What are we doing?

We've moved from holding up lighters to cell phones at concerts, but why do this on a moonlit beach?  This eerie, beautiful image from National Geographic shows Somalians in neighboring Djibouti looking for cheaper cell service across the bay. These silhouetted figures in moonlight and phonelight unintentionally link technology and nature in their simple desire to speak to family.  And while Eggers satirized transparency in The Circle, NPR shows a clip on camera called Narrative that posts pictures to the web all day long. The company suggests it will supplement memory, a simple need that I certainly feel, but with a different eerie quality in every moment. 

Often listening to the news on the way home feels like our class discussion continued. For example, "How would we know if we were on the Taker Thunderbolt?" Then this story reminds me that despite the cold US winter, January was still the 374th consecutive month above global average temperature and this one links Peruvian glacier melt to those temperatures. Combined with James Lovelock's newest predictions for economic disruption caused by climate change, I find the analogy compelling.  Our conversations about Ishmael again confirmed that it helps us think about 'how things came to be' and understand that we can tell different stories and make different choices.

I mentioned my friend David Dunbar's DKDK zone in class the other day, and his blog notes,  

One solution might be to try to figure out how to get into that zone of unknown unknowns—the DKDK zone. In other words, don’t avoid the DKDK--actively seek it out. Being there might just provide the necessary confusion or disequilibrium (key precursors of insight and experience) that would force us to create new paradigms.

Ishmael doesn't tell us how to live, but it does suggest how we might understand the way not to live, and then how to accept our ignorance as we look for creative new ways to live. But first, we have to be able to accept our errors, admit we don't know what we're doing, and open ourselves to new solutions.