Science News

"“In the 17th century, conversation exploded,” said Anaïs Saint-Jude, director of Stanford’s BiblioTech program. “It was an early modern version of information overload.”

The Copernican Revolution, the invention of the printing press, the exploration of the New World – all needed to be digested over time. There was a lot of catching-up to do. “It was a dynamic, troubling, messy period,” she said.

Public postal systems became the equivalent of Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and smartphones. Letters crisscrossed Paris by the thousands daily. Voltaire was writing 10 to 15 letters a day. Dramatist Jean Racine complained that he couldn’t keep up with the aggressive letter writing. His inbox was full, so to speak."

Via Howard Rheingold, Abel Revoredo

Chances are, you have heard of Christopher Alexander because of his most famous book on architecture, A Pattern Language. 

 

Alexander, the mathematician, was always concerned with the processes by which parts transform into wholes. He wants to know how we are implementing this part-whole synthesis; how nature does it; and especially, where we, in our own human version, might be getting it wrong. This is the key to an important realization about natural systems and how they generate form — one that, as Alexander has long noted, is distinct from how we humans typically generate form. And this is not a mere philosophical matter of humans being different from nature, or “having culture.” It’s a question of how we humans can also have a technology that is actually more complex, resilient, and sustainable — quite literally, more life-like.

Via Abel Revoredo