We might possess every technological resource... but if our language is inadequate, our vision remains formless, our thinking and feeling are still running in the old cycles, our process may be 'revolutionary' but not transformative.
Interpretation
Language shapes our perception and ability to innovate; without clear communication, progress remains superficial.
Adrienne Rich highlights the importance of language in the context of technological advancement. While we may have access to modern technology and resources, if our language and communication skills are lacking, our thoughts and emotions remain constrained by old patterns. This means that even revolutionary processes cannot lead to true transformation without the ability to articulate and convey new ideas effectively.
In practice
During a discussion on technology in education, one might quote this to emphasize the importance of effective communication.
My children cause me the most exquisite suffering of which I have any experience. It is the suffering of ambivalence: the murderous alternation between bitter resentment and raw-edged nerves, and blissful gratification and tenderness. Sometimes I seem to myself, in my feelings toward these tiny guiltless beings, a monster of selfishness and intolerance.
The word revolution itself has become not only a dead relic of Leftism, but a key to the deadendedness of male politics: the revolution of a wheel which returns in the end to the same place; the revolving door of a politics which has liberated women only to use them, and only within the limits of male tolerance.
A president cannot meaningfully honor certain token artists while the people at large are so dishonored.'”
There is no 'the truth','a truth' - truth is not one thing, or even a system. It is an increasing complexity. the pattern of the carpet is a surface. When we look closely, or when we become weavers, we learn of the tiny multiple threads unseen in the overall pattern, the knots on the underside of the carpet
It is the suffering of ambivalence: the murderous alternation between bitter resentment and raw-edged nerves, and blissful gratification and tenderness
It's as if, in the mother's eyes, her smile, her stroking touch, the child first reads the message:'You are there!'
With the cloud, you don't own anything. You already signed it away.
I was in Bangalore, India, the Silicon Valley of India, when I realized that the world was flat.
With work increasingly invisible, it's much harder to grasp the human effects, the social contours, of the Internet economy.
If you're as clever as you can be when you write it, how will you ever debug it?
Ere many generations pass, our machinery will be driven by a power obtainable at any point of the universe.
We are losing our common vocabulary, built over thousands of years to help and delight and instruct us, for the sake of what we take to be the new technology's virtues.
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