Hi Alan
First, my email was not about Ted Nelson, Doug Engelbart or what massively distributed media should be like. It was strictly about architectures that allow a much wider range of possibilities.
Ahh... but my argument is that the architecture of the current web is SIMPLER than earlier concepts but has proven more powerful (or at least more effective).
Second, can you see that your argument really doesn't hold? This is because it even more justifies oral speech rather than any kind of writing -- and for hundreds of thousands of years rather than a few thousand. The invention of writing was very recent and unusual. Most of the humans who have lived on the earth never learned it. Using your logic, humans should have stuck with oral modes and not bothered to go through all the work to learn to read and write.
Actually, no. Oral communication begat oral communication at a distance - via radio, telephone, VoIP, etc. - all of which have pretty much plateaued in terms of functionality. Written communication is (was) something new and different, and the web is a technological extension of written communication. My hypothesis is that, as long as we're dealing with interfaces that look a lot like paper (i.e., screens), we may have plateaued as to what's effective in augmenting written communication with technology. Simple building blocks that we can mix and match in lots of ways.
Now... if we want to talk about new forms of communication (telepathy?), or new kinds of interfaces (3d immersion, neural interfaces that align with some of the kinds of parallel/visual thinking that we do internally), then we start to need to talk about qualitatively different kinds of technological augmentation.
Of course there is a counter-argument to be made that our kids engage in a new and different form of cognition - by dint of continual immersion in large numbers of parallel information streams. Then again, we seem to be talking lots of short messages (twitter, texting), and there does seem to be a lot of evidence that multi-tasking and information overload are counter-productive (do we really need society-wide ADHD?).
There is also more than a tinge of "false Darwin" in your argument. Evolutionary-like processes don't optimize, they just find fits to the environment and ecology that exists.
Umm.. that sounds a lot like optimizing to me. In any case, there's the question of what are we trying to optimize? That seems to be both an evolutionary question and one of emergent behaviors.
The real question here is not "what do humans want?" (consumerism finds this and supplies it to the general detriment of society), but "what do humans *need*?" (even if what we need takes a lot of learning to take on).
Now that's truly a false argument. "Consumerism," as we tend to view it, is driven by producers, advertising, and creation of false needs.
Cheers, Miles -- In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is. .... Yogi Berra _______________________________________________ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
