Sudden Direction

If I were to have a reader or two, and if they were to have followed my earlier allusion to this site's dusty old shelves, you might have stumbled across my blogiversary, I've learned that I do the sort of writing I was thinking of in other venues instead.

So, what to do with the blog? The world doesn't need another collection containing no more than some numskull's nuggets of narcissism. I need another focus for this space. So I'm going to see how it works as a place to discuss my reading list with myself and anyone else who stumbles along.

At the moment, I'm bouncing back and forth between a few different books:

• The Assault on Reason, Al Gore
• The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, Nassim Nicholas Taleb
• The Stone Canal, Ken Macleod
• The True Knowledge Of Ken MacLeod, Andrew M Butler
• Absurdistan, Gary Shteyngart

Since that list is roughly in the order of priority, so there's gonna be lots of Al! I'm about halfway through it, so I'll probably backfill with some of the notes I took on earlier chapters. Since this post is already running a little towards the longside, I'll just jot down one of his contentions I'd like to revisit in future posts:

Gore connects the wide spread and relative low cost of the printing press with the suddenly increased value placed on individuals. He contends that, by taking publication out of the hands of an exclusive, privileged class and spreading it to a more widespread citizenry the printing press took the evidence of an individuals value out of the control of the few and placed it in the public domain.

Citation? Discussion?