What we're doing here is wrestling with understanding an evolutionary process that we're completely entwined in ourselves --it's difficult to find any vantage point from which to view the field of battle 'objectively', and there's so much going on that it's hard to decide to whom it makes sense to listen.
I realize that my own approach to exploring new territory is primarily linguistic: I'm fond of following up on the multifarious appearances and shifting meanings of words, and this time I began with the territory around cyber-, since that seems to be a widely-appropriated rubric for the phenomenon we're attempting to comprehend.
We're faced with an extraordinarily broad spectrum of kinds of literature, including scientific, hortatory, reportorial, speculative, fictional, muckraking, Luddite... to name but a few.
Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts...A graphical representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the non-space of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding... (from Neuromancer)
15 Feb
A search for 'jacking in' brought these disparate items:
16 Feb
Quick trolls of Annie for cyberspace and cybern*, and some early 'cyberspace' occurrences
from Lexis/Nexis.
And n.b. that QA76.9 .C66 has a whole lot of "what is this???" books about computer evolution
Much of this thread was occasioned by some reading in
AUTHOR Noble, David F. (David Franklin), 1935-
TITLE Forces of production : a social history of industrial
automation / David F. Noble.
PUBLISHER New York : Knopf, 1984.
SUBJECT Machine-tools -- Numerical control -- Social aspects -- United
States.
Automation -- Social aspects -- United States.
Technology -- Social aspects -- United States.
Science Library TJ1189 .N63 1984
about the early development of computer-controlled manufacturing,
specifically the machining of helicopter rotor blades (pp 96ff). In
something of the same context (more exactly, with the MIT Servo
connection, Forrester world dynamics, etc.), The
World in a Machine: origins and impacts of early computerized global
systems models (Paul N. Edwards)
All I did: folded words as taught. Now other words accrete
in the interstices. Take a peek at the first
chapter of Neuromancer for a bit of the noir. When I re-read
Gibson's first trilogy I thought it might be interesting
to see how it's represented in webspace. A search on Alta
Vista for 'neuromancer' turned up about 5000 hits, and these are
the cream (the most useful/groundbreaking/stimulating...) of the first
200:
Geospace and
Cyberspace (essays from Syracuse)
A Magna Carta for the Knowledge Age (Esther Dyson, George Gilder, Jay Keyworth and Alvin
Toffler) --Progress and Freedom Foundation
document ["...a not-for-profit research and
educational organization dedicated to creating a positive vision of the
future founded in the historic principles of the American idea"].
Associated with Newt Gingrich.
17 Feb
One interesting source is New Hacker's
Dictionary, which offers these entries in
the vicinity of 'cyber'. FOLDOC, an
online dictionary of computer terminology, offers these:
Some
other
links, consequent upon a search for "cyber* near linguistic""
18 Feb What is the posthuman? Think of it
as a point of view characterized by the following assumptions... First,
the posthuman view privileges informational pattern over material
instantiation, so that embodiment in a biological substrate is seen as an
accident of history rather than an inevitability of life. Second, the
posthuman view considers consciousness, regarded as the seat of human
identity in the Western tradition long before Descartes thought he was a
mind thinking, as an epiphenomenon, as an evolutionary upstart trying to
claim that it is the whole show when in actuality it is only a minor
sideshow. Third, the posthuman view thinks of the body as the original
prosthesis we all learn to manipulate, so that extending or replacing the
body with other prostheses becomes a continuation of a process that began
before we were born. Fourth, and most important, by these and other
means, the posthuman view configures human being so that it can be
seamlessly articulated with intelligent machines. In the posthuman,
there are no essential differences or absolute demarcations between
bodily existence and computer simulation, cybernetic mechanism and
biological organism, robot technology and human goals. (pp 2-3)
During the foundational era of cybernetics, Norbert Wiener, John von
Neumann, Claude Shannon, Warren McCulloch, and dozens of other
distinguished researchers met at annual conferences sponsored by the
Josiah Macy Foundation to formulate the central concepts that, in their
high expectations, would coalesce into a theory of communication and
control applying equally to animals, humans, and machines.
Retrospectively called the Macy Conferences on Cybernetics, these
meetings, held from 1943 to 1954, were instrumental in forging a new
paradigm. To succeed, they needed a theory of information (Shannon's
bailiwick), a model of neural functioning that showed how neurons worked
as information-processing systems (McCulloch's lifework), computers that
processed binary code and that could conceiveably reproduce themselves,
thus reinforcing the analogy with biological systems (von Neumann's
specialty), and a visionary who could articulate the larger implications
of the cybernetic paradigm and make clear its cosmic significance
(Wiener's contribution). The result of this breathtaking enterprise was
nothing less than a new way of looking at human beings. Henceforth,
humans were to be seen primarily as information-processing entities who
are essentially similar to intelligent machines. (pg 7)
The Neuromancer trilogy gave a local habitation and a name to the
disparate spaces of computer simulations, networks, and hypertext windows
that, before Gibson's intervention, had been discussed as separate
phenomena. Gibson's novels acted like seed crystals thrown into a
supersaturated solution: the time was ripe for the technology known as
cyberspace to precipitate into public consciousness... (pg 36)
19 Feb
22 Feb
24 Feb
1 Mar
How did computers become entwined in every aspect of our lives? What can
we expect in the next 20 years of the evolution of silicon-based life
forms? This course will use classic texts, syntheses, predictions,
critiques and fictional extrapolations to explore technological history,
scientific and social implications, philosophical issues and utopian
visions of the computer.
Among the texts and stimulus materials: A link to some occurrences of the machine/garden
trope
7 Mar
My first direct and personal involvement with computers began in December
1962, when I got a job as a research assistant to an anthropologist who
was doing a massive project to summarize then-available cross-cultural data
(Robert B. Textor,
A Cross-Cultural Summary, HRAF Press 1964). I fed cards into
machines, did coding, checked crosstabs... In the same machine room with
the card sorters and reproducing punches I was using was Phil Stone's
General Inquirer project, an early example of a large-scale attempt to
use computer power to address issues in language and meaning, still
remembered, as indicated by these General Inquirer links:
9 March
This raises the interesting linked questions: what do I wish for in the
evolution
of computers? What would I like to be able to do better in the electronic
medium? What are the current problems to which I'd like
solutions? I can and do
accomplish a lot of the above within the constraints of
CRT-confined web pages, by way of workarounds like scanners, and I
should be making better use of the flexibility of linkage that
HTML encourages. My pages should look less like 8 1/2 x 11 paper
on a computer screen.
I did some searches in FirstSearch (Applied Science and Technology) to
see what I could find for early mentions of "world wide web" and
"internet" and did find some useful items. Here's one that underlines
how recent our take-it-for-granted present is:William Gibson
Here's what he says about the term "cyberspace", which
he's generally credited with having coined:Assembled
word cyberspace from small and readily available components of
language. Neologic spasm: the primal art of pop poetics. Preceded
any concept whatever. Slick and hollow --awaiting received
meaning.
(from "Academy Leader", in Benedikt
1991:27)
From City of Bits (William J. Mitchell) [TK5105.5 .M57 1995], and
cf Frederick Jackson Turner:The early days of cyberspace were
like those of the western frontier. Parallel, breakneck development of
the Internet and of consumer computing devices and software quickly
created an astonishing new condition; a vast, hitherto-unimagined
territory began to open up for exploration. Early computers had been
like isolated mountain valleys ruled by programmer-kings; the archaic
digital world was a far-flung range in which narrow, unreliable trails
provided only tenuous connections among the multitudinous tiny realms.
An occasional floppy disk or tape would migrate from one to the other,
bringing the makings of colonies and perhaps a few unnoticed viruses. But
networking fundamentally changed things --as clipper ships and railroads
changed the preindustrial world-- by linking the increasingly numerous
individual fragments of cyberturf into one huge, expanding system.
(pp109-110)
I'm doing some investigation of the linguistic territory around
cyber* in the OED, which we note has
nothing to
say about the flowering of 'cyber-' in compounds like 'cyberspace',
'cyberpunk', 'cyberlore', since the entries stop in 1970. Where might
we find some analysis of the last 30 years of semantic development? cyber cyberbunny cyberchondriac
cybercrud CyberGlove cybernetics
cyberrhea
cybersex cyberspace
cyberspastic cyber-squatting
CyberWand CyberZine
I've been working on a brand new book:
AUTHOR Hayles, N. Katherine.
TITLE How we became posthuman : virtual bodies in cybernetics,
literature, and informatics / N. Katherine Hayles.
PUBLISHER Chicago, Ill. : University of Chicago Press, 1999.
SUBJECT Artificial intelligence.
Cybernetics.
Computer science.
Virtual reality.
Virtual reality in literature.
Science Library Q335 .H394 1999
which develops all sorts of issues akin to those raised by Kurzweil's
book. Here are some bits:Information... came to be
conceptualized as an entity separate from the material forms in which it
is thought to be embedded
...a conception of information as a (disembodied) entity that can flow
between carbon-based organic components and silicon-based electronic
components to make protein and silicon operate as a single system. (pg 2)
Incidentally, this is one of those books it's interesting to approach via
its [very nicely done] index --a scan through the pages is sure to send the
reader off to follow up a reference or two or three.
Thomas B. Riley
(publications, including Living in the Electronic Village)
Here are two famously prescient Licklider
articles:
"Man-Computer Symbiosis" (1960) and "The Computer as a Communication
Device" (1968). Lotsa pages (46, if printed out...), but can be read in
.pdf form.
I'm inching toward another course proposal for next year, in which the
computer-as-technology is the nexus of threads that extend to all other
disciplines, and which would make use of a forest of essential texts and
concepts that I think anybody needs to be aware of to be
"educated". At this moment the likeliest "text" (for the breadth of
intellectual background it provides) I imagine for such a course is:
AUTHOR Dyson, George, 1953-
TITLE Darwin among the machines : the evolution of global
intelligence / George B. Dyson.
PUBLISHER Reading, Mass. : Addison-Wesley Pub. Co., c1997.
SUBJECT Artificial intelligence.
Artificial life.
Neural networks (Computer science)
Science Library Q335 .D97 1997
Here's a brief sketch:
history and
prospects of humanity computing
A day of reading journals produced a 20-year
summary of my work in and around computers.
Colby's article here discusses the possibility of creating
"smart/expert" artificially intelligent systems with an
ethnographic component, suggesting the largest hurdle would be "natural
language" comprehension of multiple
linguistic systems. He discusses some of the work with "semi-smart"
content analysis software such as the
General Inquirer, and how that might lay the basis for more "intelligent"
special-purpose content dictionaries and
parsing programs that could be created. This edited volume is useful for
its other articles, which discuss a whole
range of issues in cognitive anthropology, such as taxonomies, schemata,
fuzzy sets, and ethnosemantics, which
bear on the theoretical basis of content analysis.
(from Content Analysis: an annotated bibliography (Steve Mizrach)
In addition to the perspective that concentrates on 'productivity',
another view of the world of computing emphasizes communication, and
especially the potentials of
networking amongst participants. Here's a link to an article on Community from
Esther Dyson's Release 1.0 (1993 --which makes it interesting as a
bellwether [and there are lots of others that might be seen as bellwethers,
a valuable perspective]). Another on Multi-User Virtual
Environments (1994) carries interactivity in the direction of
simultaneity. Another interesting one is The Fridge Door
(1997), which discusses a lot of real-life domestic uses. See http://www.edventure.com/release1/issues.html for access to other free articles from this publication. An interesting example of ...well, what? The annual price is $695...
For me, the content unit of the weblet has
been a godsend: a construction kit for things I'm thinking about and
looking into, a means to reach audiences, an ever-growing pool (forest?)
of connections amongst my interests and activities... But I'm constrained
to some degree by the interface: I'm still using the computer as a
glorified typewriter, as evidenced by how I compose things (hard-coding
HTML through a UNIX window, mostly --not WYSIWYG, though I do use
Netscape's Composer for some pages [but can't when I'm working from home,
since I can't reach network drives]; and I tend to write pages that go on
and on, with occasional links, rather than constructions of links that go
round and round). And the pages I make are confined
to this small CRT window. What I'd like is a touch-active wall
unit, a sort of
a giant bulletin board, which I could use as an organizational interface
and means of composition.
One sector would be the 'glorified typewriter' for creation of text that
comes from the head, but others would offer other modes of input and
facilitate manipulations (like digitizing, linking, editing) without the
keyboard. The whole would be a means to organize and interlink and
make accessible to others what's in my head...
(A fuller set of results from these searches is available)
TITLE: What a tangled Web they wove.
SOURCE: New Scientist v. 143 (July 30 '94) p. 35-9
DATE: 1994
ABSTRACT: The struggle to build links between the fragmented data on the
Internet computer network is considered. Although the
Internet encompasses over 20 million computers in over 60
countries, there is still no central point for finding out
what information is held on the system. In 1989, a computer
programmer at CERN began development of a system of "server"
and "browser" computer programs to form a hypertextual system
called the Web. In this system, each of the documents that
the browser displays has links to other routes of information.
A protocol language called Hypertext Markup Language spells
out exactly how a document should be formatted in order to
work on the Web. In 1992, programmers at the National Center
for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois
in Champaign-Urbana developed NCSA Mosaic, a way of accessing
the Web using icons and a mouse. Versions of Mosaic are now
available for X-Windows, Windows, and Mac systems.
SUBJECT: Network servers.
World Wide Web.
A whole other subject is growth. Some figures:
What makes the Internet's behavior really hard to understand, said Paxson, is that it's a complex system, like a living organism or a natural ecosystem. "It's an immense moving target," he explained. "Things change all the time." In January 1990, he said, there were only 200,000 Internet hosts. A year ago, there were 30 million. Today there are 43 million. "If you blink," read the slide he was showing at that moment, "you're out of date."At his own workplace, Lawrence Berkeley Labs, World Wide Web traffic has doubled every six weeks since 1994. "We didn't anticipate that growth," Paxson said. "Even the dreamers didn't anticipate that growth." Nor did they anticipate the unpredictable nature of the traffic patterns.
(from The Internet as Model Organism by Lois Wingerson, In HMS Beagle: The BioMedNet Magazine (http://hmsbeagle.com/hmsbeagle/49/resnews/meeting.htm), Issue 49 (Mar. 5).)
I've examined some stuff in journals from the early part of this decade, when the Internet was just getting known outside geek circles and the WWW was still unnamed. A nice example, from December 1992 Communications of the ACM:
The personal computer has become my most important communication tool. I spend more time on the Net, the Internet and the global network to which it is connected, than I do on the phone, writing letters, sending faxes and watching television put together. the only medium where I spend more time is print. In the last 2 or 3 years the Net has become an indispensable part of my professional life; it is where I work and meet with colleagues... nearly all of my colleagues have also moved their offices to Cyberspace......the vision of the Net grew out of the realization that users of the first, experimental time-sharing systems formed communities... early email software, bulletin boards, and shared subroutine libraries made their community-building effect apparent...
(Larry Press "The Net: progress and opportunity". Communications of the ACM [December 1992] 35:12:21)
10 Mar
I've been looking for early statements about the WWW, and found this one
in the August 1994 Communications of the ACM:
The World-Wide Web (W3) was developed to be a pool of human knowledge, which would allow collaborators in remote sites to share their ideas and all aspects of a common project... The idea of the Web was prompted by positive experience of a small "home brew" personal hypertext system used for keeping track of personal information on a distributed project. The Web was designed so that if it was used independently for two projects, and later relationships were found between the projects, then no major or centralized changes would have to be made, but the information could smoothly reshape to represent the new state of knowledge. this property of scaling has allowed the Web to expand rapidly from its origins at CERN across the Internet irrespective of boundaries of nations or disciplines....W3 has come to stand for a number of things, which should be distinguished. These include
- The idea of a boundless information world in which all items have a reference by which they can be retrieved;
- The address system (URI [now URL]) which the project implemented to make this world possible, despite many different protocols;
- A network protocol (HTTP) used by native W3 servers giving performance and features not otherwise available;
- A markup language (HTML) which every W3 client is required to understand, and is used for the transmission of basic things such as text, menus and simple on-line help information across the net;
- The body of data available on the Internet using all or some of the preceding listed items.
...The W3 initiative occupies the meeting point of many fields of technology. Users put pressure and effort into bringing about the adoption of W3 in new areas. Apart from being a place of communication and learning, and a new market place, the Web is a show ground for new developments in information technology.
(Berners-Lee, Tim et al. "The World-Wide Web"
Communications of the ACM [August 1994] 37:8:76-82)
Some Babbage links:
OBS Cyberspace Extension of Nicholas Negroponte's Being Digital
Net Losses: Cyberhype gives way to cybergripe in unexpected realms Copyright 1995 James Gleick. First published in The New Yorker, 22 May 1995.
Some other James Gleick material, mostly short articles
Here Come the neo-Luddites: Three Approaches Towards Encroaching Technology Reviewed by David Silver
Some idle wondering about concordances (as an example of the uses of computers in the humanities) led me to a search for 'concordances NEAR computer':
11 March
Some thoughts on the
Electronic Frontier, occasioned by an NPR story this morning on "forensic
electronic discovery" and the book
AUTHOR Ludlow, Peter, 1957-
TITLE High noon on the electronic frontier : conceptual issues in
cyberspace / Peter Ludlow.
PUBLISHER Cambridge, Mass. : MIT Press, c1996.
SUBJECT Computers -- Social aspects.
Information superhighway -- Social aspects.
Computer networks -- Security measures.
Sex -- Computer network resources.
Science Library QA76.9.C66 L84 1996
...a whole new mode of communications, of interaction, and of action itself --how are we to map our understandings of law, ethics, psychology, and the social order to this new arena of human behavior?
(Mike Goodwin, Foreword, pg xiii)
Among the issues is that of property, specifically intellectual property. Here's what one Founding Father has to say:
If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of everyone, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its particular character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density at any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property.Barlow's whole article, Selling Wine without Bottles: the economy of mind on the global net, is worth reading in its entirety, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation is worth exploring in detail. And there's an archive of Barlow's EFF articles. His Is There a There in Cyberspace? is another worthwhile piece.
--Thomas Jefferson, quoted by John Perry Barlow in High Noon on the Electronic Frontier, pg 9)
Barlow's notion of "Cyberspace, the native home of Mind" (in "Selling Wine...") is tempting. So is what he has to say in the section "A Taxonomy of Information", six pages or so (excerpted below) of (somewhat Delphic) explication of the ideas that
A verb, not a noun...something which happens in the field of interaction between minds or objects or other pieces of information... It is the pitch, not the baseball, the dance, not the dancer.Experienced, not Possessed...something which happens to you as you mentally decompress it from its storage codeHas to MoveConveyed by Propagation, not Distribution
...If I sell you my horse, I can't ride him after that. If I sell you what I know, we both know it.
Information wants to be free...life forms in every respect but a basis in the carbon atom. They self-reproduce, they interact with their surroundings and adapt to them, they mutate, they persist. Like any other life form they evolve to fill the possibility spaces of their local environments, which are, in this case the surrounding belief systems and cultures of their hosts, namely, us.Replicates into the Cracks of PossibilityThe more universally resonant an idea or image or song , the more minds it will enter and remain within. Trying to stop the spread of a really robust piece of information is about as easy as keeping killer bees South of the Border. The stuff just leaks.Wants to ChangeIs Perishable
Meaning has ValueThe value of what is sent depends entirely on the extent to which each individual receiver has the receptors...shared terminology, attention, interest, language, paradigm...necessary to render what is received meaningful.Familiarity has more Value than ScarcityIt may often be the case that the best thing you can do to raise the demand for your product is to give it away.Exclusivity has ValuePoint of View and Authority have Value
No one but Esther Dyson sees the world as she does and the handsome fee she charges for her newsletter is actually for the privilege of looking at the world through her unique eyes.Time Replaces Space...listening to a Grateful Dead tape is hardly the same experience as attending a Grateful Dead concert. The closer one can get to the headwaters of an informational stream, the better his changes of finding an accurate picture of reality in it.
Turner keeps coming back to haunt me as I read about the evolution of what we now call Cyberspace. A chapter called "The Rise and Fall of Netville: the saga of a cyberspace construction boomtown in the Great Divide" (King, Grinter and Pickering) in Sara Kiesler (ed.) Culture of the Internet (1997) is not strictly Turnerian, but consider this characterization:
...the story of the homesteading of the unique virtual settlement of Netville within which the Internet was born. The pioneers of Netville faced the hardships of a technological frontier but they also exploited a great divide --a zone of freedom and opportunity that allowed them to create something truly new. Netville was a community where deeply ingrained institutional values of intellectual curiosity, informal meritocratic reward structures, and egalitarian presumptions enabled a highly disaggregated and distributed population to work together to create an amazing artifact quite unlike any seen before. Through their labors, the people of Netville created cyberspace and a community that was geographically distributed but bound together by a shared interest in a technology that was both the subject and the object of their efforts. (pg 4)...This idyllic state began to change around 1990 as the news of Netville and of cyberspace began to spread to new domains --to commercial firms, nonprofit organizations, and most important, the media. Soon the tides of immigration flooded Netville with new settlers, and with them came powerful new institutional interests that displaced the institutional forces that gave life to Netville... (pg 4)
There is little doubt that the founding citizens of Netville have lost their ownership of the electronic frontier. Their cozy home in the great divide is rapidly being colonized by commercial organizations, followed closely by regulators who wish to control access, uses, content, and so on. The citizens of Netville will never regain control over cyberspace. Curiously, the citizens of Netville can be said to have manufactured their own downfall. By developing a technically sophisticated network and encouraging universal access for all, they maintained low barriers to entry to a highly desirable resource... Some of the early citizens of Netville have found very lucrative niches in the new commercial order, and have apparently found happiness in doing so...
Netville joins the list of legendary ghost towns with little but relics and ruins to mark what was one a vibrant and progressive social venture... In the other vision Netville evolves in the model of Las Vegas. Las Vegas was a sleepy village until the lure of the Dynamo brought can-do engineers and builders, backed by huge sums of federal money, to build a great hydroelectric dam across the Colorado River... Las Vegas capitalized on its rapidly developed infrastructure of vice-filled entertainment, which served the huge dam project, leveraged by the cheap electricity produced by the dam. (pp 24-25)
And here's another book that drifted across my desk. David S. Bennahum's Extra Life: coming of age in cyberspace (Basic Books 1998) pointed out the obvious to me:
Where's the operating system? was the first thing I thought as I stared at the Macintosh'e screen. Where is the system?There's no operating system on the Mac. Then I understood, with a mixture of bliss and disgust, that the interface is the operating system! You can't "go" deeper. This machine wasn't built for programming. It was built for using programs... You could use this Macintosh --no, you could master this Macintosh-- without having to understand how it worked. Magic, beauty, metaphor had replaced the tactile thing, the sinews of logic gates and charged electrons...
On the surface the Macintosh appeared to represent the triumph of the ideals of a collaborative man-machine symbiosis that began in the 1960s, when computers created the first hacker cultures in universities. Here was a machine designed to "augment" our intellect through easy yet powerful software applications... (pp 210-211)
12 Mar
I haven't tackled Artificial Intelligence yet. There's a nice
clear article by Ray Kurzweil: "Another formula for
intelligence: the neural net paradigm" for starters. It has this
somewhat startling sentence:
The purpose of a neuron is to destroy information. Indeed the selective destruction of information is what intelligence is all about. Artificial intelligence (AI) pioneer Ed Feigenbaum says that "Knowledge is not the same as information; knowledge is information that has been pared and shaped."
See also Kevin Gurney's historical summary, part of a larger document.
And of the Jacquard loom:
The Analytical Engine weawes algebraic patterns just as the Jacquard loom weaves flowers and leaves. (Ada Lovelace)
I chanced upon The Difference Dictionary, and accompaniment to William Gibson and Bruce Sterling's The Difference Engine. Lots of interesting links. And here's a picture of the business end of the Jacquard loom:
15 March
Today's catch is these two:
AUTHOR Norman, Donald A.
TITLE The invisible computer : why good products can fail, the
personal computer is so complex, and information
appliances are the solution / Donald A. Norman.
PUBLISHER Cambridge, Mass. : MIT Press, c1998.
SUBJECT Microcomputers.
Human-computer interaction.
Science Library QA76.5 .N665 1998
TITLE Talking nets : an oral history of neural networks / edited by
James A. Anderson and Edward Rosenfeld.
PUBLISHER Cambridge, Mass. : MIT Press, c1998.
SUBJECT Neural computers.
Neural networks (Computer science)
Scientists -- Interviews.
Science Library QA76.87 .T37 1998
Donald Norman's home page is chock full of interesting things. His Preface,Chapter 1 and Chapter 2 are available (from MIT Press), as is Being Analog (Chapter 7), which begins
We are analog beings trapped in a digital world, and the worst part is, we did it to ourselves.
Paul Saffo's Welcome to the laser decade: "...the communications laser is replacing the microprocessor as the fundamental enabling technology reshaping the computing and communications terrain today." (From a Harvard Business School Colloquium, 1995 [Multimedia and the Boundaryless World])
Of Talking Nets:
Since World War II, a group of scientists has been attempting to understand the human nervous system and to build computer systems that emulate the brain's abilities. Many of the early workers in this field of neural networks came from cybernetics; others came from neuroscience, physics, electrical engineering, mathematics, psychology, even economics. In this collection of interviews, those who helped to shape the field share their childhood memories, their influences, how they became interested in neural networks, and what they see as its future.The subjects tell stories that have been told, referred to, whispered about, and imagined throughout the history of the field. Together, the interviews form a Rashomon-like web of reality. Some of the mythic people responsible for the foundations of modern brain theory and cybernetics, such as Norbert Wiener, Warren McCulloch, and Frank Rosenblatt, appear prominently in the recollections. The interviewees agree about some things and disagree about more. Together, they tell the story of how science is actually done, including the false starts, and the Darwinian struggle for jobs, resources, and reputation. Although some of the interviews contain technical material, there is no actual mathematics in the book.
(from MIT Press web site)
And here's a snippet from a Washington Post article on various aspects of digital information at the Library of Congress:
Billington believes the library must play a role in saving the Internet from turning into a dumb-bunny domain, a mere offshoot of what he calls the "audiovisual culture." The Internet shortens attention spans, he says. It destroys the sentence, the foundation of the English language, with its diction-mangling chat rooms. And the Internet is heavily skewed toward recent information, the latest data, with little trace of older material. A person might surf the Web for hours and not encounter anything written before 1995."It's inherently destructive of memory," Billington said. "You think you're getting lots more [information] until you've found out you've made a bargain with the Devil. You've slowly mutated, and have become an extension of the machine." (from http://www.washingtonPost.com/wp-srv/national/2000/next2000b.htm)
Another pair of books, found via Norman's bibliography:
TITLE HAL's legacy : 2001s computer as dream and reality / edited by
David G. Stork.
PUBLISHER Cambridge, Mass. : MIT Press, c1997.
SUBJECT Computer science.
Supercomputers.
Science Library QA76 .H265 1997
AUTHOR Norman, Donald A.
TITLE Things that make us smart : defending human attributes in
the age of the machine / Donald A. Norman.
PUBLISHER Reading, Mass. : Addison-Wesley Pub. Co., c1993.
SUBJECT Technology -- Philosophy.
Cognitive science.
Man-machine systems.
Science Library T14 .N67 1993
And here's a nice summary statement by Norman:
I have been increasingly bothered by the lack of reality in academic research. University-based research can be clever, profound, and deep, but surprisingly often it has little or no impact upon scientific knowledge or upon society at large. University-based science is meant to impress one's colleagues: What matters is precision, rigor, and reproducibility, even if the result bears little relevance to the phenomena under study. Whetehr the work has any relevance to broader issues is seldom addressed. This is a common problems in the human and social sciences, where the phenomena are especially complex, variable, and heavily influenced by context. Most academic study is designed to answer questions raised by previous academic studies. This natural propensity tends to make the studies ever more specialized, ever more esoteric, thereby removed even further from concerns and issues of the world.
(Preface to Things That Make Us Smart 1993:xii-xiii)
Motto of the 1933 Chicago World's Fair: Science Finds, Industry Applies, Man Conforms.
19 Mar
Electronic Labyrinth
home page, with a fascinating timeline that casts
very interesting light on the history of hypertext.