Worlds of wordcraft

william-blake-night-thoughts

I enjoyed James Gleick’s review of Vikram Chandra’s Geek Sublime today, particularly the ending:

Poetry and logic live in different places, after all. Poetry has patience. It reaches into a dark vastness. But computer code has powers too. “It acts and interacts with itself, with the world,” Chandra says. And it changes us along the way. “We already filter experience through software — Facebook and Google offer us views of the world that we can manipulate, but which also, in turn, manipulate us. The embodied language of websites, apps and networks writes itself into us.”

Must one learn computer programming, then, to qualify as literate? Of course not. It doesn’t hurt to be aware of code, though. One of these days code will be aware of us.

If Gleick means conscious awareness, then I can’t say I share his confidence. There’s still a hell of a lot of undiscovered country between here and there. (If he means unconscious awareness, that’s a done deal.) Anyway, Chandra’s book sounds excellent.

Image: William Blake.