Over the weekend @Porter_Anderson picked up on my recent thoughts about Potential not Possession in a post of his own (at @WriterUnboxed) on what he’s taken to calling the “digital dynamic”. The digital dynamic (Porter’s alternative to the phrase “digital disruption”) is something I’ll be talking about later this week in posts about @ajkeen’s #DigitalVertigo and @euan’s Organisations Don’t Tweet, People Do. Both Keen and Semple talk, from different perspectives, not only about the Internet and Social Media, but about what it is to be human.
So before those new posts, a further thought on books and values. Yesterday John Henley posted The Library With No Rules at the Guardian, describing Hernando Guanlao’s Reading Club 2000 in Manila: a library that exists simply to share books, with no imposed parameters for loans. As Henley writes, Guanlao reckons books “have lives, and have to lead them. They have work to do. And the act of giving a book …it makes you complete. It makes your life meaningful and abundant. It’s a thought that has echoes of a documentary film I watched recently: The Hobart Shakespeareans, featuring the work of Rafe Esquith. If you have never seen this film, I recommend you find a copy fast: it is quite simply the most inspiring thing I have seen for longer than I can remember. Watching how a class of 10-year olds, lit up by Esquith’s passion for books, reading, culture, music and above all Shakespeare transcend the difficulties of their young lives is a humbling and sobering experience. Social media and technology have their place. But they are no match for the synapses of the human brain when inspired and stimulated.
Potential not Possession focused on what it is about books I value. Both Guanlao and Esquith use books to focus on what it is about being human they value. And act on it.