We’ve reached the halfway point of the month, and the location of a new window that really isn’t a window, exactly. I mean, it’s a screen. We were always going to have to get to the screens.
As a person who lived through the moral panic of video games as a child and then a teacher, and who is living with everyone else through the genuine cause-and-effect panic that is the morally bankrupt application of uncontrolled AI, this too-much-this-or-that in terms of digital interaction has solidified into the realization that forevermore, It’s Always Going to Be Something. People will always be upset about that which doesn’t fit within their parameters of societal or personal behavior or expectation. Even before screens, and reading on screens, my father sought to eradicate my predilection towards bookishness – without his control over the characters in the books nor over my thoughts about their actions or words or what I was learning from them, the contents of my mind must have felt chaotic, untrammeled, and wholly out of his reach… just like an individual’s thoughts ought to be.
May we guard the freedom to read forever.
avoid, escape, iterate
what mattered
was distance:
diminished
consciousness
receding
present, past –
the future
replete with
evasions.
Amen and Amen. (one for freedom to read and the other for Jason Reynolds and his “diety-tier shutdown game.”)
Oh, my goodness, yes. I think this is my favorite yet. The pushing back against judgey limits. The insistence on sustaining the freedom. The very concrete visual. So powerful.
(Related: I just saw and shared a clip of Jason Reynolds being asked if audiobooks “counted” and boy, howdy, did he shut that down in the most SOARING manner.)
@LizGartonScanlon: Oh, my word, whyyyy do people keep asking?? Also, mad respect to Jason who has a deity-tier shutdown game.