By Peter Lunenfeld
The pc, writes Peter Lunenfeld, is the twenty-first century's tradition desktop. it's a dream gadget, serving because the mode of creation, the technique of distribution, and the location of reception. We haven't really completed the flying autos and robotic butlers of futurist fantasies, yet we do have a desktop which may functionality as a typewriter and a printing press, a paintbrush and a gallery, a piano and a radio, the mail in addition to the mail carier. yet, warns Lunenfeld, we should always mood our social gathering with warning; we're engaged in a mystery conflict among downloading and uploading--between passive intake and lively creation--and the end result will form our collective futures.In the key warfare among Downloading and importing, Lunenfeld makes his case for utilizing electronic applied sciences to shift us from a intake to a creation version. He describes tv because the "the excessive fructose corn syrup of the imagination" and concerns that it will possibly reason "cultural diabetes"; prescribes conscious downloading, significant importing, and "info-triage" as remedies; and gives advice for crafting "bespoke futures" in what he phrases the period of "Web n.0" (interconnectivity to the nth power). He additionally deals a stand-alone family tree of electronic visionaries, distilling a historical past of the tradition computing device that runs from the Patriarchs (Vannevar Bush's WWII new release) to the Hustlers (Bill Gates and Steve Jobs) to the Searchers (Larry web page and Sergey Brin of Google fame). After part a century of television-conditioned consumption/downloading, Lunenfeld tells us, we now locate ourselves with an unlimited new infrastructure for importing. We easily have to locate the need to make the easiest of it.
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Extra info for The Secret War Between Downloading and Uploading: Tales of the Computer as Culture Machine
Example text
18 This impels us to create a hierarchy of meaning, judging some things to be more “meaningful” than others, and sometimes going so far as to label them “meaningless” (though we know full well the impossibility of any thing in culture lacking meaning). Meaningful uploading is both a counterpoint to and an ally of mindful downloading. As noted, any definition of what is meaningful runs the risk of tumbling down a rabbit hole of philosophical debate. Yet I am willing to stake a claim on the idea of the cumulative as one place to start.
We cannot idly jump from link to link forever, pursuing everything even vaguely of interest because, sadly, we do not have eternity. The infoverse may be infinite, but our allotment of 20 STICK Y days is not. Acknowledging the disparity between that which demands our attention and the limited time window we have on this earth demands that we deploy mindfulness. Whether we look to psychology or Zen philosophy for inspiration, mindfulness insists that we actively choose as well as commit to the situations and experiences we download.
One way to increase stickiness is to use the culture machine to add a quality of unfinish to its production. What an author produces is open to revision, and those who used to be readers, listeners, or viewers can become users, through appropriations, remixes, and creative reuse. The idea that everything is essentially an iteration can be terrifying because it encourages an endless tweaking, rather than a commitment to the discrete project with a beginning and an ending. Software 35 CHAPTER 2 developers occasionally refer to this as being in a state of perpetual beta, meaning that the code will never be released in “final” form, and is subject to a continuous process of review and reform.
