Douglas Rushkoff response to Philip Rosedale

I'm loving your posts, Philip. They remind me of things I've thought about yet never stated out loud - evoking the cyberian explorer, willing to go forth because, well, because it's forth.

And then Mark's are doing the same thing, flipping me back to the kid who invested his life in learning the classics as the classics, reading Shakespeare's complete works straight through - twice in one year - in order to try to "get" what the man was doing before attempting to direct one of his plays. It was torture, yet divine.

I am fascinated by the notion of people "groking" ideas through resonance points rather than full immersion in a linear narrative - as if by touching one point in the fractal, one gains a sensibility for the whole thing. And I fully believe that such a process, engaged in honestly and with a new kind of rigor, might yield results surprising to traditionalists. From my own experience, I can confirm that it engenders a kind of lateral thinking and pattern recognition that generate a profound sense of connection to the material. Though I'm sure that exercised without any intellectual discipline, it also allows for profound forms of faking it and false insights.

Still, there is a value set implicit in all this. As Philip suggests, a word "means" whatever the average of what people think it means at a given moment - which is precisely why Google might now be putting "live search" results on its pages, raising the comments in Twitter, Facebook, and social networks to the level of the other, more considered yet older datapoints in its archives.

Are we moving into a more democratic "now"? And does this very now-ness devalue the collective memory and inertia of the human project preceding this moment? Or is it a more honest and genuine reflection?

Or, expressed in another way, is it enough that mp3 gets to more people - even if its fidelity to the original is so inferior? Does it help more people connect to what matters in the music, or does it simply lead more people to engage with its surface textures and forget the rest?