I spent a blustery winter evening in 1996 eating at some dive just off Sand Hill Road and reading The Third Culture, an anthology edited by John Brockman that purported to be "a celebration of the ideas of third culture thinkers who are defining the interesting and important questions of our times." The title was a clear call-out to C.P. Snow's famous The Two Cultures.
(I had a soft spot in my heart for that work, as it had A) given me the conceptual framework upon which to build the argument "Why You Should Admit This Science Major Into Your Graduate Writing Program"; B) apparently fooled many admissions departments into believing I was not merely an Erlenmeyer flask-slinging philistine and therefore should be admitted into their program; and C) actually touched on something that's pretty near and dear to my heart: understanding the feedback system between technological advances and societal trends.)
So I slurped my pasta and read The Third Culture and felt like I was living in the most exciting place and time ever. Truly there was no place more exciting to be than the Bay Area in the 1990s! First Microserfs, now The Third Culture. What could possibly come next?
The future. Which, come to think of it, is surprisingly unchanged in some ways. I'm still (or, nore precisely, back) in the Bay Area, Douglas Coupland's written another nerd culture book with JPod, and the third culture thinkers have moved on and expanded with the latest collection, What We Believe But Cannot Prove: Today's Leading Thinkers on Science in the Age of Certainty.
This is another great read for people who are fans of studying arguments, for people who are fans of trying to read society's tea leaves in the research of today, and for people who simply want to run across something they haven't thought of before. The language is clear and accessible, and you've got over a hundred different contributor's essays to savor. At least one will rock you. Another will make you feel like you've just picked up a big piece of the great mental puzzle you'll spend your life solving. Another may help you direct the ruling curiosities that perpetually pluck at your brain.
For me, that last one came upon completing Alan Kay's essay. He wrote:
One guess I made long ago -- and which does not yet have a body of evidence to support it -- is that what's special about the computer is analogous to (and an advance on) what was special about writing and then printing. It's not the automating of past forms that has the impact. As the media philosopher Marshall Macluhan pointed out, when you change the nature of representation and argumentation, people who learn in these new ways will turn out to be qualitatively different thinkers (and better thinkers?), and this will (usually) advance our limited conceptions of civilization.
Lord knows it's not a new idea -- Neal Stephenson references it in Snow Crash, and it has its roots in structuralism and post-structuralism, especially in reference to Claude Levi-Strauss and Noam Chomsky's work. But to be able to form the question -- how will communicating online change who we are as a people? -- is a fine start for someone who wants to spend the rest of her life figuring out the answer.
Well, I believe that anyway. I can't prove it. Yet.
As a biochemistry major, your phrase 'Erlenmeyer flask-slinging philistine' gave me quite a chuckle
Posted by: Chris | 2006.05.10 at 23:47
I noticed this in my local bookstore a few weeks ago...sounds like I'd really enjoy it. I'll have to pick it up.
Posted by: drunken monkey | 2006.05.11 at 05:31