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March 18, 2006
Saturday afternoon reflection
Listening to Open Source's show on Convergences, I was moved to add a note before digging into my work.
This blog is the realization of my passion for seeing the connections between the seemingly disparate aspects of my life, work and studies. Rather than compartmentalize my interests and knowledge, I use my whole appetite and all of my experiences, whether I am reading the Odyssey or writing about the War in Iraq or debating the obligation to obey political authority.
It is appropriate that my high school's last words on me were "there are no short conversations with you, for ideas do not exist in isolation... Connections suffuse all you do."
This may be why I spend a lot of time thinking about what I want to study-- and how I want to study it-- over the next two years at Brown. The great theoretical works cannot be carved up and sorted by discipline without much of their complexity being stripped away. In a similar way, one cannot treat these works as if they are made of different stuff from the comments and observations that reverberate in the popular common sphere. So I'm grappling with Brown's curriculum-- and its Independent Concentration policy-- and designing a program in "Social, Ethical, and Political Thought." I've compiled a complete list of courses that interest me, and I'm working on a table of courses that is modeled on Harvard's Social Studies.
My work on Milosevic last week was as exhilirating as anything I've done in months, perhaps since Boing Boing linked to Tri Repetae, a UN worker who is blogging from Liberia (Open Source story).
What has made this new medium so exciting is that it is more radically open to participants than any of its recent predecessors. Within 12 hours of my deciding to survey reaction to Milosevic's death across the Balkans, I received a half dozen letters and posted them here and on Open Source. My readership quadrupled, with visitors coming from across the world in droves (from Serbia And Montenegro, Bosnia And Herzegovina, Ukraine, Croatia, Belgium, Switzerland, Australia, Greece, Indonesia, Italy, and the United Kingdom in the past four days).
Hopefully, some of these new readers will hang around, comment, and contribute as I spring from story to story, all while I relate news from my own studies. In an ideal world, it will be like the international terminal at Heathrow, only with duty free conversations instead of duty free purchases.
Posted by Henry Shepherd at March 18, 2006 03:58 PM
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