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ABOUT THIS WEBLOG
"Content" is one of the more odious buzzwords of the information age. "Content" (with emphasis the first syllable) is merely "something contained," as the dictionary says. In the online age, "content" means the containment of words, sounds and pictures in cyberspace. In the lexicon of the digital world, "content" is just one cog in the machine, filler material among the advertising. We call our massive media institutions "content providers," as though they were trading on units of communication as a blacksmith would peddle horseshoes, rather than using their words and pictures to define our reality.
"Content" connotes a neutral commodity, a dry product that belies the fact that communication is a very human, dynamic, and spiritual phenomenon. The word reflects a fascination with the mere transfer and retrieval of digital data. But human beings don't just "access content" and "distribute content" as robots do—we use our unique cognitive and creative abilities to form and share our unique perspective on reality through words, sounds and pictures. Ironically, although the Web was supposed to expand our minds by connecting us to information, it too frequently does the opposite; despite our "abudance of information, or maybe partly because of it, the West has great difficulty in finding its bearings amid contemporary events," as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn said a quarter century ago at Harvard. He is quoted in Quentin Schultze's new book Habits of the High-Tech Heart (which I reported on for the Nov./Dec. 2002 issue), which talks about "informationism" as a religion unto itself—the worship of data and the belief that it will redeem and transform us. "Informationism," says Schultze, "produces what Lewis Mumford calls 'cold intelligence,' a kind of knowing disengaged from the deeper drama of life."
So for a periodical like Books & Culture to start a weblog may seem an incongruous gesture. Publishing bi-monthly in a world of 24-hour news, Books & Culture exists not to gratify our appetite for constant data, but rather to zoom out from our daily view of the world and put it in larger perspective, drawing on history, analysis, and faith to give deeper meaning to our content-saturated but perspective-starved lives. Why venture into the "blogosphere," which embodies the foolish preference for the immediate over the important, content over context?
The short answer is that we're looking for that elusive Aristotelian golden mean: the middle ground between a dangerous addiction to the constant manipulation of digital data and shying away from it altogether. Discerning readers can pluck the many intellectual fruits the Web does bear—and bears not just by mathematical chance, in a validation of the age-old monkeys-typing-Shakespeare scenario, but because many creative, intelligent people are using the Web to read and write about the increasingly complex world around us. The Web is neither a magic bullet for social progress (as mainstream culture believes) nor a complete waste of time, and this weblog—which does not purport to speak for Books & Culture as a whole, but nonetheless tries to strike a resonant tone with the print magazine and Web site—will try to illustrate both these points. Inevitably, it will involve content, since a weblog by definition links to other Web sites and articles and laces them together with brief commentary. But true to this magazine's mandate, context will be the driving force. After all, it's possible to use the Web to search not just for information, but for wisdom—and to avoid confusing the two.
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