Content and Form of This Book
Image credit: Richard Giblett
Here is a plan for how this book will be structured and what it will contain.
Each page will present an idea or an observation. It won't be too long - easy enough to digest. Several links spread throughout each page will lead to related thoughts and associations in other parts of the book. Most links will lead to other pages on this website, but some will direct the reader outside of it. This second category of connections will serve as a substitute for a bibliography (I may consider adding a separate page with all the references at some point). Bearing in mind that some visitors will arrive to the website not knowing what to expect, I am going to place a link to the Start section in the bottom of every page.
What is this book going to about? A lot of things, but not everything. There are some concepts that currently interest me most. They include: communication, human nature, empathy, power, and truth. This does not seem like too much. However, it turns out that when I start thinking about these topics, many directly and indirectly related issues come to mind. My goal is to explore them all as much as I can, moving in whatever direction my mind wants to take.
What is this going to look like? I describe this project as a hypertext, which may not mean much without an additional explanation (since the whole internet can be seen one big hypertext). While many texts available online contain links, those usually lead to places outside of the texts they are embedded in. In contrast, ideas I develop here will be connected with each other more than with ideas on the outside. This is not supposed to imply that my thoughts exist in some sort of a vacuum. They would not be possible without other people's ideas, without cultures and communities I am a part of. And yet... this project is supposed to be a book, and books are created to be mostly self-sufficient (at least, while you are reading them).
If you need an image to describe this book's structure, don't think of branches of a tree. Look at the picture on the top of this page. This graphite on paper drawing was created in 2008 by Richard Giblett, and it is titled Mycelium Rhizome. As it happens, rhizome is a botanical term and an important concept within postmodernist philosophy. It is a great way to represent human nonlinear thinking.
Illustrations for this book come from three main sources. Image credit is provided for pictures that I found on websites that require attribution to the author. High resolution images without credit come from Pexels. Finally, some images come from my Instagram account. They have smaller resolution and are more personal. The logo of the project will appear in the bottom of every page. I designed it using Microsoft Word and Fotor.
About this project: Me, Looking for Meaning.
