Small Pieces Loosely Joined

I'm angry with David Weinberger. It's not a grudge that will slowly pass away. Here's how it happened.

I took a friend to the airport at the impossibly liminal hour of 4 am this evening/morning. I hate being awake before 10 unless I haven't slept the night before. So I came home after the drive to the airport ready to collapse into a peaceful slumber designed to last well into the morning ( I would have been happy with early afternoon). Eager to fall asleep quickly I picked up Small Pieces, because regardless how good a book it is (it's very good) reading always put me to sleep. Always unless I happen to read something that starts connecting every piece of my life to every other piece and then makes me excited to start thinking. I had forgotten how clearly David talks about individuality and community.

The problem with sleeping, after reading something like this, is that you are too busy thinking about how the web shows our deep connectedness with each other. Look at the patterns of interrelationship around this individualism community thread. After a long and continuing discussion on the academy, Jeff Ward describes the myth of the independent. Matrullo extends the conversation and AKMAextends it and reconnnects it to the academy discussion. I jump in because its a wonderful discussion on something that I care about, because I'm teaching community this quarter, and because Tripp in a whole other world is doing much hard work with community.

The Tutor picks this up and makes explicit the ways in which it is community that is going on here. I am not a purely independent blogger. Some of you would read this page if not for AKMA and the Tutor but many of you are here because of them.

Other follow Burningbird's deep challenges, or Delacour's careful attempt to understand me.

It's deeply humbling to have the opprotunity to respond to challenges like Shelly's or to have one's words taken as seriously as Jonathon has in his post and especially his comment in response to loren and dave. It's even more humbling to feel understood, which I do.

Others are here because Tripp, Jeff, Cliff, or Laura, bring you here. I am an individual in this conversation but not independent. I am joined, sometimes loosely, but in relationship to AKMA very tightly, but always joined. I think that there is a tension between Weinberger's quote and the huge world of ends meme. I'm not sure its exactly a World of Ends. I think its more a world of interconnected groups. Weinberger surely knows this (he taught us) but World of Ends doesn't get to this in its emphasis on Ends. (I'm tempted to Pippaize the discussion at this point and say it should have been the world or Ents. The Ents refuse to engage the world outside their forest without deep consultation. Old Entish is a careful language, one we would do well to re-learn as we rush to war. But the Pippaization of reality is a somewhat random, if beautiful thing and I will resist for the sake of clarity). I don't think I am an end of the Internet. I feel more like a point on a curve. I shift and sway as other points, bigger and smaller exert gravity on me. Mostly, I rotate around AKMA. AKMA might be a legitimate end but he would never admit to it. His post at the beginning of this discussion connects us back to the academy by saying,

The web give voice to individuals but individuals are listened to in context of there relationship to other individuals. We exist in groups.

Tripp says in a comment on this blog that my view is anarchist. I'm not opposed to this. I don't think people have figured out the best way to run the world yet. I don't think God is an anarchist but I can't know for sure. If I am an anarchist I am because my committments to community outweight my commitments to myself or to insitutions. To use explicitly theological language, I am committed to the body of Christ not the church. It just happens that there is no way to be committed to the body of Christ other than belonging to a church. And, my committments to the body of Christ require deep committments to the world. So I'm a nice anarchist if I am one.

Maybe it is a world of social bodies rather than a world of ends. Maybe we need to remember that we are always embodied even when we are online. Maybe I should stop writing blogs before sane people are awake.

In saying this I partly want to offer an answer to Matrullo's questions, connect my earlier comments about cultural resources to my Gospel Mission class, talk about performance, phenomonology, and cultural resoures, and write a dissertation. But these will wait and I will try to sleep again. Maybe I'll try reading something else ...