.... when the world's concept of good culture was bad dance songs and and recycled art work.
Yeah, I think that's why it attracted me and my buddies. When we drove to Seattle the day after high-school graduation in 1977 to see it on the wide-screen we weren't looking to learn about the meaning of life, just to see a cool movie.
I think a lot of "historical re-visionism" in Hollywood is no different from how lots of cultural artifacts (painting, literature, drama) have, through the ages, been propped-up after the fact to support somebody's agenda.
Re:Medium of Communication
on
Heart of the Net
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Well actually, isn't it a medium of *information* as well as communication? In my tiny corner of the beast...oops, I mean "corner of the net"... I run a web library and our ability to assemble information resources "on demand" to create a unique body of knowledge is at least as important as our ability to communicate those resources to our web audience.
I think this an important distinction compared to the phone system and so on.
"The web is a medium for people to do what they otherwise would have done anyway through other means."
That's true. But it's only really useful in the context that almost every powerful new technology goes through the same trajectory. The first thing people do with powerful new technology is to do the same things they have already been doing only now it's faster and cheaper.
Slowly but surely the power of this new tech will result in news ways of doing things that, hundreds of years from now, will make our lives right now seem like quaint history.
I'm not predicting the future, I'm trying to apply the lessons of history to the "now". The rise of the printed book followed this path; so did the development of the printed alphabet. A more recent (and less overarching) historical example is the telephone.
I think we happen to be living at a time when we're being handed phenomenal new technology that not even the tech's designers (*especially* not the tech designers) really understand how this stuff will ultimately be used. So, if the web hasn't reached its potential (and perhaps that's something we can all agree with) then all us info architects, cybrarians, web-app developers and so on should be putting our heads down and trying to figure out how to make better use of what we've got in front of us!
Slashdot Mirror
.... when the world's concept of good culture was bad dance songs and and recycled art work.
Yeah, I think that's why it attracted me and my buddies. When we drove to Seattle the day after high-school graduation in 1977 to see it on the wide-screen we weren't looking to learn about the meaning of life, just to see a cool movie.
I think a lot of "historical re-visionism" in Hollywood is no different from how lots of cultural artifacts (painting, literature, drama) have, through the ages, been propped-up after the fact to support somebody's agenda.
Well actually, isn't it a medium of *information* as well as communication? In my tiny corner of the beast...oops, I mean "corner of the net"... I run a web library and our ability to assemble information resources "on demand" to create a unique body of knowledge is at least as important as our ability to communicate those resources to our web audience.
I think this an important distinction compared to the phone system and so on.
"The web is a medium for people to do what they otherwise would have done anyway through other means."
That's true. But it's only really useful in the context that almost every powerful new technology goes through the same trajectory. The first thing people do with powerful new technology is to do the same things they have already been doing only now it's faster and cheaper.
Slowly but surely the power of this new tech will result in news ways of doing things that, hundreds of years from now, will make our lives right now seem like quaint history.
I'm not predicting the future, I'm trying to apply the lessons of history to the "now". The rise of the printed book followed this path; so did the development of the printed alphabet. A more recent (and less overarching) historical example is the telephone.
I think we happen to be living at a time when we're being handed phenomenal new technology that not even the tech's designers (*especially* not the tech designers) really understand how this stuff will ultimately be used. So, if the web hasn't reached its potential (and perhaps that's something we can all agree with) then all us info architects, cybrarians, web-app developers and so on should be putting our heads down and trying to figure out how to make better use of what we've got in front of us!