I thought I would do the honors and be the first to talk about Moby Dick. So I may or may not have told you all, I took Dr. Burton's Shakespeare class last winter, and at the end of the semester he told me he was teaching this class. I bought a copy of Moby Dick and slowly read through it over the course of the summer in my free time...well, perhaps not that slowly. It's hard to put down a book that you're reading late at night and munching toast to.
I will admit that I am as annoyed about the whaling chapters as some people get. However, what keeps me going is considering the value of the text. If one wants to get into the minds of 19th-century whaling culture and discover what the whaling industry was like, Moby Dick is probably the best text available. Herman Melville already went and did the research for us. This is what it was actually LIKE to be on a whaling ship hunting spermaceti.
This kind of reminds me of our digital culture today. While Melville uses words, modern culture uses pictures, captions, videos, skype and live-feed, music, and social networking forums to allows us a glimpse into any sort of world we want. The difference is that while a book can completely immerse you, the internet will only immerse you as deep as you want to go. The diverse options we have of what to do with our digital resources means that, as we said on Wednesday, we can either explore many things at once on a surface level or any one subject we want to an infinite depth. We can be either Ishmael, conversant on many subjects, or Ahab, the man obsessed.
It's interesting to think about what is collected at different times in order to provide the context needed to be immersed in another world. I like your exploring the metaphor of surface and depth with the internet. I think the various sea and whaling metaphors will come in handy as we go along.
ReplyDeleteextremely so.
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