From Scott Walker, Vice President and Executive Producer:
Not long ago, as I was about to leave home for the office, I felt something. A lack.
I realized that in the frenzy of Web work, amid the days and nights surfing and scanning furiously, trying to keep pace with developments in Web technology, marketing, usage, and other news, I had managed to go several weeks without really reading. I skim, surf, scan, trend-watch, byte-ingest, site-mind, keep my ear to the business ground and my nose to the media winds.
And what I really needed right then, what I needed to do before zapping mentally and permanently into cybermediaspace never to be heard from again, was to read. A book. To read calmly and absorb slowly. One word after another, put there on purpose by someone who means every word.
So I sat, and did that, and a half-hour later was ready for work and happy to be going there.
Books. I started my communications career -- what I've been calling my "500-Year Career" -- by making them, by hand, because I love to read. I kept publishing books because I love to read and because I love writers. I do what I do now because I like what the Web is -- a way of delivering ideas and perspectives from one person to another.
Saying that computers are replacing books is silly. As if TV replaced radio. But for me it's not a bad idea to keep things in balance, to balance the quick slurps and sips of media with longer more refreshing and nourishing gulps of ideas.
I like to think of a certain group of people, Tripod's main audience, as the Net Generation -- a group of people greatly influenced by an ability to process an amazing amount of information; communicate and think globally; and to operate on many levels at once. This new way of thinking will produce some great and new arts.
And for the new year I will not only appreciate and extend that, but delve into a few old friends, too: Kundera, Mona Simpson's new novel, Dickens, Linda Gregg (a marvelous poet), "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance"....
Read more "Letters from Tripod" in the archive.