If you ever want to extend the analogy to include the perspective of the water here's one to read:
"Over the last few years I've regularly been cornered by nervous publishers or broadcasters or journalists or film makers and asked about how I think computers will affect their various industries. For a long time most of them were desperately hoping for an answer that translated roughly into 'not very much'. ('People like the smell of books, they like popcorn, they like to see programmes at exactly the same moment as their neighbours, they like at least to have lots of articles that they've no interest in reading', etc.) But it's a hard question to answer because it's based on a faulty model. It's like trying to explain to the Amazon River, the Mississippi, the Congo and the Nile how the coming of the Atlantic Ocean will affect them. The first thing to understand is that river rules will no longer apply."
Since you're currently holding a magazine, let's think about what might happen when magazine publishing is no longer a river in its own right..
I've had that happen before. I wrote a somewhat long piano piece that I was unusually impressed with myself for.
I later learned (luckily before I published it anywhere) that it was in fact a melody from a (somewhat well-known) friend's song I had heard some years before, perhaps only 2-3 times, but somehow it remained intact in my head.
I suspect all these derive from a Buddhist parable, in which a novice fish asks a master fish to define the "sea" that the master keeps mentioning. The original point was different: the master's description is necessarily mystical, but the sea is real.
It does have Buddhist roots. If fact the Youtube videos of DFW's - This is water - are very close to what Buddhism advocates (for lack of a better word) - consciously chosen response to every moment/situation. (DFW mentions "Default Setting" of unconscious conditioned response which I find highly relevant for geeks!)
You can find hours of lectures by Alan Watts about this sort of thing. I find his work to be a very approachable explanation of Buddhism, Zen, Hinduism and Taoism.
Thank you for posting DFW's commencement speech. After reading it, I realized that I think under my default setting the majority of the time. It's something I am now consciously going to work on changing.
Personally, I didn't find Derek's post to be anything new. It was basically just an eloquent rephrasing of "some things we think are fundamental values are just cultural". I knew that already.
The phrase "fish don't have a word for water" (and many permutations thereof) existed before both essays. So it's quite possible that both DFW's speech and Derek's essay have nothing to do with each other.
