Dead TV replacement: Internet info & stories

[Fidcal]

As TV died I clung to its rags. In the spirit of 'half-full' I still saw myself 'program-clothed' even when my garments were separate rags. Now I accept that they are only useful for occasional cleaning and dusting I can array myself in reading material.

 

When I was young I read voraciously. Fiction and non-fiction were my daily diet. I raided the local library armed with family tickets and came away laden with a bagful of exciting ideas. Fantasy and science fiction, crime, thrillers, all kinds of novels, hobbies, crafts, astronomy, spaceflight, technology, science, you name it. But somehow over the years that faded. Probably the advent of home video, then home computers, and the internet. But so far I have mainly used the net for information relevant to some task and read it minimally for that application. Now I plan to read for its own sake; for leisure. Guttenberg I have known of for some time. Now there is Wikipedia, Google books, Open Library, and others to explore.

 

Pure, uncluttered information and ideas given freely by minds uninterested in grotesque glamorising and greedy 'getting'. It's a refreshing change from the satanic tower of babel TV.

 

I've made a start reading up on time travel ideas and speculations. This has led to a few stories I've not yet read of that genre. Should be fun...

[demagogue]

I can say two things about the explosion of stuff to read online.

(1) The reading list of stuff I've downloaded and queued is something over 2000 works by now. If I read 1 book/article a day it'd take 5.5 years. It's hard to cull it down because there are so many works that have as good a claim to be read as anything else.

(2) Has anyone else noticed this phenomenon? I find when reading online stuff, the temporal context gets hazy and works from the ancient period, medieval, enlightenment, modern, postmodern, and the most technical of contemporary stuff, from every field - physics, biology, comp sci, cognitive science, sociology, history... - all sort of blend together. It's not like different conversations all spread over time; it's like one long, timeless conversation with no beginning or end and no way to situate ourselves in it. That sense happens especially when I'm jumping across very different genres one after another.

[Fidcal]

No I've not noticed. Food for thought. I'm not clear exactly what that means but I'll keep a look out for it. I suspect that might be the only way to see what you're saying. I don't suppose an example?...

[aidakeeley]

I'll give you me as an example: by far the 2 most important sites to my way of thinking... both of whcih are constantly updated... have not been visited by me... but maybe 5 times each in the past 2 years.

 

It might even be worse than that.

 

Too much information running through my brain.

Too much information driving me insane.

I've seen the whole world six times over,

Sea Of Japan to the Cliffs Of Dover.

OverkillOverviewOverMyDeadBody

OverMeOverYouOverEverybody

 

And I have "Read It Later" which is a replacement for the massive set of bookmarks piled upon bookmarks which I hardly have time to glance at much less actually peruse the content of because I'm too busy archiving all the stuff I am constantly offloading to make room for the masses of stuff I'm constantly downloading... same as y'all, I guess.

[Fidcal]

I don't have any problem with too much. I have a certain amount of time each day which is convenient to fill with some interesting fact or fiction. TV now fails to fill that time so 10,000 documents to read is fine by me.

[woah]

I would have never expected the renaissance men on this forum to have enough time for TV anyway