This Time It's Different
Confounding Machines: How the Future Looked - New York Times
The author misses the point.
The Internet can ( or will ) encompass all of the features of radio, film and broadcast television (along with print, library resources, news gathering and dissemination and telephony).
Now, with such tools as blogs, information becomes decentralized.
"In the August issue of Wired, for example, Kevin Kelly celebrates the 10th anniversary of the initial public offering of Netscape stock, which he takes as marking the start of the Internet revolution. The Internet, in Mr. Kelly's evangelical eyes, is alive, overwhelming, sublime and, finally, magical. It has created, he writes, 'a new type of thinking - part human and part machine - found nowhere else on the planet or in history.'
Three thousand years hence, he concludes, historians will say: 'The Machine provided ... a new mind for an old species. It was the Beginning.'
One way to look at such a claim - a common one among Internet enthusiasts - is through the writer Arthur C. Clarke's Third Law, from his 1962 book 'Profiles of the Future: An Inquiry Into the Limits of the Possible.' It states: 'Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.' And in fact, Mr. Kelly's reaction has been preceded, over the past 100 years or so, by similar reactions to the introduction of motion pictures, radio and television. Each in turn so astonished those who encountered it that magic - black or white - seemed the only explanation.
"
The author misses the point.
The Internet can ( or will ) encompass all of the features of radio, film and broadcast television (along with print, library resources, news gathering and dissemination and telephony).
Now, with such tools as blogs, information becomes decentralized.
"In the August issue of Wired, for example, Kevin Kelly celebrates the 10th anniversary of the initial public offering of Netscape stock, which he takes as marking the start of the Internet revolution. The Internet, in Mr. Kelly's evangelical eyes, is alive, overwhelming, sublime and, finally, magical. It has created, he writes, 'a new type of thinking - part human and part machine - found nowhere else on the planet or in history.'
Three thousand years hence, he concludes, historians will say: 'The Machine provided ... a new mind for an old species. It was the Beginning.'
One way to look at such a claim - a common one among Internet enthusiasts - is through the writer Arthur C. Clarke's Third Law, from his 1962 book 'Profiles of the Future: An Inquiry Into the Limits of the Possible.' It states: 'Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.' And in fact, Mr. Kelly's reaction has been preceded, over the past 100 years or so, by similar reactions to the introduction of motion pictures, radio and television. Each in turn so astonished those who encountered it that magic - black or white - seemed the only explanation.
"
posted by JTH at 7:54 AM
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