At Home in a Sea of Information

We are indeed, as Gary Snyder puts it, "the most highly developed tool-using animal" (Snyder, "Four Changes" 245). As I sit before my computer, emblem of the religiosity of the technological, I wonder to what purpose we have progressed. While we are highly developed animals, so are our tools, yet what good does our historical collective innovation serve? My laptop is a convertible; its monitor can spin to form an electronic version of a stone tablet. The logic behind producing such a machine--more importantly, behind purchasing such a commodity--is to enhance the rapidity and facility of recording and recalling information.

American society in general has moved beyond the formative wilderness condition and the successive technological ages into the information age. Our national product is no longer the object "Made in the USA" but knowledge transference. The human mode of experience seems no longer to have to deal with the real but exclusively with the categorized, the interpreted, the transmitted.

It was precisely for this reason I sought wildness this summer. I came to Alaska in order to continue gathering and digesting information as a graduate student in an environment I perceived as more real than the suburban one I usually inhabit. In this place of more palpable wildness, I have noticed the correlation between the "life network" and the information technology network (Snyder, "Four Changes" 250).

Increased understanding has been the goal of philosophy since time immemorial. Schools of the Liberal Arts press students to ponder the positions of multiple disciplines on converging and divergent issues in the hopes that they arrive at a state of enlightenment. While most such schools do not encourage their instructors to teach "while walking," Americans approach the process of learning as a journey (Snyder, Practice 88).

Through what environment do the student and teacher walk? Regardless of the academic discipline, the pair walks into the wild, for "Wildness is the state of complete awareness" (Snyder, "Four Changes" 251).