Since the beginning of the computer age, the informational gurus have assured us that the technology under development was going to be a "good thing". The new means of informational exchange would allow us to 1) work more efficiency, 2) be more productive, 3) stay in better touch with our friends and family, 4) allow us to meet new friends…. As the King of Siam would have said "Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera…"
I've always been unsure myself that this would be the case. I've never found myself bonding strongly with people over the internet, but I was never sure it that was just because there is something "different" about me.
Recently, I started reading "The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at MIT" by Stewart Brand. This book was published in 1987 (22 years ago!) and it is truly amazing how revolutionary Nicholas Negroponte was. I'm only a couple chapters into the book and I'm finding all these technologies that he was pushing back then. For example, computer secretary programs, movies on DVDs, interactive movies in which the viewer controls the action, customized news feeds, just to name a few, interactive "books" with digital images and videos implanted in the text, flat-panel displays with touch screen capabilities, just to name a few. When I say he was pushing them, I don't mean to say that he was talking about them, I really should be saying that his crew of researchers at the Media Lab were already demo-ing these technologies.
Just before I read this book, I read another one called "Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age" by Michael A. Hiltzik. It was at PARC that the following technology was developed: the laser printer, the computer desktop GUI used in nearly all personal computers, bitmap graphics, 3d color graphics, (what became) Postscript, the Ethernet protocol that connects all of us to the internet, the first laptop computer, the concept of the paperless office, object-oriented programming, the first WYSIWYG text editor. This was all happening between about 1973 and 1979. Steve Jobs stole the GUI from Xerox for the first Apple Macintosh computer, and it was subsequently stolen by Bill Gates for the first version of Microsoft Windows. The only one of these technologies that Xerox really profited from was the laser printer, which is not small thing, however, many business historians view Xerox as really "screwing the pooch" with the rest of these technological breakthroughs.
So here we are, 20-30 years down the line, all of these wondrous technologies have finally broken into the mainstream of computer usage. People now have all of these computational/informational tools that are supposed to make them (us) happier, healthier, saner, more productive, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera… Are they? I still don't know.
Tony has posited that they have made us more narcissistic. Facebook, myspace, and twitter are all filled with people screaming "Look at me! Look at me!" You're not cool unless you have one bazillion friends on Facebook. A prime example of this is Tila Nguyen, or Tila Tequila as she is now known. She is a former Playboy Cyber Girl, and one of the hot chicks that stand around posing with racing cars. She now has 3,700,000 friends on Myspace, and is the host of a couple of risque (or formerly risque) reality television shows.
OK, some questions to address:
- What good is this technology?
- Are there technologies that aren't strictly feeding our narcissism? What are they?
- How did these narcissistic modes of communication come about?
- Tony, Bob, what else can you think of? Just working notes here…
Links to other content pages on the site:
- Tony's initial comments - whole-world-is-a-stage
- Why I saw Cirque du Soleil - cirque-du-soleil
