The other day I was helping a young friend focus on an essay he was trying to write for school. He was at the stage of grabbing relevant quotes from various publications. Quotes of course are good for making people take you more seriously than they otherwise would. I mean you can't just expound on something, no matter how true or profound. You have to surround yourself with the agreeing voices of a host of others. Then you can collectively sweep bystanders along with you. Because everybody knows what a mumbling individual looks like. Like an embarrasment, an irritation, an affront, an insult, like pretty much any negative thing you can think of.
Well, anyway, to get back on topic, my friend of course was not allowed to take his quotes from the internet, especially from normal websites, which very well could be run by mumbling individuals, or even from wikipedia, which makes no guarantees about mumbling individuals. No, any website quote must come at least from a .gov or a .org site, and even they are not to be totally trusted. The rule is that the majority of quotes must be lifted from actual, real-world books made of paper. Books with bindings. It's not that the reality of the paper and binding correlate with the rest of reality in terms of truth. Or even that bound paper books tend to have older information in them than is found on the internet, which might tend to correlate more closely with truth. No, it's just that for a mumbling individual to get his thoughts published in a bound book he must jump through more hoops, and it's difficult to imagine a mumbling individual doing that. Certainly not a series of hoops anyway. Like a dog on a stage.
So anyway, my friend had to copy out laboriously letter by letter these quotes. Well, in this age of copy and paste, typing each letter is a huge setback in the otherwise smooth flow of essay formation. All of my friends’ mental processes which would have contributed to the unique ideas and points of view that are absolutely necessary to get a good mark were repeatedly forced to come to a total halt. The many scampering fingers of his goal seeking mind, each finger carrying on it's back the memories of relevant and semi-relevant information it had so far discovered and processed, were all told to take a break, to have a snooze. At which point those memories slid down and wandered off into the grass.
It's not right. There must be a better way. I may not be able to write an essay, but I can definitely solve a problem. My mind is here and now clambering to solve this one. Because in this day and age of starter-buttoned, instantly-processed, hi-tech solutions, it's obviously anachronistic that my friend must type out letter-by-letter the quotes for his essay. He should be able to just hold a device to the relevant page of his book, press a button, and have it record the quote and transfer it into his essay. The device would necessarily be about the size of the book, which is the size of an ipad, and it would have a scanner built into the screen. He would set it on the page; it would read it; and then he would point out to it how much goes in the quote. So the back side of the ipad would have another screen which shows the page as the ipad sees it on its front side. On that screen he would select the quote and send it to the essay. Simple. All students need one of these. Their essay marks would be so much higher. And they would begin to be respected by their fellow students, their teachers, their relatives, their peers, and in fact by everybody who should respect them.
This new technology would mark the beginning of a new form of literature, the mental collage. The challenge would be not so much the creation of new ideas, which we know is impossible because every new idea is only a fresh take on an old idea, but the creation of new connections between others' ideas. Creative conjunctions. Which would result in new mental landscapes. New from old; that's what we seek. Rejuvenation; a new world. With a New Order. This device is not an invention; it is a Revolution!
Well, anyway, to get back on topic, my friend of course was not allowed to take his quotes from the internet, especially from normal websites, which very well could be run by mumbling individuals, or even from wikipedia, which makes no guarantees about mumbling individuals. No, any website quote must come at least from a .gov or a .org site, and even they are not to be totally trusted. The rule is that the majority of quotes must be lifted from actual, real-world books made of paper. Books with bindings. It's not that the reality of the paper and binding correlate with the rest of reality in terms of truth. Or even that bound paper books tend to have older information in them than is found on the internet, which might tend to correlate more closely with truth. No, it's just that for a mumbling individual to get his thoughts published in a bound book he must jump through more hoops, and it's difficult to imagine a mumbling individual doing that. Certainly not a series of hoops anyway. Like a dog on a stage.
So anyway, my friend had to copy out laboriously letter by letter these quotes. Well, in this age of copy and paste, typing each letter is a huge setback in the otherwise smooth flow of essay formation. All of my friends’ mental processes which would have contributed to the unique ideas and points of view that are absolutely necessary to get a good mark were repeatedly forced to come to a total halt. The many scampering fingers of his goal seeking mind, each finger carrying on it's back the memories of relevant and semi-relevant information it had so far discovered and processed, were all told to take a break, to have a snooze. At which point those memories slid down and wandered off into the grass.
It's not right. There must be a better way. I may not be able to write an essay, but I can definitely solve a problem. My mind is here and now clambering to solve this one. Because in this day and age of starter-buttoned, instantly-processed, hi-tech solutions, it's obviously anachronistic that my friend must type out letter-by-letter the quotes for his essay. He should be able to just hold a device to the relevant page of his book, press a button, and have it record the quote and transfer it into his essay. The device would necessarily be about the size of the book, which is the size of an ipad, and it would have a scanner built into the screen. He would set it on the page; it would read it; and then he would point out to it how much goes in the quote. So the back side of the ipad would have another screen which shows the page as the ipad sees it on its front side. On that screen he would select the quote and send it to the essay. Simple. All students need one of these. Their essay marks would be so much higher. And they would begin to be respected by their fellow students, their teachers, their relatives, their peers, and in fact by everybody who should respect them.
This new technology would mark the beginning of a new form of literature, the mental collage. The challenge would be not so much the creation of new ideas, which we know is impossible because every new idea is only a fresh take on an old idea, but the creation of new connections between others' ideas. Creative conjunctions. Which would result in new mental landscapes. New from old; that's what we seek. Rejuvenation; a new world. With a New Order. This device is not an invention; it is a Revolution!
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