Tomasz Rola wrote on 1/5/19 10:44 AM January 5, 2019:
On Fri, Jan 04, 2019 at 12:15:03PM -0800, Heather Madrone wrote:
[...]
I don't know much about the radio generation or the telephone
generation or even the early automobile generation.
Me neither, but when I look at writers fed with radios as children,
they were titans of imagination (MHO).
Of those known widely (for a liberal definition of "widely"),
Stanislaw Lem, Philip Kindred Dick, Ursula Le Guin, Kurt Vonnegut come
to my mind almost immediately. They were not alone - there were a
number of less known writers (as well as more known mainstream
i.e. non-sf writers), whom I am not going to mention here, and there
were a number of non-writers, who likewise had been risen on radio
waves and good quality paper. They have, for one example, put a man on
a Moon, multiple times (but not the same man, mind you) with the help
of a pencil and logarithmic scale (and plenty of screwdrivers). Those
same people banged out ideas which are being recycled nowadays as if
they came in afresh (I cannot serve the canonical list of such ideas,
but from time to time I come upon one or another, and think "yeah,
thirty/sixty years went, how much a world had changed, hohoho").
The great creative minds of our day might not be writing prose. We might
be more likely to see their work in video games, on these little screens
we all carry around. They write code, or they plot out games, or they
design systems for directing our eyeballs to their advertisements.
Of course, there were plenty of idiots in both eras, most of them
forgotten, some left papers, some not. On the other hand, I wonder if
future generations will recognise any such titanic writer-philosopher
figures from this era of cells.
I've read some tremendous books written in the past decade. I read one
last week about a young woman whose OCD takes the form of extreme
anxiety about the health of her microbiota, and whether she had any
identity apart from the microbes that teemed inside her. She's always
getting out her phone to research, for example, how eating or kissing
affects the composition of the microbiome.
(John Green's _Turtles All the Way Down_)
[...]
Young people will lose some of what we had because they have gained
so many things we didn't have. They have their mix of environmental
conditions, and they do the best they possibly can with them.
I am afraid (but) I have to ask: what have they gained? It may look
like they have plenty of things I had not access to, but then they
also seem to be haunted by small daemons and deficiences of their
own.
There is much to mourn in what we lose as technology changes. I
particularly miss the beautiful fresnel lenses in lighthouses and a
number of traditional Japanese arts. We preserve the memory of these
things, and a few examples, but they're no longer going concerns. No one
trods those paths, and their perspective is now lost to us.
People will say, but look, GPS and modern communication prevent more
ship loss than lighthouses, and those Japanese crafts you so love are so
labor-intensive that countless women lived as slaves so that they could
be created. We are better off with the newer methods, and it's only your
romanticized vision that mourns those particular pasts.
My geneticist daughter works for a firm that supplies machines that
genetically categorize disease strains by type. Hospitals with these
machines can precisely identify a disease organism with an in-house test
that takes half an hour. Listening her talk about her work gives me new
hope that seasonal flu might become a thing of the past and that
humanity might be able to get a handle on many of the diseases that have
seemed hopeless.
At her age, I could have done none of the chemistry and biology she does
on a daily basis. The technology didn't exist, nor did most of the
research that supports it.
(She also wishes to inform this list that, although she is not keen on
writing, she has to document everything that she does, so she writes
reams. (My kids won't give me information unless I tell them how I'm
using it, and then they want to stick their 2 cents in.))
So that's one area, biology and medicine, where young people have gained
a great deal that we didn't have. They have also lived in a steady
stream of images from the Hubbell, and know things about space that were
unimaginable 50 years ago. They have access to tools and inventions that
didn't exist before their births.
That little supercomputer that each of them carries in their pockets is
also better at taking photographs and videos than any previous consumer
product, and so they can share details of their existence in more depth
than we had any hope of doing.
So yes, I think they've gained an amazing trove of knowledge and
technology. Whether they use it wisely or not is another matter, but
we're all so very human.
[...]
I am of the pre-graphics computer generation back to the days of
having to spell out the UUCP path. It's text all the way, baby. I
can construct entire universes out of ASCII characters. I don't need
no stinking images, no movies, no audio. The Internet was better
when it was a non-commercial sea of plain text, she says with a
curmudgeonly snort.
That day is gone, the day of Usenet and mailing lists, and it's not
coming back.
Perhaps it is the other kind of thing. There were always very few
people on Usenet and very few email users (i.e. long form writers). It
is just that this other part of humanity finally has got their toys,
too. Looking from this perspective, there was never going to be an
upgrade for them into textual world, because their preferences are so
much different and text is so alien to them.
<curmudgeon mode on>
The Internet went downhill when AOL let ordinary people come online. The
web was a mistake, and there's more evidence of that every single day.
<curmudgeon mode off>
[...]
Not only do I get to look forward to the loss of functionality in my
human body, but I also get to experience it in my virtual life.
I dare to say you had not lived if you had not seen a "word processor
for handwriting":
http://www.styluslabs.com/
(source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17858641 )
They take a two kilobytes of text and blow it up to two megabytes by
replacing each handwritten letter by a multiple lines of Javascript
whose purpose is to render a line on a canvas object. Looks like
Postcript was very decent in comparison.
Thank you.
My life is now complete.
I haven't had such an enjoyable discussion online for some time. Thank
you for engaging in this one.
--
Heather Madrone ([email protected])
http://www.knitfitter.com/category/personal/
The Goddess moves mountains -- bring a shovel.
