Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
We will, Jon. We'll keep checking back in. Thanks, everyone!
  

    
I want to echo Jon's thanks to Nancy and Cliff for letting us pester
them. I've read the book and suggest that if conversations are of
interest to you, you pick it up. The historical context set up in the
beginning is fascinating and something that is often left out of the
conversation (more square wheels?)

Thanks, Cliff and Nancy!
  

    
Our pleasure!  See ya' round (virtual) town!
  

    
Just now getting around to reading the last half of the foregoing, and a
couple of things occur to me.

One is that there is a perfectly good word (albeit one long fallen into
disuse) to describe people who specialize in doing the writing that others
lack the knack/time/predisposition to do: scribes.

The other is that not everyone you might want to involve in a conversation 
sits at a desk with a network-connected computer in front of them.  Light, 
portable devices, such as the Simputer http://www.simputer.org/ or the new 
tablet PCs, with some means for periodically exchanging information with 
the network, might be just what's needed in many circumstances.
  

    
Hi, John. I agree that scribes are needed to convey important
goings-on to others, and that such reporting is part of the
c0nversation. Journalists should see their work as part of a
conversation rather than the last word.

And the idea of extending communications technologies so that people
can be involved who don't have convenient access to net-connected PCs
is important if this is to become anything like a global village. I'm
writing an article for a Dutch biotechnology journal about the kinds of
devices (including the Simputer) that will be the channels for
spreading knowledge about biotech promise and threats in the developing
world.