On the radio tonight I heard a man speak about the printing press and how it radically changed the nature of learning at the time. His premise was that previous to the press, learning pretty much occurred only in monastaries in a rather fixed course of study. The implication was that classical texts were always read in a certain context, with the understanding that other classical texts had already been digested.
What is fascinating, if you accept this premise, is just how linear such a structure for learning is. The speaker describes how all this context (the "expected" order for reading the classics) was destroyed by the invention of the printing press by allowing people to read books anywhere and at any time.
Besides being a fair analogy for hypertext, I was going to say that books are not generally written with a rigid context like that in mind. I have to recant, however, after deciding that those references which I'm so fond of not getting are all about context and expecting the reader to have some commonality of background with the author. Perhaps it was easier to make allusions when you could be more sure of what people had read?
The speaker asked (or was asked) about how the young adults of today reacted to classical literature, when they bring so little context to the table. I missed the answer, which is too bad. I can see that it might make thinking about certain issues very difficult, because one hasn't already given considerable thought to related, but easier, issues. Capital punishment and abortion are issues which have major subissues involved.
I saw "Gamera: Guardian of The Universe" tonight. While it had pretty impressive special effects (especially for a 1966 movie), overall it was still fairly cheesy. This evaluation caused me to wonder about what cheesy actually means, and I think I've decided that a movie is cheesy when it uses gross (or cliche) tactics to manipulate the audience into certain reactions.
There was one scene which struck me as particularly primitive (by comparison to today's media standards) in its handling, but it escapes me now.
I've lately undertaken some minor home "repair" type work for a friend. I did some electrical wiring and I'm in the midst of wiring extra telephone jacks. As a youth, I never imagined that I could be quite so versatile in so mundane a way. It has given me a little more scope for the imagination, as now I whittle away the hours in my car envisioning how I could build my own little "mission control" replete with displays and radars and such. This is only too appropriate for my car, whose wealth of dials and readouts always strikes me as the interior of a small craft. I have some notion of how I could work this into a clever design for next halloween, and only my lameness poses a real difficulty.
provoke. condone. infer.