Reading the Noosphere

"Reading broadens the mind, travelling the horizon", they say. And that is true - or can be true. Reading enriches us when we engage with what we encounter. Paging through a comedy, a treatise or an article about local architecture on the beach and considering the themes encountered or even talking to other people about things we enter the cultural sphere woven around the world by mankind. Subjective insights, unexpected approaches and even occasional revolutions characterise this fluid world of ideas - and sometimes also the places where they originated or were applied. Reading and travelling, one thus immerses oneself in that rarely harmless, often harsh wonderland of ideas and thoughts surrounding our planet, which one might call a "thought ether". I believe, however, that the term "noosphere" is more appropriate here. Made up of the ancient Greek words for thought/reality and sphere the term has taken on various meanings since its introduction in the 1920s (more on this elsewhere). In the 1960s, Marshall McLuhan described the noosphere as a "cosmic membrane that has been snapped around the globe by the electric dilation of our various senses". Today, many would simply refer to it as "the web", but this rather simplistic view does not do justice to the dimension of ideas in which humans interact with products of the mind. However, the certainly intangible, ephemeral and electrifying noosphere can be described as being constantly recreated by us so-called recipients, through the march of history, new writings and individual interpretations. As a kind of gateway into the noosphere, combinations of places and texts (where "text" means anything that can be "read" in any way, i.e. any cultural work) are proposed and explained here. With the first explorations of this sphere, people pretty much by default become „Noonauty“, divers of the noosphere. This site is just another way of fostering interconnections in this depening ether. To which a comment on these pages could also contribute.

T. Elling.