It's
amazing how much stuff there is online to help me with my voyage into the world
of cardistry. Instruction videos on YouTube, forums where people swap ideas, boot
camps that you can pay to attend, trainers that will do one-to-one sessions
with you via Zoom, lists of tricks with details of how to perform them, blogs
from people who are already successful. And it's led me to have one of my days of
pondering very heavily about 'the way things are these days'. Because if I have
access to this stuff, then so does everybody else on earth, which means that we
all have the ability to get good at something that previously was an art form
only practiced by a select few individuals around the world. And if that's true
of Cardistry, then it's true of everything else too. And I think it IS. True, I
mean. If you look up anything online now, no matter how obscure it might be,
and if you are prepared to put in the time to practice and perfect, you can
become an expert in whatever you choose to put your mind to, without having to
resort to paying someone to teach you or going away to study for years on end. Want
to be able to change a spark plug in any vehicle made from 1970 to 1985 without
being trained as a mechanic? Yep - I bet you can find all you need on the
internet. Want to know the composer and publication date of any piece of
classical music just by hearing the first five notes? Yep - I'm pretty sure
that's covered too. Want to know more about South African flora and fauna than
anyone else in Britain? The information is all there, if you choose to get into
it and absorb it. The way we learn, and
what is available to whom, has changed, and now certain worlds are having to
change and adapt accordingly. Poker players who dominated tournaments for years
on end have had to alter their habits to fit in with the internet generation
who have overtaken their predecessors live experience by playing countless
games online. Chess - an unchanged game that for 1500 years was a playground
only for the intellectually elite - now has players near the top of the
rankings who grew up playing on computers at home. It's not just in these game
environments either - your neighbour Tommy is probably just as good at making
soup as the potager chef at the top hotels in London; Kelly who works in your
office might know as much about Niels Bohr as the physics lecturer at Oxford;
and Hassam from the refrigeration company we use at work might know more about underwater
earthquakes than he knows about installing a freezer. Everyone, everywhere has
access to everything, and it's levelling the playing field of life, I guess.
I need to think about it some more before I draw
a conclusion, but it's certainly cheered me up a bit thinking about it. I have
such a negative view of things like social media that it's wonderful to realise
that the good intentions of the world wide web have not been lost in the
plethora of puerile pap placed upon it. And, for me, right now, it's a godsend
to have so much access to the cardistry stuff.
RC 27-2-25
No comments:
Post a Comment