ABVR's "Digital Culture" Thread

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ABVR's "Digital Culture" Thread

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1ABVR
maig 14, 2012, 9:50 am

This thread is an experiment . . . me, having an ongoing conversation with myself, and anybody else who feels like joining in, about books that try to make sense of the impact of digital technology on society.

The idea for it started, appropriately enough, with a tag: one I created (out of someone else's term) to connect big-picture conceptual books like Here Comes Everybody and Everything is Miscellaneous with object-focused books like The Perfect Thing, society-focused titles like Blur, and jeremiads like The Dumbest Generation. Having grouped all that under "digital culture," it seemed like an interesting thing to group my thoughts about it. Hence this thread. Hence, too, this invitation: Feel free to jump in with suggestions, comments, opinions, discussions, arguments, or whatever. The more the merrier.

Full disclosure: I'm not a "computer guy" by any stretch. I've used them on a daily basis for 25+ years, but my under-the-hood experience with them is virtually nil. My interest in the subject of the thread comes from the fact that I think/write/teach about the impact of science & technology on society & culture for a living . . . and from the fact that, like everybody else, I'm living in the world that digital technology is (re)making.

More to come.

2banjo123
maig 14, 2012, 9:43 pm

I will be interested to hear more about this. Since I have a teenager who loves her technology, I have a stake in the questions.

3qebo
maig 14, 2012, 10:31 pm

I like experiments.

4ABVR
maig 14, 2012, 11:34 pm

> 2 Thanks! And welcome!

> 3 Cool . . . I'll try to make sure this one doesn't get loose and terrorize the countryside. I hate it when that happens. :-)

5ABVR
maig 14, 2012, 11:48 pm

Ben Shneiderman, Leonardo’s Laptop: Human Needs and the New Computing Technologies (2002)

Finished: Sometime in 2007.

Shneiderman, a professor at MIT, thinks that computers should meet human needs, rather than the other way around. “Ask not what you can do for your computer,” if you will, but “ask instead what your computer can do for you.” He calls for a user-centric “new computing” to replace the machine-centric “old computing” that stretches from ENIAC in 1946 to the book’s present in 2002. Leonardo’s Laptop opens with an eloquent plea for user-centered design in computers and software, then shifts a to long analysis of human needs and interactions, and finishes with a series of chapters on how computers might be used in medicine, politics, and other fields to meet those needs and facilitate those interactions.

Leonardo’s Laptop was first published in 2002, and I first read it in 2007: exactly halfway between then and now. At the time, I was unimpressed. I thought his attempt to envision the future of computers and their relation to society was vague when it tried to be synthetic and (already) outstripped by events when it tried to be detailed. I complained that the sociological material about human needs was too basic to impress people interested in how society worked, and the discussions of new uses for computers too big-picture to engage computer people. I know I said all that because I wrote it in an online review that, thankfully, wasn’t published anywhere very visible.

All that was the sound of the 2007 version of me missing Shneiderman's point.

Leonardo’s Laptop wasn't an attempt to predict the future, but an attempt to create the future – not a forecast but a manifesto. Its central message, aimed squarely at the people who build the machines and write the code, was (and is): Think about the users, and what they might want to do, if they had the power. Then go, and create the machines and the code to give them that power. It's a book that exhorts its target audience to dream bigger dreams than they're used to dreaming, confident that, once they do, they’ll find a way to make those dreams real (to everyone's benefit).

The point I missed so spectacularly five years ago now seems obvious, and the reason why it does suggests something important: Shneiderman called it right. We are, in many ways, now living in the world that he hoped would come to pass. Smart phones and tablets, with their tap-swipe-pinch-sweep interfaces, are a first step toward the simpler, more intuitive, more “transparent” computer technology he called for. A little less obviously, today's rudimentary implementations of "the cloud" are a step toward the flexible and universal access to data he hoped for. Google, Facebook, YouTube, Wikipedia, Hulu, and other iconic Web 2.0 sites (not yet born or in their infancy in 2002) are rapidly enacting the first stage of his "new computing": shifting the focus from what the technology can do to what the user wants to do.

None of this, though, reduces Leonardo’s Laptop to a period piece, or makes his arguments obsolete. It retains its value because the questions it asks are evergreen: It’s always possible (and, Shneiderman would argue, desirable) for developers to ask: Where else might users want to go, if only their computers would give them the power?