![]() | d2r diego's weblog |
Now blogging at diego's weblog. See you over there! gibson on media and technologyIf you have a few minutes check out this incredibly good speech by William Gibson to the Directors Guild of America. Quote: What we call “media” were originally called “mass media”. technologies allowing the replication of passive experience. As a novelist, I work in the oldest mass medium, the printed word. The book has been largely unchanged for centuries. Working in language expressed as a system of marks on a surface, I can induce extremely complex experiences, but only in an audience elaborately educated to experience this. This platform still possesses certain inherent advantages. I can, for instance, render interiority of character with an ease and specificity denied to a screenwriter. But my audience must be literate, must know what prose fiction is and understand how one accesses it. This requires a complexly cultural education, and a certain socio-economic basis. Not everyone is afforded the luxury of such an education.He makes a point near the end that I (surprinsingly) disagree with: I imagine that one of the things our great-grandchildren will find quaintest about us is how we had all these different, function-specific devices. Their fridges will remind them of appointments and the trunks of their cars will, if need be, keep the groceries from thawing. The environment itself will be smart, rather than various function-specific nodes scattered through it. Genuinely ubiquitous computing spreads like warm Vaseline. Genuinely evolved interfaces are transparent, so transparent as to be invisible.I don't think we are entering into an era of less function-specific devices. Rather, we are entering an era of even more "specificity", but with greater interoperability. What is on the fridge's door that reminds you of an appointment doesn't come built in with the fridge, it's a PDA-fridge-magnet (let's ignore the problems of magnetic fields on electronics for a minute). And you can take it off and carry it around. Or put it in the car, and it always stays sync-ed with your main data store, which is a black box hidden somewhere, subwoofer-style. Function-specific, transparent, pervasive, energy-efficient, data-aware, people-aware, context-aware, portable (if possible), fully interoperable. That's, IMO, where things are going. Categories: technologyPosted by diego on May 27 2003 at 1:01 PM Copyright © Diego Doval 2002-2011.
|