Monday, March 5
Riskutie, 8:02
When I got up I noticed that the sun seemed to have started winning. The snow had receded noticeably and Sunshine went out without immediately trying to rush back in again. I decided to walk to Plantagen in order to take a photograph that I had seen at the weekend and not taken.
As I walk down to the bus I take the (slightly) longer way in order to walk down Riskutie. There I find the snow patterns remaining and manage to capture one before it disappears in the sudden Spring warmth. The layers look archaeological and reflect the different days of snowfall and subsequent heat and cold. I spend a few moments there and only just remember to race across the main road in time to catch the 97V.
I will spend the morning working on detailed examples for the Structured Information course that will begin as soon as we get back from Dubai. As I work on the examples I will find myself shifting the course content around as the details begin to drive the narrative. I will also find myself looking for linking passages where gaps reveal themselves. By lunchtime I will have a revised structure and several interlocking examples that build upon each other. At lunchtime I will have vegetable lasagne.
In the afternoon I will sit through a team meeting in which we will plan the entrance examination period and agree some details for the courses in Period 4. I have two of these: Structured Information and Interactive Storytelling. After the meeting I will begin to look through material for the latter. I intend to put this course online, with a few live appearances, and so I need to script and film a series of online lectures. I will concentrate on going through the material I have to hand from previous years. I intend to make sure that I will have it with my on my iPad next week, so that I can script the lectures then.
At 16:30 I will have a second Skype meeting with Scott Cunningham and Elisabeth Bisanz about what seems likely to turn into a Digital Illich project in which we seek to identify the ramifications of Illich’s ideas for the digital world and then underpin that with some key ideas from Charles Sanders Peirce. We will talk for an hour or so until Elisabeth has to leave, and then Scott and I will continue for another hour. I will feel energised by where we get to.
Before leaving I will follow through on a later part of the conversation and try various ways of googling for “digital Illich” or anything similar. Googling “digital McLuhan” produces a lot of results, including several books, but I can find no similar material related to Ivan Illich. I could explain this in one of two ways: the topic seems inherently stupid to anyone who thinks about it, or we have located a strange cultural lacuna which we should try to address.
On the way home I will ponder about this and wonder whether I should accept that Convivial Mechanics and my discussions with Scott and Elisabeth form two thirds of a single project. I will decide that I do accept this and that the reason that I feel a need to locate a missing third part lies in the fact that the project must encompass cultural actions in order to complete itself.
How do I know this? By a process of abduction, of course. In this way I have, I think, persuaded the project to unfold itself.