[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
>
> My immediate response is what have we all lost in the name of progress?
[snip]
I tend to be suspicious that the past was better than the present,
except for the very fortunate few. A person who lived to be 80 years
old in "the old days" might have endured chronic disease much of
that time, and the lucky ones often had their faces turned
into mini-lunar landscapes by smallpox, etc. I think
Brueghel's peasants were accurate likenesses....
My point was to echo Joseph Weizenbaum's observation that, if
by a "revolution" we mean substantive changes in the social relations of
life, there has been no computer revolution, and that the computer,
by doing clerical tasks faster than human clerks could, "saved"
the existing social structure -- esp. large bureaucracies -- from
having to change (breakthru or breakdown...), and therefore that the
computer has been one of the most powerful forces for social reaction
in the 20th (now 21st...) century. Kafka's K. would probably not
have felt too out of place if one day he came to work and his
workplace had been converted during the nite into a
modern computerized office.
Instead of a "computer revolution", maybe we sould speak
of: "computer churning" (motion but not progress).
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
[snip]
> > The Mondrian landscape that marks our offices and office buildings all
> > reflect the stunning insight of building spaces on the sole criterion of
> > price per square foot. Before price per square foot and bottom line
> > thinking came to dominate, we created public and some private structures
> > with high ceilings, some ornamental work, columns, a sense of space and
> > aesthetics.
[snip]
Poor Mondrian! His linear abstractions expressed a personal
mystical vision. Alas that the abstraction was easier to
copy than the vision was to appreciate! I prefer to
quote Bruno Latour perhaps against himself: We have never yet
really been modern.
http://www.users.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/husserl_philcris.htm
I believe Adolf Loos's 1907 manifesto "Ornament and Crime"
(i.e., ornament *is* crime) is still vital for us, and perhaps
more in front of us than behind us.
Postmodernism's
"decorated sheds" are precisely that: sheds with decoration on their
facades, which in no way elevate the lives of the persons who
inhabit them. Louis Kahn was an architect for our time, with
such ideas as that the essence of a city is to be a place where persons
can pursue interests beyond the parochial constraints of stolid
reproduction of individual and species life:
The essence of a city,
according to Kahn, was to be a place where a small child, as he or she
wanders thru it looking at the work of various master craftspersons,
can discover something he or she *wants* to do their whole life.
This is not a matter of decoration or lack thereof, but of essence:
constructing places that nurture creative human association as
their thematic objective.
But new computer "architectures" have not done much if anything to
further this kind of modern design....
> > ----- Original Message -----
> > From: "Ed Weick" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> > To: "Brad McCormick, Ed.D." <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>;
> > <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> > Sent: Sunday, April 22, 2001 6:40 PM
> > Subject: Re: Less is less (Photos of The Computer Revolution)
> >
> >
> > > Brad,
> > >
> > > What can one conclude from this except that the soul is not necessary to
> > > modern work, or perhaps it is? Your new surroundings would, like a
> > Trappist
> > > monestary, seem more supportive to meditation, your old ones to
> > creativity.
> > > Creativity may be out; meditation in. Have courage.
[snip]
Trappists have good bread and good beer and even Chartreuse.
I am genuinely pleased that my workplace has *bottled water*,
but that is by no means a substitute for "Brot und Wein".
My workplace's "meditation", like that of all hi-tech workplaces,
is trying to decipher maddeningly inscrutable "bugs" in
some of the most abstract creations of the human spirit --
as if Aristotle's empyrean was laughing malignly in our faces.
What Weizenbaum described as "incomprehensible comuter programs"
have replaced "Hic est corpus" etc. as a more literal kind of
deus ex machina, and even atheists are not immune from
acts of this new kind of G-d, even if this new G-d is no
less a "projection" of human symbolic processes than ws the
old one....
> > > ----- Original Message -----
> > > From: "Brad McCormick, Ed.D." <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> > > To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> > > Sent: Sunday, April 22, 2001 3:33 PM
> > > Subject: Less is less (Photos of The Computer Revolution)
[snip]
> > > > http://www.users.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/jpg/Office2000.jpg
[snip]
> > > > The worker's lifeworld is a co-product of all work.
[snip]
A picture and a thousand words can be worth more than
their simple sum....
"Yours from the computer world...."
+\brad mccormick
--
Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21)
[ I am looking for a Waltham Premier Maximus pocket watch in
excellent condition. Any "leads" much appreciated. Thank you. ]
<![%THINK;[SGML+APL]]> Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED]
914.238.0788 / 27 Poillon Rd, Chappaqua NY 10514-3403 USA
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