Paper Clippings
Before becoming possible and commonplace, to create and maintain digital records in one’s home – thanks to the Personal Computer, my passion for information and reference sources led me to engaging in a lot of clipping of articles or the collection of books and magazines. Along with extensive note-making about various subjects of interest.
Without quite realising just how much of a ‘geek’ I was at the time (and before The Big Bang Theory series made being ‘Geekish’ cool, I was seamlessly drawn into the technological revolution that the personal computer portended.
After all is said and done, I”m a part of the generation that feasted on the tales and travails of Buck Rogers in The 21st Century. Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey and Expedition To Earth, Isaac Asimov “Foundation” and I Robot, Robert A. Heinlein Stranger in a Strange Land, or Life and Times of Lazarus Long. Ray Bradbury Fahrenheit 451, The Martian Chronicles, The Illustrated Man, Philip K. Dick Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep [Blade Runner].
Let’s not forget Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea or Journey to the Center of the Earth. Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek and George Lucas’s Star Wars. Aliens or Steven Spielberg’s FIrst Encounter of The Third Kind or E.T., Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin or NASA Voyager programme.
By the time the Internet and The World Wide Web appeared I have been looking forward to the age of the Flying-Car, personal ‘transporter’ to zip around the world (see the Jetsons).
All of which is to say, that I’ve embraced the digital shift toward data collection, collation, corrolation and dissemination as it can lead to the ‘centralisation of knowldge’, the Big Brain of current human civilisation. The power of which can be staggeringly impactful on furture human societies. Science-fiction-ish? Yes. Even George Owell was that prescient in his writings.
And so, along the way I’ve come to the realisation that I have a predilection for cataloguing. The result of which is this current and personal ‘web site’ project.
Being a ‘computer geek’ has provided me with the means and ease with which I’ve been able to turn a little side project into an ongoing ‘labour of love’. There is no commercial intent involved. Just, subject-matter-title, search, document and save. The cataloguing or indexing / cross-indexing of documents and subjects is solely subjective on my part.
I use Wikipedia, primarily, as an external source of topic/subject references (assuming a certain degree of neutrality in content versus references to ‘partisian’ specific web sites).
In those instances where ‘non-Wikipedia’ sites/sources are cited, the intent is to indicate that the resultant information has a greater degree of ‘partisian’ bias attached. Or, to state the obvious. The intent is not to be seen as promoting (or minimalising) any particular point-of-view.
I admit that some of the views (or positions on any given subject) may become discernible with analysis; but my intent is never to become the ‘voice’ of others. Toot your own horns, I say. Stake your claim and be ready to defend it, IMO.
I think that the use of ‘library’ to describe this site’s contents is a tad pretentious. Call it my digital scrap-book of this and that that have been accumulated over the years. And, perhaps, of little to no interest to others, outside of a few ‘hardy’ souls among the billions that share this planet.
14/01/2024 07:20:09 -0500