After a weekend of productive, blissful isolation, this evening I decided to venture into the outside world. Here’s what I found:
- the headlines for Sinar Harian, which read “Sejuta perangi murtad”, about a rally (planned for 22 Oct) against “penyebaran ajaran Kristian kepada Melayu khususnya beragama Islam”;
- TV3’s Buletin Utama, which was essentially a re-broadcast of Najib’s speech at some BN meeting;
- a pretty shitty tom yam dinner; and
- a toddler who kicked a kitten in the face.
So I beat my hasty retreat into a book.
I Read Where I Am: Exploring New Information Cultures was something Sharon brought home for me, from Berlin; it’s a pretty collection of essays about books, e-readers, touchscreen swipes, the internetz, and such.
(Essays only make up half the thing’s pages; the rest comprise various indices: by essay title, by “First 140 Characters of Essay”, by word frequency. The text is colour-coded: words are shaded in a gradient, according to some algorithm involving frequency and uniqueness.
Very cool and computational. But it’s a little too much surface typography as opposed to actually useful content, to me …)
Anyway, the essays themselves run the gamut of opinion, from “Zomg, bold new frontier!!!” to Brave New World (in the Huxley sense) — but, because there are 82 of them, they blur into one another.
(Which is, I guess, the intent: you’re allowed to dip, and pay attention to the bits that strike your fancy.)
- I liked “Shapes”, Caroline Nevejan’s meditation on an accident that caused her to lose the ability to read, forcing her to re-learn this skill as “seeing through shapes”.
- Found Kevin Kelly’s “Screening” dystopian, though I dunno whether he intended it like that.
- Thought the title of Arjen Mulder’s piece — “Horses Are Fine So Are Books” — pithy.
But the bit that made me pause — that made me close the book, put it down, cross my legs, and go: “Gee, gotta think about that!” — was David B Nieborg’s “Achievement Unlocked!”.
The guy’s an academic that focuses on gamer culture, and he suggests that writers and publishers take a leaf from videogames’ Achievements convention (earn trophies from doing stuff in-game, brag to your friends) to bridge the gulf between the solitary act of reading and today’s networked, attention-deficit consensus: “What if you could become better in reading books and could share that with the whole world?”
Not sure I like the idea — it so goal-oriented, and opinion is split about the achievements thing, even in gaming — but it’s nice to think about stuff like that. Doesn’t bring me down as much as thinking about fundies and murtads.
What can I say? I’m an escapist.
