Stopping to Think What is Happening
August 3, 2010
My friend, and brother in observing media, Ian Huckabee has a perceptive accounting of The Story So Far. He tells of his own family’s progress from a computer the size of a room to the (much more powerful) iPod, noting cultural earthquakes thus enabled.
We will all have our own patterns of how the new means affect our ends, but I find that it’s in my professional life that the effects are most pronounced. The ability to hear of new developments, to communicate new thoughts (and to have them quickly rebutted), to call up old thoughts of millions of others, has revolutionized the volume and directness of sharing musical ideas, whether theoretical or very practical.
It’s easy just to move on automatically to the next idea, the next argument, the next self-aggrandizing or humiliating revelation. But Ian, in his essay, encourages a historical perspective, and he helps us to take our own conscious inventory. We’ll need another one soon.
