There is more coming, if you could look at a history written 20,000 years from now, there will be a short section on intellectual developments in ancient times and two developments will be mentioned, Plato's Academy and Wikipedia. Fred

On Fri, May 29, 2009 at 8:13 PM, Durova <nadezhda.durova(a)gmail.com> wrote: Well, to be fair, "history of Western thought" has a number of problems in its very premise that make it disinteresting for modern young people to deal with: 1) It uses the "east west" dichotomy, which automatically attaches to it certain qualitative assumptions and connotations about its distinctiveness from "eastern thought." 2) Taking active participation in the cementation of such concepts in the modern mind, when people really just want them obliterated and relegated to a pre-hyperconnected world's history, is anathema to the emergent collective mind. 3) And besides its a bit redundant; the concept of "western thought" is historical and needs not be qualified as "history." 4) And worse, the word "history" innately implies that the concept that any particularly "western" anything likewise has a similarly particular future, which violates 2. And anyway Bart Simpson is just plain freakin' timeless, regardless of his novelty. Ah- the interesting dichotomy between relevant and historical information, and (corollary) the dichotomy between the crusty old wiki encyclopedia and the flashy new hyperintuitive one. -Steve

Bryan Derksen wrote: It's a standard riff, in Wikicritic circles. Little evidence is typically adduced, about on the level of "how else could it all work?", and "reacts like an ants nest when poked with stick, so must be run by social insects". Charles