I'm reading Bootstrapping by Thierry Bardini, another book about Doug Engelbart, the man who foresaw and proto-typed windows in computers, graphical user interface, the mouse, and hypertext. The book is fairly dry and I'm wondering if Bardini is as much hindered as helped by his background in sociology. But, shoot, I didn't take the time to research and write about a sometimes complex subject that affects us significantly at the moment.
In just getting started with this book, I'm already getting some sweet bits. One is Bardini's illuminations of the differences between associations and connections and what that means in the use of hypertext links. Formerly this was a subject of academic debate — or, perhaps, an unvoiced day-to-day argument of heierarchical vs. non heierarchical ordering — but now the arguments become more common as more people decide how to get machines to sort information, our own and others. You can observe examples of this playing out in the emergence of the Google search engine, the development of tags, and the creation of folksonomies.
The other is the very idea of personal computing. Personal computing might have been inevitable, but at one time the fate of Engelbart's "crusade" was not such a sure thing. Engelbart uses the simile of the transition from railroads to personal vehicles:
I suggest that the parallel of the indiviually manned auto-motive vehicles will develop in the computer field, contributing changes to our social structure that we can't comprehend easily. The man-machine interface that most people talk about is the equivalent of the locomotive-cab controls (giving a man better means to the contribute to the big system's mission), but I want to see more thought on the equivalent of the bulldozer's cab (giving the man maximum facility for directing all that power to his individual task).
Bardini follows with this:
This is the first reference to personal computing in Engelbart's thinking: the difference between locomotives and automobiles or bulldozers points to a difference between technological servitude and technological liberation, between individuals being subsumed into a task defined by some massive technological innovation and that innovation being put at the service of autonomous individuals . . . [I lopped off the qualification and the qualification of the qualification. If you want some sociological rigor, go see the book.]In some ways, Engelbart seems like one of the most subversive characters of the sixties.
Anyway, quo what-you-call your vadis. The computers are here, and as Bardini pointed out, at the same time we've been empowered or liberated, we've made computers our servants, and now have an arrangement which implicates us in a master/slave relationship.
Perhaps the result will be a mixture of bad behavior and alienation. Materials like computers and communications media, however, might offer an opportunity to transcend our circumstances. I'm thinking of last night's Bob Dylan show, and the one interviewee talking about Dylan's propensity toward acting, "once you're acting you can pretty much take it anywhere."
Pardon me for my leaping from one thought to another, but I'm beginning to see the parallels between folks in the early 20th C. leaving the farm and the folks of the 21st C. leaving their skins. While we're about to immerse ourselves in and with the help of new technologies, expand our minds, join a virally-organized network of ideas and programs, we've not even dealt with the ethical problems of the last migration.
Posted by mastr at September 27, 2005 07:43 AM