Everything claims meaning, begs for meaning. There is among us all a growing illiteracy, and a growing cultural illiteracy, along with a growing dependency on electronic media and their reflexive programming, their discourse of personality and knee-jerk reaction. Present-day and future marketing battles are at least as much about 'brandwidth' as bandwidth. Moreover, the gap between that minimalist environment and an increasingly specialized scientific and professional discourse is huge and widening. Because their job is to create the desire fueling the purchase of dreams and lotteries, they are the wrong translators.
Someone needs to stand outside the showroom.
Whether we will exhaust our environment or our health in a culture and economy of such relentless competition and reinvention is one of the most intriguing issues of our time. In this gap between the specialized and the instant discourse, in the world of relentless stream-text, there is a keen need for informed conversation, for exchange which is expansive rather than reductive, reflective rather than reflexive, a dialogue rather than serial soliloquies. In an age where spaces for physical, personal contact and discourse may indeed be shrinking, and electronic, edited discourse expanding, we need to ask ourselves how best to manage what kinds of information. We need to find a personalized space, where people are aware of one another's needs as human beings, and we need to enrich the quality of exchange that takes place there. The humanities are not merely the texts of such informed exchanges with our past and our present, they are the process by which these texts are formulated, shared and examined because what underlies them is not answers, but questions and time for reflection.