Hi Miles
First, my email was not about Ted Nelson, Doug Engelbart or what massively
distributed media should be like. It was strictly about architectures that
allow a much wider range of possibilities.
Second, can you see that your argument really doesn't hold? This is because it
even more justifies oral speech rather than any kind of writing -- and for
hundreds of thousands of years rather than a few thousand. The invention of
writing was very recent and unusual. Most of the humans who have lived on the
earth never learned it. Using your logic, humans should have stuck with oral
modes and not bothered to go through all the work to learn to read and write.
There is also more than a tinge of "false Darwin" in your argument.
Evolutionary-like processes don't optimize, they just find fits to the
environment and ecology that exists. The real question here is not "what do
humans want?" (consumerism finds this and supplies it to the general detriment
of society), but "what do humans *need*?" (even if what we need takes a lot of
learning to take on).
>________________________________
> From: Miles Fidelman <[email protected]>
>To: Fundamentals of New Computing <[email protected]>
>Sent: Wednesday, February 13, 2013 4:58 PM
>Subject: Re: [fonc] Design of web, POLs for rules. Fuzz testing nile
>
>Alan Kay wrote:
>>
>> Or you could look at the actual problem "a web" has to solve, which is to
>> present arbitrary information to a user that comes from any of several
>> billion sources. Looked at from this perspective we can see that the current
>> web design could hardly be more wrong headed. For example, what is the
>> probability that we can make an authoring app that has all the features
>> needed by billions of producers?
>
>Hmmm.... let me take an opposing view here, at least for the purpose of
>playing devil's advocate:
>
>1. Paper and ink have served for 1000s of years, and with the addition of the
>printing press and libraries have served to distribute and preserve
>information, from several billion sources, for an awfully long time.
>
>2. If one actually looks at what people use when generating and distributing
>information it tends to be essentially "smarter paper" - word processors,
>spreadsheets, powerpoint slides; and when we look at distribution systems, it
>comes down to email and the electronic equivalent of file rooms and libraries.
>
>Sure, we've added additional media types to the mix, but the basic model
>hasn't changed all that much. Pretty much all the more complicated
>technologies people have come up with don't actually work that well, or get
>used that much. Even in the web world, single direction hyperlinks dominate
>(remember all the complicated, bi-directional links that Ted Nelson came up
>with). And when it comes to "groupware," what dominates seems to be chat and
>twitter.
>
>There's a pretty good argument to be made that what "works" are powerful
>building blocks that can be combined in lots of different ways; driven by some
>degree of natural selection and evolution. (Where the web is concerned, first
>there was ftp, then techinfo, then gopher, and now the web. Simple mashups
>seem to have won out over more complicated service oriented architectures. We
>might well have plateaued.)
>
>Miles Fidelman
>
>-- In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
>In practice, there is. .... Yogi Berra
>
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