Flourishing

I was listening to an interview of Thomas Friedman on my iPod yesterday while running around our neighborhood. He was talking about the latest edition of his book, The World is Flat (I think its version 3.0 by now).

In the course of the interview, he made a passing (almost throwaway) reference to the impact of our increasingly efficient search functions (like, for example, the Google). His phrase was something like, “we’re now a search culture.”

This got me thinking. Hmmm, how can I put this, why read? I mean, if I can search a book to find the specific information that I want, why spend hours digesting bits of information that might not be what I’m looking for?

The advent of “spotlight” with with Mac OSX.4.11 meant that it no longer is all that important to have a taxonomically-complete archiving system on your hard drive. If you want to find a document or file just click the little magnifying glass in the top right hand of the screen, enter a keyword, hit return, and watch spotlight pull it up for you. No more asking yourself whether this document was personal or business, etc. The same goes for email.

Obviously, this could really make paper-writing a lot more simple. How many of us spent our senior year in college stuck in the library, index cards in hand, reading for our senior thesis? What about grad school? Maybe 80% of what we read probably never made it into the final paper. So, why read it?

I’m interested in your thoughts about this. What are the hidden costs of a searchable society? We already know that the Google has been wrangling to put electronic versions of classic books in a searchable format online. Is this good, bad, or neutral? If you’re a graduate student or faculty, what impact has the rise of searchable wikis (like, for example, the bane of all serious writing, wikipedia) had on the quality of the research and writing submitted to you by undergraduates? We’re all in this together as members of the university community and the professions, so let’s talk about it.

I recently learned that Dr Francis Collins will be one of our plenary speakers at FC08! It’s wonderful news. Collins is director of the National Human Genome Research Institute at the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

Here’s a little bit about his credentials:

Dr. Collins received a B.S. from the University of Virginia, a Ph.D. in Physical Chemistry from Yale University, and an M.D. from the University of North Carolina. Following a fellowship in Human Genetics at Yale, he joined the faculty at the University of Michigan, where he remained until moving to NIH in 1993. His research has led to the identification of genetic variants associated with type 2 diabetes and the genes responsible for cystic fibrosis, neurofibromatosis, Huntington’s disease and Hutchinson-Gilford progeria syndrome. He is a member of the Institute of Medicine and the National Academy of Sciences.

If you’re interested, a guest blogger at JesusCreed is working through the book. Check it out.

At least since the 2000 presidential election (woops! I ruined this post by bringing it up) we have been repeatedly told about the polarization of American society. For a while (and I guess still, to some extent) talking heads were speaking of blue and red states. It has become a sort of convenient shorthand for describing divergent moral values, political philosophies, and even cultures between Americans.

Enter Purple State of Mind.

Purple State of Mind is basically a conversation between two old friends on issues that often either unite or divide us: our identities, choices, and beliefs. Here’s how they put it.

“Craig Detweiler and John Marks have known each other for twenty-five years. When they roomed together as sophomores at Davidson College, they were devout Christians. It was Craig’s first year in the faith, John’s last. After college, they parted ways, and when they met again, years later, they never talked about what happened… until now…
Their conversation starts as a bull session between pals and becomes a story about how people make friends, and how they lose them; how people change, how they grow, and how they deal with the big stuff: death, sex, the meaning of life, God. The conversation between Craig and John captures in all its intimacy and difficulty a one on one reckoning between two people who want to understand each other but won’t compromise their beliefs.”

If the film succeeds, and I think it does, it is because it manages to capture an authentic conversation. Unless your understanding of a conversation is two people reading a legal brief or academic paper (if it is, I’m sorry) then you’re ready to live with some ambiguity and some rough edges. There are some rough edges in Purple State of Mind, but if they weren’t there the project would fall apart.

I’ll post more on this later, but If you’ve seen the film, how ’bout telling us what you thought?