Slashdot Mirror
Developer's View: Real Life Inspirations Or Abstract Ideas?
StormDriver writes "According to writer Marc Prensky, most of us come from a generation of digital immigrants. It basically means the modern web developed during our lifetime, it is a place we migrated to, discovering its potential. But people aged 20 and younger are not like that at all. They are digital natives, they've spent their whole lives here. 'Hey, let's do a digital version of our college facebook' is a digital immigrant's idea, just like 'Hey, let's make something like a classifieds section of a newspaper, only this one will be online.' Or 'Hey, let's make an online auction housel.' 'Hey, let's make a place for online video rentals.' The thing is, recreating items, ideas and interactions from the physical realm on the Web already ran its course." To me, this sounds like the gripe that "Everything that can be invented, has been invented." There are a lot of real-life services and experiences that have yet to be replicated, matched, or improved upon in the online realm; I wouldn't want people to stop taking inspiration from "old fashioned" goods as starting points for digital products.
"Hey, lets make another Facebook, only more betterer!"
I'm 28 and haven't seen any sign that my fellow Millennials are any fundamentally better with computers than Generation X or the Boomers. In fact, I've found that my grandmother who is 82 and doesn't even have a computer has more common sense about how she would use one if she bothered to buy one. For example, when I told her of all of the people I knew who got viruses by not updating their OS when automatic updates have been available for at least 10 years, if not about 12-14 (Windows ME?) or by clicking on every link and file attachment they're sent, she asked how stupid could those kids be to be that lazy and trusting. You can make excuses for them like phishing, but the fact is that more often than not, it's just laziness or unwillingness to learn to do any better.
The inventors are a handful of people at any time. The rest are consumers.
Once, if you had a computer you had to know its ins and outs. Same as people who once drove cars or flew planes. Nowadays cars just work and people barely know where to put the fuel in, cue people putting in the wrong fuel. No owner of a Spyker would ever have done that, they KNEW their car and its needs.
There will be new inventions made by old and young people but what they all have in common is that they don't just consume whatever tech is available in their time but think about and think about what is lacking or missing. The man who made lighthouses saw how his wife was cooking and made a better stove. Simple as that. Could easily have been her son as well. Or a grandpa watching his granddaughter. Inspiration comes from looking at the world and not just assume but to question. And no, kids are NOT better at it. If they were, they would be far harder to teach.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I'm working on creating a digital mouse trap.
You're just trying to bait us into making a cheesy reply.
What one fool can do, another can. (Ancient Simian Proverb)
When the electric guitar was first invented, it was played just like an accoustic guitar but with amplification. Later, artists like Jimmy Hendrix came along and played it like it was a fundamentally different instrument. I think that a similar cycle is likely going on with the web, as the original article says. Like the electric guitar, the web has ways of "playing it" that are fundamentally different from the non-web counterparts. The best innovations have come and will come not from porting non-web faculties, but inventing new ones that could not exist without this medium.
Since the 1970's every generation has independently invented disco and think they have something new. Donna Summer, Techno, Lady Gaga, etc. But eventually they get over it.
Personally, I'm looking forward to the next real game changers. Some that might qualify would be real AI and robots, ultracaps capable of replacing batteries, political landscape shifts such as the adoption of the idea that the communications infrastructure is as important as, and for the same reasons, as the transport infrastructure with associated rights of passage and removal from commercial interests, just as private toll roads are almost unknown today, a space elevator or other means of inexpensive space travel, a confluence of insulation, local power generation, and storage to free the "average" home and vehicle from the power grid and oil interests, real 3d display technology... web innovations are rarely, at least recently, of a great deal of interest to me. Maybe it's just me, though.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Anybody who uses the phrase "digital natives" without a heavy dose of irony can usually be safely ignored.
Are there cases where dragging physical metaphors into computing is brutally-old-and-busted? Sure; but making MP3 players with UIs consisting of elaborate(but non-resizeable) bitmaps renditions of 1970s stereo gear was a moronic idea back in the 90s, just as it is now. Outside of agonizing over-literal nonsense like that, 'real life inspirations' seem to take two forms, neither obviously outmoded:
1. Remnants in name only: Your email client likely still has an 'inbox' and an 'outbox' because, at some point, somebody actually had two boxes on their desk. Guess what, it doesn't matter. The computerized abstractions have gained so many features(instant search, threading, sort-by-whatever-you-want, etc, etc.) that they bear almost no relation to their physical counterpart. They have to be called something, so the legacy name is harmless enough.
2. Borrowings that make sense because people want them: Y'know why stuff exists in 'real life'? Because people wanted them it. If they wanted the dead-tree version, they will probably want an electronic one, as well. Once that gets built, it will eventually be polished(having features added and archaisms removed) until it moves into category #1.)
This argument also seems to implicitly overstate the number of things that are somehow fundamentally digital. There are a lot of (mostly failed) ideas involving the dissemination of information in surprisingly modern ways within the constraints of antique media. Making variants of these ideas actually not fail this time will be a change; but it won't be one fundamentally tied to the internet(in anything other than an economic sense).
I'm working on creating a digital mouse trap.
Easy, just put a slippery glass mirror in its way. Whether it has a ball or an optical sensor, the pointer won't move an inch.
Ezekiel 23:20
From the article: "It’s time to embrace digital natives and give them something cool, that doesn’t try to imitate existing concepts." Maybe. There's still a huge, wealthy immigrant population that has lots more dough than the natives. Before I set about catering to either group, I need a business model. "Something cool" may be part of it - I won't ignore native sensibilities about "coolness." Something saleable will be a larger part, whether conceptually imitative or not.
"Dammit, all these charts a tables need to be on a computer!" -- me in 1976 playing D&D.
I would argue that the "immigrants" have a more pressing desire to innovate because they felt the crushing limitations of the non-virtual world first hand.
I'm sorry, but the college kids that I've been around don't strike me as being particularly internet savvy at all. For all this hype about "They were born on the internet, they were raised at its tit, etc." they actually strike me as being no more tech savvy than any other generation. Sure, they all have Facebook profiles and play a lot of those Farmville-type games, but they still have to call someone to set up a router. They still have to ask me how to do a complex google search. They still seem to know fuck-all about internet security. My brother-in-law had to call me in to fix his laptop after my Generation-Y super-internet-savvy niece infected it with about every phishing virus known to man. The young programming students I've dealt with seem no more or less comfortable with programming than any other young programmers from other generations (and I go back a while).
So where exactly are all these Generation Y ubermensches I keep hearing about? Because I sure haven't met many of them. There are geeks in that generation like any other, but, as with all generations before them, most of them seem pretty clueless about tech.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
One important thing to note is that the laws of the physical world are pretty much ingrained in us. Not only in us, even in animals and their reactions to things. Things from the physical realm *have* to obey these laws (or they wouldn't work) and just imitating them can help here. *Understanding* why they work is better, though.
One reason the iPhone took off as it did despite its touchscreen was the fact that the scrolling was modelled closely on the behaviour of "real" things: There is friction and inertia, you can "throw" a page, everything works in a reliable, predictable way because it's the same way every physical thing behaves. There is no abstraction here at all, it even painfully emulates things that have no real meaning in the digital world. They have meaning for us and our animal minds and bodies, though. We are a product of millions of years of evolution in the physical world and while there is freedom in breaking out of this there's also much to work with in this.
There's no such thing as one optimal point of view when it comes to understanding the universe or creating artifacts or inquiring into the human condition, just to cite a few examples.
Each generation has its peculiar fashions and prejudices. Each generation is imaginative. New generations tend to bring a refreshing skepticism of preexisting paradigms - and this is good, or anyway better than complacency - but there's no guarantee that what they come up with will be any better than what came before. Less experience is not intrinsically an advantage over more experience; it stands to reason that more often the converse is true.
One certainty is that, as the volume of human knowledge grows, its surface area increases also. It's at this surface that genuinely new discoveries and new ideas can take place. Unless it turns out that we're living in a bounded space, it's not the case that we're in any danger of running out of new material. And new generations do tend to be especially comfortable at this surface, because their life experience is all about new discoveries and new ideas - at least, discoveries and ideas which are new to them.
It doesn't follow that all new discoveries and new ideas are revolutionary, or even necessarily very interesting. Most aren't, in my experience. Most are either prosaically obvious or shallowly misguided. I'm old enough to have seen a dozen generations of computer hardware come and go. Certainly there's been much incremental evolution along the way, but of all the hundreds of shiny new technologies that were supposed to be revolutionary, only a handful have actually stood the test of time. I'm happy to see anyone, young or old, propose a new one. But please, let's dispense with the hubris.
Parity: What to do when the weekend comes.
I agree that "digital native" and other terms are contrived and fluid. Rather than argue the definition of terms invented by marketing droids, let's ask the better question of what the next step from the Information Age is.
Ideas precede action, so in that sense there is no limit to the evolution of how we organize and present information. But no matter how ornate our ideas, the physical world is. Ideas influence the material world, to be sure, but put a bullet in your head and no idea in the world will save you.
So it's worth asking if the skills we have gained organizing and processing information on the level of ideas will help us master the physical world better. Can we make our homes, goods, and surroundings reflect the order we have imposed on abstractions housed within 1's and 0's?
I believe they can, and the blood/brain barrier, as it were, is being breached on at least two fronts: 3D printing/additive manufacturing, and bioengineering. If we can materialize CAD drawings and DNA sequences directly, our physical world may come to echo virtual reality more quickly than any of us can now possibly imagine.
The digital natives [sic] will likely look at the physical world and wonder why it does not reflect the virtual one, rather than the digital immigrants [sic] who look at the virtual world and wonder why it does not reflect the physical one. They will probably expand upon the Internet of Things, 3D printing, bioengineering, and do it at the pace they've become used to on the Internet rather than in the pre-Internet material world. Their frustrations, and therefore their actions, will be driven by the physical world's inability to live up to the expectations acquired in their virtual worlds.
For better or worse, I expect that we are sliding down the event horizon of permanent dis-equilibrium until we reach the singularity.
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
Whatever you do, do not believe these two reasons. Never use then as a justification to not do something.
1. If it was worth doing, someone else would have already done it. (No market)
2. Someone else is already doing it, so there is no point in you doing it too. (No profit, too much competition)
Commerce happens because of value and value alone. No one has done it just like you, or will do it just like you. Facebook wasn't first but their way won. Apple didn't invent computers or phones but they went on to make the best, and incredible profits even while charging a premium.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.