S15 Awakening the Digital Imagination
New Media Seminar for Virginia Tech faculty, staff and graduate students
Reading: “Will There Be Condominiums in Data Space?” by Bill Viola. Video 80(5):36-41. 1982. The notion of “data space” has changed drastically with the advancement of technology. I enjoyed Viola’s examples of data space in history as elaborate memory systems, “mnemo-technics.” My example of data space highlights the brain’s amazing ability to adapt to new information. In […]
Originally posted on Sirius Reflections:
Bill Viola‘s “Will There Be Condominiums in Data Space?” is one of the richest and most perplexing readings we engage in the New Media Seminar. As rhetorical questions go, “Will there be Condominiums in Data Space?” is a bit consternating, since the point of view behind it is not immediately…
Originally posted on Sirius Reflections:
We are reading Marshall McLuhan this week for the New Media Seminar, which gives us a nice pivot to thinking about how we prepare for the future and understand the past, especially in times of great change. One of the themes of McLuhan’s Gutenberg Galaxy is that societies on the…
Reading Marshall McLuhan this week has caused me to reflect on the media forms that have had the biggest impact on our world. Though it’s hard to beat the printing press for sheer revolutionary impact, the first thing that popped into mind was social media. Of course, the distractive properties of Twitter and Facebook are well known, and […]
Just a few nuggets inspired by “Personal Dynamic Media”… The essay, of course, is incredibly prescient. Conceiving of the personal computer as a “metamedium whose content would be a wide range of already existing and not-yet-invented media” is a perfect description not only of the current incarnation of the Dynabook, i.e. the laptop, but also … Continue reading Toddlers, Tablets and Black Boxes
This series of short interviews with technological leaders in 2008 is illuminating. Their predictions for the development of technology over the next 10 years echo many of the “far-fetched” predictions by the authors we have read in the New Media Seminar. Big data: The next Google : Nature News.
Reading: “Personal Dynamic Media” by Alan Kay and Adele Goldberg. Computer 10(3):31-41. March 1977. Available as a sample chapter from the New Media Reader. Here, Kay and Goldberg describe the potential of their Dynabook to influence the lives of any person as a creative and educational outlet. I am impressed that they have users from […]
NMR Ch. 26: Personal Dynamic Media Jordan asked us to think about a nugget or app that best represented Kay and Goldberg’s vision of the Dynabook. I’ve worked with the flute / pizza / Theremin metaphor before, and also thought about the dialogic qualities of personal dynamic media and their value in the classroom. So […]
The Turing Test! Getting closer…take the quiz from the New York Times. Did a Human or a Computer Write This? – NYTimes.com.
Many of the people we are reading in the New Media Seminar encourage the ubiquitous nature of technology, envisioning a world where people use technology seamlessly in their everyday lives. In many ways, we have realized this dream. But there may be some costs that even Bush, Englebart, and Nelson couldn’t foresee. Wired recently posted […]
