:: Living in the now ::

Thursday, March 08, 2007

Alan Kay:

Pop culture lives in the present; it doesn't really live in the future or want to know about great ideas from the past. I'm saying there's a lot of useful knowledge and wisdom out there for anybody who is curious, and who takes the time to do something other than just executing on some current plan. Cicero said, "Who knows only his own generation remains always a child." People who live in the present often wind up exploiting the present to an extent that it starts removing the possibility of having a future.

I've removed the context of this quote deliberately, but Dr. Kay is speaking about the state of the computer industry and the web. It's easy to think, as we bask in our own information-amplified, communal magnificence, that the "now" now is a completely new "now". People are ever-obsessed with the present. No matter the decade, even the slowest news day has headlines.

Admittedly that's not what Dr. Kay is saying - he does not claim the current perspective to be the same or different than the past's. Whether our fixation is greater now or not, it does behoove us to throw our periodicals, 24-hour news shows, up-to-the-minute blogs, and closed-circuit live secret video feeds from department store dressing rooms aside then and again in favor of a little wisdom from the ancients.

Posted by morland @ 02:56 PM

:: Comments ::

that's why i read wikipedia.

Posted by: bedwell on March 8, 2007 04:35 PM

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