I Sing the Consumer Electric
I love all this talk about how Amazon’s Kindle will remake the way in which we consume written media. I’ve always been a big proponent of trying to minimize the physical aspects of culture (that is to say, the devices/space/access/cost needed) while maximizing its consumption. Cleaning out my RSS reader in between issues of the old Watchmen comics that Gestalt dropped off, I caught the Penny Arcade from a couple days ago and just couldn’t resist. What can I say, we’ve been on a bit of a comics bent lately.
The comic’s funny as hell, and the underlying point is solid. Popular technoculture sort of implicitly assumes that complex systems are naturally superior to simple ones (and this is more market driven than any intentional design principle; modulated scarcity and control of distribution being the big thing.). Many of the brightest people I know greatly value simplicity (be it code, cuisine, what have you), but our simplicities are conflicting, which makes the larger system ever more complex. We’re at that awkward phase where things like access standards and personal electronics haven’t become truly ubiquitous enough that they’ve rounded the corner and begun getting simple again. We’re still faced with multitudes of access options to have to sort through and choose from (what? You’re still on AIM?), the net itself has only begun to reach into the realm of semantically tagging information; we remain very much isolated islands despite the vast sea of data and facebook friends we’ve grown around ourselves. Nevertheless, I foresee a time when these social and technical systems will reach their maturity and allow us to interact with each other and our environment in massively directed and scalable ways.
Till then I’m gonna go grab a book.
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Good point! I’m glad you’re liking the comics. It’s funny whenever I think about tech based social networking , I instantly think of it as the next evolution in social commodities. There is a certain meta-irony when the possessions that helped alienate us from society are now try to find new way to communicate with other peoples possessions. In other words, if material object could be conscious, do you think they would be starting there own social revolution or at least be developing some sort of repressed neurosis based on a need to socially conform. Spontaneous computer virus anyone?
It’s sort of the nascent developement out true out-brain processing; applying a layer of metadata that in itself can function and process based on it’s own internal integrity, and in which the original data set only acts as a feed idependant of the operation itself. If not self-aware, then at least independantly operational. Think: facebook starts picking your friends for you based on your interests.
It already does!!