I have always been interested in how technology and culture affect each other and, in particular, what the word interactivity really means. The more I read and experience, the more I've come to believe that culture is affected much less by technology than it affects technology. These five books--I never could follow directions very well--have helped me explore that relationship and isolate some central ideas:
Art and Physics (1993), by Leonard Shlain, is one of the most interesting books on how we've developed an understanding of our world. It is the best book on physics you will ever read--and the best one on art history. By digging into our past, Shlain gives you a sense of how the politics, emotion, theory, and inspiration of art, science, culture, and technology mix. Also look for his forthcoming book, The Alphabet vs. the Goddess.
The Meaning of Things (1981), by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Eugene Rochberg-Halton, presents a taxonometric study of the relationships people have with things on many levels. They explore what--and why--objects have mere utility for some people yet are cherished by others; they examine how objects define us and are defined by us. While parts of the book get a bit off-track, the core research is important and fascinating.
There are many different cultures in what we call our society. The novel Generation X (1992), by Douglas Coupland, gives insight into the motivations, dreams, frustrations, and reactions of an important and growing segment of our society that is trying desperately to build culture. Most of us are too old, jaded, distracted, or ignorant to build culture from scratch. Instead, we tweak it from time to time as it flows by us, usually only choosing from the alternatives created for us. Don't read the story itself, but the stories within it. We build culture by telling stories to each other, and the characters in this novel successfully build their own culture in reaction to the one around them in a particularly interesting, inspiring, and emotional way.
Identity is an important part of culture, and ours is a culture that is increasingly allowing many different identities to coexist and thrive--even within the same individual. Life on Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet (1995), by MIT's Sherry Turkle, explores how and why we build identities and how we use those identities to affect and integrate our cultures.
The Media Equation: How People Treat Computers, Television, and New Media Like Real People and Places (1996), by Byron Reeves and Clifford Nass, is a rare and disturbing look into the dynamics of power in culture and society--from intimate, personal interactions to those that affect our society as a whole. It will engage you, enrage you, scare you, and give you a sense of control over the invisible pressures you feel every day.
Nathan Shedroff is creative director of San Francisco's Vivid Studios. He maintains a Web site with resources and thoughts about interactivity at www.nathan.com.
Dana Gioia
Contemporary poetry mostly exists outside the marketplace. Thousands of new poetry collections appear each year, but most sell only a few hundred copies. Even critical successes achieve circulation mainly through compulsory sales to students. And yet a few poets still prosper by attracting a voluntary audience of readers willing to spend their hard-earned cash for the pleasure, enlightenment, and conciliation genuine poetry provides. I want to recommend three poets who in different ways have built considerable readerships without academic support.
My first recommendation is the late Philip Larkin (1922-1985), who is in danger of becoming academically respectable despite his unreconstructed Tory politics. Look for his Collected Poems (1989), but any of his books will serve as an irresistible introduction. Larkin published only four proverbially slim collections in his lifetime, but on the basis of that tiny output, he is universally recognized as the best British poet of the past half-century. Larkin's poetry, which is mostly in rhyme and meter, is often simultaneously heartbreaking and hilarious. "Deprivation to me is what daffodils were to Wordsworth," he once remarked. Near the end of his life, the queen offered him the coveted post of poet laureate, but he declined. "I dream of being poet laureate," he told reporters, "and wake up screaming." Larkin had the essential poetic gift for memorable language. He is one of the few contemporary poets whose work people know by heart.
My next recommendation is a starker poet: Weldon Kees (1914-1955). Although Kees has never been a big seller, his work has steadily stayed in print--without any scholarly support--for the 40 years since his mysterious disappearance and presumed suicide. (His first editions, in fact, command huge prices in the rare-book market.) If Larkin is alternately wistful and stoic, Kees is wryly apocalyptic. You may have trouble finding a copy of his Collected Poems, even though the book was reissued both here and in England in 1993, so let me explain why searching it out will be worth the effort. There has never been an American poet with fewer illusions about life than Kees. He makes his tragic worldview, however, not merely compelling but darkly attractive. "It's good to be deaf," he observed, "in a deafening time." He is the laureate of gallows humor and fatalistic ingenuity. Academic critics have little use for Kees. He rarely appears in the official anthologies, but writers and artists adore him. For many readers, discovering Kees becomes a conversion experience; they are drawn completely into his imaginative world. (This is similar to what science fiction fans undergo reading Philip K. Dick--an experience that changes their notions of the medium.) BBC television even did a film, Looking for Robinson, depicting an obsessed British poet traveling America to search out clues about Kees's disappearance. Kees is a poet who requires a psychic warning label.
Finally, let me recommend Wendy Cope, a poet who offers pure pleasure. Cope is currently Britain's best-selling poet, but she remains almost unknown in America. She is probably the best living comic poet in English. She is also a superb love poet. Her first book, Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis (1986), would be my top recommendation. Among its many delights are "Waste Land Limericks," which summarizes Eliot's Modernist classic in five bouncy light-verse stanzas, and "From June to December," possibly the best sequence of love poems written in the past 20 years--by turns comic, erotic, romantic, and vengeful. Cope is so ingenious and funny that you won't be able to read her alone. You will soon be in the next room or on the phone reciting her to someone else.
Dana Gioia is a poet and critic. He is the author of numerous books, including Can Poetry Matter?: Essays on Poetry and American Culture. He lives in Sonoma County, California.
Paul Shepheard
I know a man who does not like Shakespeare's plays. The unusual Elizabethan syntax throws him, and he will not learn how to listen to it. What's more, he insists that no one else understands it either. He says that anyone who says they enjoy Shakespeare is faking it. Why should they do that? Because they're snobs.
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