Holotopia

Holotopia

Modernity needs lightbulbs, not candles

Already in the 1990, when Tim Berners Lee was still only writing the code for the World Wide Web, the NYU researcher in communication Neil Postman was warning us that our not thought through handling of information, combined with the extensive volumes that were already there, brought us to a situation where our very sense of meaning is at stake. What might be an alternative?

Suppose we handled information as we handle most other human-made things—by adapting it to the core purposes that need to be served. What would this information be like? What practical consequences would it have?

Etc.

By depicting our civilization as a bus, and our way of handling information as a pair of candle headlights, the Modernity ideogram points to a way in which a difference can be made.