(James Burke) Download babysitting

…tonight. I found a new James Burke series I didn’t even know existed. James Burke, if you don’t know, is the only good sociologist. I don’t mean that he’s dead (not yet, thank god), only that he is the only vaguely “academic” British person I’ve seen who knows exactly how to use the medium of television to educate.

Burke is most famous for his BBC series Connections, which aired on PBS stations across America. Mostly educated, relatively “free thinking”, middle-class folk, some of whom were probably teachers, watched it, and then picked up their telephones. They dialed the little number PBS used to flash on the bottom of the screen before Al Gore invented the Internet. A human being thousands of miles away pushed a button and asked them what they wanted. Then they asked for a credit card number. Six to eight weeks (or however long it took) later, Connections found its way onto the dusty shelves of collage libraries all across the nation. Including mine.

I tell you this story to illustrate the kind of casual chains Burke seems to have devoted his life to examining. Burke’s work is all about the interconnectivity, not just of the modern world, but of the past that built it.

We in American have a problem with remembering the past. It bores us. It isn’t now. We live in a perpetual now because, as the man himself says, “We’ve got a problem.”

We live I the crosshairs of perpetual change. Everyday we wake up, go outside, or even stay in and turn on one of the technological gizmos we surround ourselves with. Whatever it is we do, we find ourselves forced to deal with more change than anyone at any point in the past. And because of this, we’re left with less time to process the changes that surround us. “We’re pulled between yesterday and tomorrow,” James Burke says.

I prefer o think of it as stretched, the way the Inquisition used to do. But my world has already diverged wildly from James Burke’s…or, at least, the twenty years young version of James Burke that speaks to me from my television screen. He filmed Connections in 1979; The Day the Universe Changed in 1986. It’s a little hard to take the Soviet Union seriously anymore, given the fact that it no longer exists for me. It’s changed.

And that’s the point. In our world, the pace of change will continue to increase, while the time we (as individuals and a society) give ourselves to process that change continues to shrink. What exactly will that lead to? And why will it lead there and not, say, in the parallel universe a few inches to the right of there?

That’s what James Burke is all about. I immediately urge all and sundry to seek out his work and bring it into your lives. It will open your eyes to a totally new way of viewing history, technology, and the whole of human civilization.

I could quote from the man at length, but I’d rather just point you to the man’s website and let you poke around. I will quote only the line that I find most relevant, as it is a truth we should all remind ourselves of, constantly:

We are making the future.

--D