I recently got finished reading the book "Oryx and Crake" by Margaret Atwood.
Atwood is a feminist novelist who makes occasional and
GOOD forays into science fiction. Though her stories are not innovative for the science fiction genre she writes well, and infuses new life into old stories.
In Atwood's book the main character studies literature while he is in school. He develops an interest in reading very old self help books. When he graduates he ends up getting a job as a promotions person for a company that makes self improvement products. I found this quote from the job interview scene to be provocative:
(approximately page 245, the chapter titled "Vulturing")
Quote:
What had impressed them, said the interviewers -- there were two of them, a woman and a man -- was his senior dissertation on self-help books of the twentieth century. One of their core products, they told him, was the improvement items -- not books any more, of course, but the DVDs, the CD-ROMs, the Web sites, and so forth.
...
(page 246 )
"You showed great insight into the process", the woman said. "In your dissertation. We found it very mature."
"If you know one century, you know them all," said the man.
"But the adjectives change", said Jimmy. "Nothing's worse than last year's adjectives"
"Exactly!" said the man, as if Jimmy had just solved the riddle of the universe in one blinding flashbulb of light.
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This quote really struck me for several reasons. One reason is that I have seen several people on this board make the same observation that I have had. That observation is that many PD systems don't say anything new, they just rephrase and recompile existing PD knowledge.
Stephen Covey in his 7 Habits wrote that people who are successful have the capacity to do things of their own accord when they do not feel like doing them.
Perhaps one of the reasons that PD knowledge keeps getting reinterpreted is that consumers are looking for a way around this fact and new materials give that illusion with "new adjectives"?
I'm not dissing PD. There are legitimate reasons for recompiling and presenting existing knowledge in new ways. I and other people have benefited in legitimate ways from that.