“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Thursday, July 31, 2008

The medium is the message

A truly good thing has happened.

In this age of insane gas prices (and insane gas use, period), Science (the big science journal along with Nature) has picked up the story about the videoconference I did.

I gave a keynote speech at the University of Edinburgh, which was hosting the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment conference. But I gave the talk first at UCD, to save an air fare and carbon, and sent them the dvd. Then I did the Q&A by videoconference.

It was a very positive and very ecological experience. In fact, the medium was in every sense the message. (And this was also the topic of my talk, so we got a nice recursivity going...)

Here it is.

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