Shortly before he died five years ago, the Nobel prize-winning Irish poet, playwright, and translator Seamus Heaney sent a last text message to his wife. “Noli timere,” it ended. “Be not afraid. When I read his son’s account
of Heaney’s text, I was struck by the anachronistic juxtaposition–Latin
across SMS. It was as though Heaney’s message had resuscitated a dead
language, if only for a moment. Sent impossibly fast through silicon,
steel, and air, Heaney’s two words pronounced themselves in the mind of
another person. Almost like magic.
And,
in fact, it often seems that our digital communications platforms–best
represented by the internet–are a kind of wizardry. The internet allows
me to transmit, reproduce, and retrieve meaning independent of time and
space. It records both the passage and content of the thought–whether it
was quotidian or profound. Love letters to old partners, plans to meet
up with friends, threats of thermonuclear war from world leaders, grocery lists from years ago: They are all stored and indexed into a half-life of binary code. ... [mehr] https://www.fastcompany.com/90311664/what-late-poet-seamus-heaneys-last-text-message-tells-us-about-our-digital-lives
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