November 24th, 2008
People of the screen
Today’s must-read, ironically, is an essay by the ever brilliant Kevin Kelly on the decline of word-centered, book-based literacy and the rise of something new. We are becoming, Kelly says, “people of the screen.”
An excerpt:
“The fluid and fleeting symbols on a screen pull us away from the classical notions of monumental authors and authority. On the screen, the subjective again trumps the objective. The past is a rush of data streams cut and rearranged into a new mashup, while truth is something you assemble yourself on your own screen as you jump from link to link. We are now in the middle of a second Gutenberg shift — from book fluency to screen fluency, from literacy to visuality.”Read it all.
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