Introducing the guestblogger
Hi everyone, I'm Aaron Suggs. I'm a recent graduate of U of C with a degree in math and minor in econ. Currently, I maintain the online e-prints repository arXiv while I figure out what I want to study in graduate school. And I'm friends with Kathie.
I am hugely in to new media. An analogy I like to keep in mind while discussing electronic media is the printing press. Written language is a very powerful technology for storing human knowledge. But until Gutenberg invented the printing press in the late 15th century, only royalty and clergymen had access to the technology. The printing press brought written language from the privileged elite to the masses (See Rheingold's book Smart Mobs). Five-hundred years later in the present day, we see the effect of this invention all around us. We are surrounded by written language. The technology is ubiquitous.
Computing technology will have as great an effect on society as written language, and will affect society more quickly.
While written language stores information, computing manipulates information. (By 'computing', I mean not just desktop computers, but cell phones, mp3 players, barcode readers, etc.; which are essentially special-purpose computers.) Since the invention of the graphical user interface for computers in the 1980's, it is no longer necessary to be a computer programmer in order to use a computer. That was the technology that brought computing technology from a trained programmers to the masses.
We are like assistants working on Gutenberg's new printing press. We make a lot of initial mistakes—witness the rise and fall of many popular web sites over the past decade—but we learn quickly from them. We can see that our new media will allow us to do the same things we used to do more cheaply and with a greater audience. But the really awesome part is the totally new stuff we'll be able to do, new ways of communicating, sharing, and learning. Tomorrow's reality that we can hardly imagine today.
I am hugely in to new media. An analogy I like to keep in mind while discussing electronic media is the printing press. Written language is a very powerful technology for storing human knowledge. But until Gutenberg invented the printing press in the late 15th century, only royalty and clergymen had access to the technology. The printing press brought written language from the privileged elite to the masses (See Rheingold's book Smart Mobs). Five-hundred years later in the present day, we see the effect of this invention all around us. We are surrounded by written language. The technology is ubiquitous.
Computing technology will have as great an effect on society as written language, and will affect society more quickly.
While written language stores information, computing manipulates information. (By 'computing', I mean not just desktop computers, but cell phones, mp3 players, barcode readers, etc.; which are essentially special-purpose computers.) Since the invention of the graphical user interface for computers in the 1980's, it is no longer necessary to be a computer programmer in order to use a computer. That was the technology that brought computing technology from a trained programmers to the masses.
We are like assistants working on Gutenberg's new printing press. We make a lot of initial mistakes—witness the rise and fall of many popular web sites over the past decade—but we learn quickly from them. We can see that our new media will allow us to do the same things we used to do more cheaply and with a greater audience. But the really awesome part is the totally new stuff we'll be able to do, new ways of communicating, sharing, and learning. Tomorrow's reality that we can hardly imagine today.
posted by Aaron Suggs at 9:57 PM
1 Comments:
I hope that the increasing power of bloggers can have the effect of holding the mainstream media's feet to the fire, forcing them to do their job. From what I've read so far, I think the power of new media will ultimately be in their effect on traditional media - at least for the foreseeable future.
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