Bill McKibben
This page is a synopsis of "The Age of Missing Information" by Bill McKibben's. Also you can order the book from here.
Reprinted with permission from Esquire Magazine, 1993. "Sometimes You Just Have to Turn it Off" by Bill McKibben, director, TV-Free America. A man walks into a room, fumbles for the remote, and turns on the TV. This is the quintessential act of modern life. It obliterates the three rarest commodities of our age: silence, solitude, darkness.
Bill McKibben is author of "The Age of Missing Information" and "The End of Nature." His newest book, "Hope, Human and Wild," discusses true stories of human communities that have managed to "live lightly on the Earth." Tripod recently spoke to McKibben at his home in the Adirondacks about the recovery of the Eastern forest, the dangers of "Baywatch," and the importance of staying in close contact with the natural world.
Many of these activities are just plain ole good media literacy exercises and can be done as stand alone lessons without reading the book, but it is a great book. In either case, have fun choosing from this rich assortment. *** YOU NEED TO DOWNLOAD THIS ****
Bill McKibben, a former staff writer for The New Yorker, is the author of The End of Nature and The Age of Missing Information. He lives with his wife and daughter in the Adirondack Mountains of upstate New York.
In the book of The Age of Missing Information, the author, Bill McKibben said that "We are living in the age of missing information, when vital knowledge that humans have always possessed about who we are and where we live seems beyond our reach."
Currently a freelance writer and environmentalist, McKibben was a staff writer at The New Yorker magazine from 1982-87, where he wrote several hundred articles for the magazine, including Talk of the Town stories, humorous fiction and general interest longer pieces.
Bill McKibben once spent a year watching 100 cable channels to determine how technology can alter our consciousness. Today, James Bailey leads off their debate by saying, "We must start now to shape our grandchildren's minds to process more in parallel and to embrace parallel computers as their intellectual collaborators. For anyone old enough to be reading this, it's probably too late."
The following is the transcript of a live online conference with Bill McKibben as it appears in The Atlantic Monthly Online on the America Online network. It came about largely because of where I live--in the middle of the Adirondack Mountains in upstate New York. McKibben: When I lived in New York and wrote for the New Yorker, I concerned myself mostly with people stories.
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- Created by: Lesley Allard, Class of 1997
- Last updated April 21, 1997