Unseen
Unseen is a documentary divided in to two parts. The first part is about five individuals who provide tours of various parts of London which they inhabited as homeless person and the second part is feedback and advice.
Marie Kondo’s rule that you should only keep thirty books, that you should only keep those that you personally want to read or enjoy is a silly rule because it encourages people to limit their scope and perspective on the world.
One memory of my childhood is being surrounded by books and being able to look through hundreds of books, whether at home, in libraries or even
I bought books and only read a few chapters. Books are not like bread or shoes. They don’t have a best before
A home or house benefits from having a wide selection of books because life is not linear. We want to learn about multiple topics at once. One day we want to read about the Vietnam war and the next day we want to read about climbing the Eiger. On the third
Such a book charts the history of writing from oral traditions of storytelling to cuneiforms, the library of Alexandria, the role of literature in the forming of national identities and cultures but also about what an important role the development of paper had.
When you needed to breed sheep to make parchment the process would take months or even years. With the development of paper the process was cheaper. It took time for paper to be cheap enough for use with printing processes. It took several iterations before they had developed the right type of paper to work with Guthenburg’s press.
It would take several more centuries, and the industrial revolution to get writing from an elite skill to one that most people would learn. With increased
One of the great things about physical libraries is that they train your mind to think spatially. If you have hundreds of books spread across several rooms on multiple floors you need a good memory to remember which book is where. Your subconscious takes note of where things are constantly. If you have 30 books, your brain would never develop that skill.
Having more than 30 books doesn’t mean that you will even read the physical book. I have seen books when visiting friends and I’ve bought the e-book version rather than the physical one.
The idea of limiting yourself to 30 books bothers me because it’s a limitation on the diversity and creative directions that a person can take. To limit yourself to 30 books means that you can have a maximum of thirty topics. That’s one book a day for a medium month. That’s one book a year if you’re 30 years old. That’s a tragic way of looking at things.
I can remember reading 191 books, am currently reading 60 and want to read 196 books. That’s 447 books in total and several weeks worth of reading if I read non-stop. That’s excluding the reading of newspapers, magazines, comic books, blogs, reports and other forms of content.
I started to go through and catalogue physical books that were in my bedroom. This information is no longer correct. This provides intellectual flexibility. This does not constitute clutter.
Despite my love for physical books I buy virtual ones these days. I have 144 kindle books, 273 Audible books and 95 Kobo books. In theory I could take Marie Kondo’s idea of having 30 physical books down to 0 physical books and have 30 Kobo or Kindle devices instead. I could also have two or three mp3 players with my entire audible collection. That would take much less space.
In the 21st century the need for physical books is gone. With a mobile phone you can read from multiple libraries at a time. With a single Kobo, Kindle or other e-book reader you can gain access to hundreds of books. The drawback is that you are not moving in space. By having a physical library of books across several rooms you need to get up and move. You need to develop your spatial awareness and you train your memory to remember where things are in the physical world. By limiting yourself to 30 books you are limiting the diversity of topics that you can spontaneously read about. I believe that to have a wide diversity of books promotes intellectual well being.
For those of us living in Europe we now have the option of paying for Facebook and Instagram, not to see ads. In theory this is fantastic and we should be jumping on the opportunity.
I don’t feel that way. I had plenty of conversations, with uni friends, colleagues and more, until Zynga brought Farmville. When Farmville spammed our timelines and killed all conversations the value of Facebook as social network was destroyed because instead of conversing and networking we were taking care of virtual farms. We went from spending time with friends to wasting our online time. Our social bonds degraded and Facebook went from being social to being lonely.
I would have been tempted to pay for Instagram, before it was bought by Facebook. Before instagram was bought by Facebook it was a network of friends sharing photos of things they saw, did, ate, or experienced. After Facebook it became a network of influencer spam and adverts, with posts by friends becoming invisible. It became a network of strangers, rather than the network of friends it had been before then.
We might pay not to see adverts but influencer garbage is so ingrained into timelines that there is no way that I would pay to use a network, that, instead of being social, is utilitarian. When I was trolled two or three times on Facebook, during lock down, and it deeply affected my mental health, I dumped Facebook and eventually Instagram too, to keep my mental health sustainable.
One of the worst things about social media, since 2007 or so, is that it has become utilitarian, rather than social. Instead of people being part of a forum to have pleasant conversations it has become a place for people to use others. Influencers are there to exploit the gullible. Brands are forcing us to see tweets that have no value. Facebook forces to see posts and photos by random strangers that are “influencers”. This isn’t social. This is clickbait, as with YouTube.
I have a pro Flickr account, and I am paying for my Mastodon instance, but I seriously question whether to delete it. I am tired of the utilitarianism that I see, on Mastodon, which is why I deleted almost all the Fediverse instance accounts I have had so far.
## A Reason for Web Forums to Come Back
If we have to pay for all social media sites soon, then it gives us a good reason to revive web forums and related projects. For a long time the unique selling point of social media is that it was cheap, dynamic, and affordable/free. Now that it’s no longer cheap and affordable it provides us with a reason to setup niche websites for those of us with specific interests that are not covered by social media.
Twitter wants us to pay 140 CHF per year. Facebook wants us to pay 120 or more per year. That’s 260 CHF per year for two social networks that spent so much effort forcing irrelevant content on to us that their social networks are worthless. It would have been worth paying a decade ago. Paying now is a waste of money. I won’t pay 20-30 CHF a month for social networks that make me feel lonelier than if I was not using them.
In the long run “Social media” is going to become very expensive if we have to pay to use all these sites.