The Center provides a wide range of resources, including our unique Aphorisitic approach to understanding the DIGITAL world, an expanding collection of Essays and interviews &c, as well as a Library of recommended reading and viewing materials. Throughout, these resources reflect our commitment to understanding human affairs through the triple-lenses of Environment (see the Environment heading), their associated Sensibilities (see the Sensibilities heading) and the structures that underlie our 3Spheres world (see the 3Spheres heading).
To be sure, many have attempted to collect knowledge in an undifferentiated "encyclopedic" fashion – beginning in earnest with PRINT (although SCRIBAL did produce a few "Summas"). Diderot. Brittanica. Wikipedia. H.G. Wells's "World Brain." In these cases, it was presumed that the biases of the editors (generally not at all "diverse") represent a "universal" which can be applied across the board. Mortimer Adler's famous Syntopicon takes this path into intellectual history – minus the history – by collating the uses of "102 Great Ideas" (actually terms, not ideas) across the entire collection of the Great Books. That is not our approach.
We view human history (and pre-history) as highly differentiated. In a word, "digital." Indeed, it seems that the term "digital" originated on this basis – derived from "digit" (all appendages except for our thumbs) since they appear to be "discrete" and not "continuous." In the early-days of computer design this was meant to differentiate from "analog" computing (which, by the way, is now enjoying a comeback, in an attempt to overcome limitations of digital designs in AI). Considering that many other options were discarded in favor of today's dominant base-2 "binary" designs, perhaps that would have been a better term but "digital" has stuck.
Accordingly, we suspect that we are all "Connecticut Yankees in King Arthur's Court" attempting to somehow transcend the limitations and prejudices of our times and personal experiences. The inablity to read texts in unfamiliar languages (including earlier versions of English), our reliance on often unreliable translations, and our lack of extensive immersion in distant cultures all inhibit our understanding. Introduce mathematics and even programming languages and this "Tower of Babel" can become overwhelming. Who knew Python would become an essential job skill?
Many foundational texts for human civilization (some of which are cited under Resources) can only be adequately read by a handful alive today. Many try and then many disagreements ensue. Indeed, given that writing/literacy is a relatively new invention (c. 500BC), ORAL material transposed into a SCRIBAL environment – such as the words of Moses, Homer or Zoroaster – brings even more difficulties. Words are metaphors – every one of them – and metaphors depend on contexts and relationships which have been largely forgotten. The OED attempts to catalog the timeline of how these metaphors (or "meanings") change and some have even written extensively about how terms like "innovate" and "fact" and "objective" now have fully-inverted connotations from earlier usages. Yes, under technological pressures, "black" can indeed become "white."
Our frameworks of Environments, Sensibilities and Spheres is meant to be an admittedly feeble overlay to what William James called a newborn's "blooming, buzzing confusion." Boundaries are never sharply drawn. We are, above all, humble about our ability to reach a final "discernment" under these circumstances. But that doesn't stop us. As the title of Walter Ong's PhD dissertation, "Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue: From the Art of Discourse to the Art of Reason" underscores, the transition from SCRIBAL (dialogue/discource) to PRINT (method, reason) implied a considerable loss for humanity. Unfortunately ELECTRIC "holism" (aka "systems thinking" &c) only punted this difficulty down the road, without addressing the human dimensions involved (as reflected in the misplaced willingness to model human on computers along with failed efforts to "mathematize" biology have shown).
We are not "systems" builders. We do not believe that "computation" is fundamental to the universe. We think that "information" is little more than a veiled attempt to hide a lack of understanding of "form" between a prefix and suffix. In our view, the world is analogical, not "logical." In the Trivium, Grammar takes precedence (see Trivium University heading). As many complained about the work of Marshall McLuhan, we make no effort to be "methodical," instead attempting to provoke the recognition of patterns in our lives (see Patterns heading). We are confident that, perhaps more than ever before, it is truly up to each of you to sort this out and act accordingly.
As a result, the Center's Resources are intended to be "provocative." Take a look and remember, as McLuhan said, "when you're laughing you're learning."