I wonder if you saw this amazing image from flood-affected Wagga Wagga?
No — it’s not a farm house surrounded by flood waters. It’s a farm house surrounded by spider webs!
How they organised this impromptu Occupy The Farm House bamboozles me. But I love it. Can you imagine walking out your front door to this one morning? You’d have to pinch yourself.
I find this image latent with more than purely Nature Is Amazing kind of significance. For surely this image of physical inundation triggering a frenzy of web-spinning — like the socially-networked protesters converging on Tahrir Square in response to a rising tide of brutality and economic insecurity — is metaphorically pregnant with the essence of the age we live in.
According to Time magazine, a recent study published in Science has found evidence that when inundated with information, we network. Specifically, they found that:
- We are increasingly processing the tsunami of information threatening to swamp us by networking. When we don’t know the answer to a question, we start thinking about how we can get access to the Web to answer it
- We are increasingly outsourcing our memories — failing to commit things to memory when we believe we’ll easily be able to save and access it again later
- And what we are remembering is not the information itself but — in an Information Age mutation of the social-psychological phenomenon known as transactive memory — where and how we’ll be able to find it
This certainly resonates with the way I learnt theology. I was forced to think much more about the connections within the overall system — as well as how these linkages are made — than the precise details (of historical debates about the doctrine of creation etc).
What about you? Does it ring any bells for you too?
