/lit/ - Literature

Holy shit, y'all - I think I just had a Marshall McLuhan moment, and I need muh nerds to hear me out and let me know if what I'm saying is a) already stated elsewhere; b) not particularly insightful; c) factually inaccurate; or d) Logically inconsistent.

I'm an actual teacher working on teachery shit, and I have an MA in Composition. No, I don't teach college. Yes, I could. Technically, I did for a Summer, but it was really not an adjunct position. I'm not planning to publish any of this, per se, so anything you see here may be fully consumed and reattributed to any current works or various academic endeavors that you may wish to splice into your current theories on education, media, sociology, critical theory (my fav), or other Humanity (presumably, though if you can apply it to a hard science or math, please do explain how and enjoy equal free use). This is the goddamn hivemind.

So, now that I've preambled this thing like a bitch, you're probably not going to be that impressed with the actual idea, so allow me to present it as a follow-up to this (what didn't originally intend to be) introduction to my appeal for assistance:

(note: pic unrelated, though technically an appropriate attention-getter, as I indeed seek feedback from any and all "you"s (second person plural implied, though the only English equivalent (curse our anemic pronoun selection)) might be "y'all")

(1/?)

Assume for a moment that everything that can be written has been. This might help if you have trouble with it: http://libraryofbabel.info - Wherein, then, do we find comfort?

The lilt of our language, codified into lexicography, becomes a static monolith, a set algorithm upon which the endless brute-force permutations can be applied, rendering all into a dizzying complexity of binary data that, however long it will take, must at some future point be processed and gathered as a system of information.

Wherein do we find our comfort, scribes? For we become the willing vessels of words not our own in that case, the concept of ownership becomes altogether laughable, as we happen to be the right monkey at the right typewriter, happening upon the melancholy prince like a fucking Plinko board - that price does not seem right, my friend.

But there it is: a mathematical certainty given the open parameters of infinity and the present understanding that all empirical data can be quantified to some degree and captured within a system of information coding - have you heard that they just stored the Muybridge horse clips into DNA? Yuppers. We can literally store information like a hard-drive. Of course, we can't retrieve it through the same means, but still...

So tell me: where is it you seek the strength to keep going, or is it the stolid faith of one who knows that even the suspension of disbelief that self-slaughter will yield any better results than drudging onward and inevitably toward an uncertain future is yet still faith?

Share your thoughts. Spill a vein.