David Weinberger's book "Too Big to Know" is a good one to represent the possibilities, irritations and dangers of today's internet and the freer flow of both information and misinformation. I have found the title Too Big to Know a valuable description of several parts of my life.
This morning, I saw a National Geographic article called The Forest in Your Mouth. It is about the human biome, or at least that part of it in the mouth. I am confident that I could spend the remaining days of my life learning about what lives in my mouth and still find that my mouth is too big to know. And that doesn't start on my eyelids, my gut, my lungs and other parts of me. I am just too big and complicated to know.
My friend reminded me of the tv series "Suits" about a New York law firm. This show is an original on the USA channel. Maybe I can catch up looking at the USA channel's web site. Maybe I should watch it on cable tv. Maybe I should look at the cable tv feature called Video on Demand, which allows viewing of some but not all older episodes of some but not all shows. But wait: maybe we started taping that show and forgot we had done so. Maybe I should watch it using the Roku streamer, where that series might be on Netflix or on Amazon or available through a Roku USA channel. It could be on Hulu or Vudu. Maybe I should use the Amazon streamer. It is getting so that television is too big to find my way around.
In both the public library and the university library, there are research librarians. I should bring these experts to mind more often. I still think of the library as a place for print, for books and periodicals. Now that I think of it, I haven't tried asking a research librarian for help in tracking down the latest series of "Suits".
When I get interested in something, there is only a limited time before my interest wanes. Sometimes, it is shifted to something else. That falling and shifted interest might be what happened with "Suits". For a while I was a big fan but holidays and other good programs and new books and this and that, before I realized it, the program fell off my radar. It is really not surprising that that just about everything is too big to keep in mind, too big to keep track of, too big to know.
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