S15 Awakening the Digital Imagination
New Media Seminar for Virginia Tech faculty, staff and graduate students
This WIRED article resonated with the New Media Seminar I’m taking at Virginia Tech. Big Data: One Thing to Think About When Buying Your Apple Watch | WIRED. I hadn’t heard of the term ephemeralization coined by Buckminster Fuller before, which is the promise of technology to do “more and more with less and less until eventually […]
This week I stumbled through Ted Nelson’s 1970s imaginary “Computer/Lib,” and was struck by the ongoing tension between ease-of-use and complexification. And as I pondered, I considered: is the Apple Watch, or iWatch, a contender for each category? As a watch, it’s needlessly complex. It’s also needless machine (don’t we all have phones to attend […]
One of my favorite things about Ted Nelson’s 1965 essay “A File Structure for the Complex, the Changing, and the Indeterminate” is that he begins with an honest and demystified assessment of the writing process. His writing process, in turn, becomes the criterion for his file structure design. It got me thinking:
Ahh yes — a Ted Nelson image — that was Ritz Bitz‘ suggested “make” for the week. I’ve posted before about the iconic clenched fist of “Computer Lib. So instead of an image, I went with a poem (inspired by the eulogy noted in an earlier post) — a computer assisted poem, compiled from my […]
Re-watching Ted Nelson’s eulogy for Doug Engelbart last week reminded me of one of the many (many) reasons Nelson’s thinking about computers and society resonate so powerfully with me. Mourning the loss of one of the most pivotal stars of the new media revolution by indicting his colleagues and making them laugh (nervously), invoking the […]
Reading: “Computer Lib / Dream Machines” by Theodor H. Nelson. Self-published, 1974. 2nd ed., Redmond, Washington: Tempus Books/Microsoft Press, 1987. Excerpt from the New Media Reader (available here). Nelson’s passionate and witty perspective of society’s adoption of technology kept hitting me in the face with bold (and sometimes biting) comments about the current directions of technology. Add to […]
I just read some excerpts of Engelbart’s 1962 report, “Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework.” While the piece was interesting, I found it kind of a hard slog at the same time. Maybe it’s because I was distracted by trying to read while hanging out with my friend’s new baby, but I think part of […]
Reading: “Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework” by Douglas Engelbart. Excepted from Summary Report AFOSR-3233 under Contract AF 49(638)-1024, SRI Project 3578 for Air Force Office of Scientific Research. Stanford Research Institute, October 1962. (Full reprint here). In these excerpts, Engelbart attempts to capture the complexity of human problems and his framework for “augmenting human intellect” […]
I’ve posted before about how central Doug Engelbart is to the Awakening of the Digital Imagination. This time I’m going to let an image — or more precisely, a mural — do the talking. Created by Eileen Clegg and Valerie Landau for the fortieth anniversary of the Mother of All Demos, this graphic representation of […]
I had forgotten what a clear, concise, and talented writer Turning was. His prose bursts with energy, even when his is deep in the weeds of logical arguments against theology. Turing’s concept of science was broad enough to include the speculative imagination, and his statement about the need for conjecture as a motor of scientific discovery … Continue reading A Few Brief Thoughts on Turing’s Computing Machinery and Intelligence
