The title alone is worth the price of admission.

This fall I have been gripped by Vannevar Bush’s essay “As We Might Think” and by Doug Engelbart’s essays over at Bootstrap.Org. Reestablishing contact with Brian Lamb and Bryan Alexander (who led me to this essential chapter on Doug Engelbart from Howard Rheingold’s Tools for Thought–thanks a bunch, Bryan) and DePauw’s Dennis Trinkle (who introduced Bryan to Howard Rheingold–get the story here) has made all these thoughts accumulate even more intensity for me. Then I find “Life With Alacrity” and Christopher Allen’s very useful history of social software on his blog. The article generated many comments that take the discussion to an even higher level. Great stuff. Thanks to Charlie Lowe at cyberdash by way of Martha’s “The Fish Wrapper” for the links that led me there.

I know I recently blogged about how a network is not itself a mind, but with the kind of celerity this Internet enables it does sometimes seem that the thoughts are coming after me just as much as I’m pursuing them. I’m struck by how much I’d like to encourage this feeling in my students, too, and that I’ve often had it when I do my research and writing in Renaissance studies and film studies. It’s something like feeling the conversation cares about, even anticipates, my participation in it. A fragile, fleeting emotion that’s hard to sustain … but an important motivation for keeping up my end of the chat.

“What is truth? said Jesting Pilate, and would not stay for an answer.”