My suggestion is to learn a little about biology and anthropology and media as
it intertwines with human thought, then check back in.
>________________________________
> From: Miles Fidelman <[email protected]>
>To: Fundamentals of New Computing <[email protected]>
>Sent: Wednesday, February 13, 2013 5:56 PM
>Subject: Re: [fonc] Design of web, POLs for rules. Fuzz testing nile
>
>Hi Alan
>>
>> 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.
>
>Ahh... but my argument is that the architecture of the current web is SIMPLER
>than earlier concepts but has proven more powerful (or at least more
>effective).
>
>>
>> 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.
>
>Actually, no. Oral communication begat oral communication at a distance - via
>radio, telephone, VoIP, etc. - all of which have pretty much plateaued in
>terms of functionality. Written communication is (was) something new and
>different, and the web is a technological extension of written communication.
>My hypothesis is that, as long as we're dealing with interfaces that look a
>lot like paper (i.e., screens), we may have plateaued as to what's effective
>in augmenting written communication with technology. Simple building blocks
>that we can mix and match in lots of ways.
>
>Now... if we want to talk about new forms of communication (telepathy?), or
>new kinds of interfaces (3d immersion, neural interfaces that align with some
>of the kinds of parallel/visual thinking that we do internally), then we start
>to need to talk about qualitatively different kinds of technological
>augmentation.
>
>Of course there is a counter-argument to be made that our kids engage in a new
>and different form of cognition - by dint of continual immersion in large
>numbers of parallel information streams. Then again, we seem to be talking
>lots of short messages (twitter, texting), and there does seem to be a lot of
>evidence that multi-tasking and information overload are counter-productive
>(do we really need society-wide ADHD?).
>
>>
>> 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.
>
>Umm.. that sounds a lot like optimizing to me. In any case, there's the
>question of what are we trying to optimize? That seems to be both an
>evolutionary question and one of emergent behaviors.
>> 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).
>
>Now that's truly a false argument. "Consumerism," as we tend to view it, is
>driven by producers, advertising, and creation of false needs.
>
>
>Cheers,
>
>Miles
>
>-- In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
>In practice, there is. .... Yogi Berra
>
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