Sunday, January 04, 2009

earth abbey, mark tully+satnav


Went to the Earth Abbey “Mid-winter Celebration” at Faithspace in Stackpool Road yesterday afternoon. EarthAbbey is a movement of people helping one another to live more in tune with the earth. Some really interesting stuff.
It seems to me that Earth Abbey has quite a few links with this morning’s “Something Understood” on Radio4 (always thought-provoking and usually presented by the wonderful Mark Tully – another contender for a place in my World XI?) entitled “Is This the Way?”. He couples this question with another: “How Should I Travel on This Way?”. The programme included an amusing reference to SatNavs via Michael Bywater’s article ‘The Curse of SatNav: On a Road to Nowhere…’ published in The Independent in April 2008. The following is a brief extract:
The more we rely on satnav, the more the world becomes something seen – or unseen, or barely noticed – through glass. The glass of the satnav display and the glass of the windscreen become indistinguishable; the former is merely a better, more reliable (we believe) version of the latter. The cityscape, the buildings, the landmarks, this cathedral, that office block: they merge into something called "information", a better recension of which is available by looking at the satnav. We no longer notice the subtle shadings of terrain, the movement from escarpment down to estuarine plain, the changing crops”.
Image: flier for the Earth Abbey Mid-winter Celebration.

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