I was sitting around with a couple friends at college two years ago, and we got on talking about the old Konami code. Being a little hyper at the time, we wandered around the campus for a while asking random people whether they recognized "Up, up, down, down...". About half of everyone we asked knew immediately what we were talking about. Granted, this was an engineering school, and thus probably not representative of anything at all, but still, 50% of engineering students is a reasonably significant figure. So water down "any male his age" to "maybe half of twentysomething engineers" and you're probably closer to the truth.
Whether video games reflect any kind of significant cultural shift as compared to previous generations is, of course, another question entirely...
it's been a while since i read Pearly Gates, but i seem to remember Wertheim being highly _critical_ of the cyberspace-as-religion viewpoint that Katz describes. she talks about the inbreeding between religion and science in Western history, and goes on to suggest that Kevin Kelly and the other Wired utopian fanatics are just the latest spin on a centuries-old tradition. so, yeah, she discusses Katz's cyber-utopia, but in more of an anthropological "aren't these people funny for thinking this way" manner then as someone actually trying to promote that view.
did anyone else actually read this book? or are we all just trusting Katz's summary?
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I was sitting around with a couple friends at college two years ago, and we got on talking about the old Konami code. Being a little hyper at the time, we wandered around the campus for a while asking random people whether they recognized "Up, up, down, down...". About half of everyone we asked knew immediately what we were talking about. Granted, this was an engineering school, and thus probably not representative of anything at all, but still, 50% of engineering students is a reasonably significant figure. So water down "any male his age" to "maybe half of twentysomething engineers" and you're probably closer to the truth.
Whether video games reflect any kind of significant cultural shift as compared to previous generations is, of course, another question entirely...
it's been a while since i read Pearly Gates, but i seem to remember Wertheim being highly _critical_ of the cyberspace-as-religion viewpoint that Katz describes. she talks about the inbreeding between religion and science in Western history, and goes on to suggest that Kevin Kelly and the other Wired utopian fanatics are just the latest spin on a centuries-old tradition. so, yeah, she discusses Katz's cyber-utopia, but in more of an anthropological "aren't these people funny for thinking this way" manner then as someone actually trying to promote that view.
did anyone else actually read this book? or are we all just trusting Katz's summary?