CC Timely Alex

I watched the “Bags of Gold” video for the first time about six months ago, and it was one of the first things that really sold me on DS106. I remember not understanding parts of it—the allusions, the web 1.0/2.0 distinctions, the blackboard forum dissection—but I remember thinking that Campbell seemed like a zealot who believed in a religion that I hadn’t understood existed, a religion where the scripture talked about the Code becoming flesh and Web 2.0 affordances carrying us to Mecca and then to heaven. Or, you know, the equivalent.

What strikes me most now, watching the video, are the moments when the talk sort of pushes through logic into a place closer to poetry, maybe?, or philosophy. The idea that we use these tools/affordances to “amplify our beings,” that the goal is to become “programmed for discovery.” Even “mileage may vary” strikes me as a perfect metaphor, terse but not austere, with a Carver-ish ironic charm.

But the ideas—which I digested and processed but never attributed to GC or the video, forgotten somehow in my rush to implement the talk’s lessons—have, since, become central to a lot of what I think the web is really for: to use the tools of narrating, curating, and sharing in order to open ourselves to the world, to each other, and to ourselves. A professor of mine (from grad school) said that if something was worth doing, it was worth documenting. And as these occurrences of documentation accumulate, so, therefore, I think, do things of worth.

And it seems to me that as competency increases, the possibilities for documentation increase exponentially. A sense of wonder seems not only possible but constantly hovering nearby, at arm’s reach, and everything you do—looking, talking, thinking, making—takes on the quality of an adventure. Hey, let’s learn how to make a French omelet! Wow, let’s go to the dump!

Carl Jung once treated a man who dreamt that a man was trying to give him bags of gold, and the dreamer, in the dream, refused. Jung took this to mean that the man had refused contact or connection with the subconscious forces at play in his life, and, because he refused, he had to take the long way round. Here’s to the short cut. Cheers, Gardner, and good night.