To Grow in Wisdom: Vannevar Bush, Information Overload, and the Life of Leisure by David Levy
The “library problem” how to take on the problem of “information overload’
Josef Pieper “Leisure the Basis of Culture” same time as Bush. Why we need leisure and need to avoid the world of total work. Can we be more than complete functionaries and full time workers? Can we enter the world of slowness and stillness [and quietness]? Leisure is related to scholarship as in being receptively attuned. The first scholastics looked at ratio or rational the other intellectus or simply looking.
What happened to intellectus? Web helps solve only ratio. says Levy.
[Levy elides the profound religious and directly Catholic basis and some would say bias of Pieper’s work
He uses Bush as an empty vessel to fill with an areligious Pieper. To say well Bush was much like Pieper when he talked about info-overload say. But how much of that is really in Bush. Not much from what I recall from the biography of Bush.]
What can we do, ask Levy. Expand the dialog and metrics beyond effeciency and productivity. What does it take to become comtemplative? Great reading rooms in libraries inspire contemplation. What would it mean to create sanctuaries in cyberspace? [I think he means Sanctuaries] He did a conference on Information, Silence and Sanctuary
at LC he hopes to do a workshop on mindful work and technology winter 2006.
Without irony, Levy asks us to Google to find the references to the conference and to learn about his workshop. It has streaming video, he tells us.
In the question time, more comes about the importance of reflection. Does he recall that many monastaries saw a work as a form of contemplation?
Some good discussion. One questioner notes the inherent problems of supporting the contemplatives which forced so many to be virtually enslaved in order to support the meditators.
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