Yihong,
… enjoying your meditation on the geography of thought.
Our language acts as a kind of lens or perceptual organ through which we make sense of the world … and english distorts and defies the logic of hyperconnectivity. We’re trained unconsciously to see processes as things, and to pluck objects out of their vital web of relationship and interdependence.
But the dominant metaphors that we use to describe the web are shifting: pages are giving way to streams and flows, and over time this is going to shift our common understanding of what the internet is. A network is nothing but relationship.
In the meantime, we fumble to make sense of living at the speed of light with a language that’s out of tune with our electronic environment. We are searching for a language of ecology, a language that encourages us to re-cognize the objects around us as patterns of relationship.
And yet ironically, the Western world continues to export it’s 19th century perceptual lens to asian and native cultures whose languages are much better equipped to probe and make sense of 21st century connectivity. Doubly ironic, since westerners have been exploring eastern religion and arts for decades in an effort to realign their sensibilities with electric technology; and yet we haven’t been able to assimilate these new modes of awareness into our language. Yet.
