The third section of Douglas Engelbart’s Augmenting Human Intellect is another entry in a long history of science fiction’s contemporary relevance. Enlightenment thinker Voltaire used his 1752 story “Micromegas” to provoke Western ideas that had been accepted carte blanche. Not an uncommon motif during the French Enlightenment, visitors from outer space (for Voltaire, the visitor […]
14 NMS_04 Search and Structure
14 NMS_04 Search and Structure ref: Doug Engelbart, “Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework” A question arises early in this work; what is the relationship…
Jeffrey on Steroids
The release of Walter Isaacson’s, The Innovators’ this week offers an ideal backdrop for tomorrow’s discussion of Doug Engelbart’s “Augmenting Human Intellect,” a text which in many ways serves as the animating heart of the New Media Seminar syllabus. Isaacson’s saga of the digital revolution — from its origins in the 1840s in the visions […]
Joining the Mobile Digital Age
Tonight is the last night before I have a smartphone. Tomorrow, I will be getting not only my first smartphone, but my first touchscreen mobile device. I’ve resisted thus far, but the difference between basic phones and smartphones is financially negligible, as far as I’ve found. And I worried about my ability to learn to […]
What kind of symbiosis?
Writing in the late 1950s, Norbert Wiener and J.C. R. Licklider both saw the future of computing as an interdependent relationship between people and computational machines. Wiener, founder of cybernetics, framed the information age as a second industrial revolution. The first had replaced the energy of humans and animals with that of steam engines. In […]
Thoughts on Wiener, week 2
After reading Men, Machines, and the World About I had a strange sense of pining. After sitting on that feeling for a few days I think that I’ve identified it as a pining for the world in which complete technology…
We must value leisure.
I propose that unemployment is not a disease, but the natural, healthy functioning of an advanced technological society. – Robert Anton Wilson, the RICH Economy This week’s readings were fascinating in contemplating what the past-futurist’s sense of what we technology could do and also what we should not do. Mankind’s relationship — and work — […]
14 NMS_03 Icarus Falling
14 NMS_03 Icarus Falling ref: Norbert Wiener, “Men, Machines, and the World About” J. C. R. Licklider, “Man-Computer Symbiosis” Regarding the two readings, I found…
Stuck on the Jetsons
I spent the last few days at the very enjoyable EdUI conference in Richmond, focused on the work and tools of higher-ed “web” professionals, where the opening speaker was Matt Novack, author of the Paleo-Future blog that studys the history of futurism. Seems fitting to our seminar reading and discussions. Specifically, he brought up the […]
Where does Humanity Begin?
This is a hackneyed question, but one that bears more investigation: Where do humans end and machines begin? Norbert Wiener engages this question directly, concerning the human control in antiaircraft guns. J.C.R. Licklider, too, confronts this idea, with the very notion of “symbiosis” in computers and humans. But this concern reaches even further, when we […]