McLuhan quotes Joyce’s words “My consumers are they not my producers?” — a line that brought me right back to our discussion of the Dynabook vision from last week. Allowing users to produce rather than just consume has become a foundational principle of much of the technology we use today. I thought McLuhan’s comparison between … Continue reading »
We are reading Marshall McLuhan this week for the New Media Seminar, which gives us a nice pivot to thinking about how we prepare for the future and understand the past, especially in times of great change. One of the themes of McLuhan’s Gutenberg Galaxy is that societies on the verge of massive changes are […]
The Medium is the Message by Marshall McLuhan. I wanted to say, in response to this reading: “I have no words”. I will admit I was a little lost when I started the reading. Though I realized it was a paradox, I still couldn’t get the meaning that was sitting right in front of my…
I wanted to offer a couple of observations on the discussion topic for this week’s New Media Seminar, Personal Dynamic Media by Alan Kay and Adele Goldberg. The most striking thing about these early discussions of computer technology, in this case about personal computers and applications, is how prophetic they have proved to be. In(…)
Personal Dynamic Media by Alan Kay and Adele Goldberg, 1977 On one level, the reading left me thinking: these authors are truly smart, imaginative. Even though many of the things they are describing are actually functioning now in computer systems, I enjoyed reading their almost laborious descriptions of the functions. From the mundane editing and…
Part of the first sentence of “Personal Dynamic Media” provoked thoughts about the ways that images, both digital and non-digital, can represent quantifiable human behaviors. The relevant phrase is that the Xerox group is interested in “all aspects of the communication and manipulation of knowledge.” The two images posted below are two very different […]
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It is strange how most of the articles we are reading are about the non-computational part of the computer. The focus is still on the non-human part of the computer but more on the non-physical part and on the ability of computer to so something humans can’t do on their own or with other tools. […]
Ted Nelson, like the other authors we’ve read in this seminar, offers a vision of computers that seems to have three elements that exist in some tension with each other: the great potential to expand capacities for intelligence and creativity, the danger of routinizing behavior in ways that become dehumanizing, and the advantages of performing […]
