snowdeal.org - conflux

conflux

"A popular notion is that computers will be ubiquitous - embedded in our clothes and appliances and other everyday objects, and that they will communicate wirelessly with something resembling the Internet. IBM, for one, is now in the throes of fashioning an elaborate vision of the Internet as a sort of autonomic nervous system that functions on its own. The idea is that the Net, with all these billions of gadgets communicating all the time, will be so complex it will have to do a lot of things on its own, just as our bodies unconsciously breathe and pump blood and release adrenaline. Putting this autonomic system together from computers as building blocks would be the job of services firms.

The odd thing about this vision is that it's missing the piece we all care about: what will these intelligent, communicative everyday objects actually do? If we knew, we most likely would cease to think about them in terms of the computer and networking technologies that make them possible, just as we now fire up our PCs while ignoring the electrical system we plug them into. It takes some effort to imagine that people once got excited over electric power. One day soon (if not already) it will be the same for PCs and Internet-service providers."

redux [06.15.00]
Fast Company Design Vision
""We know how to do amazing things," [Thackara] says, "and we're filling the world with amazing devices. But we cannot answer the most important question: What is this stuff really for?""

"The time has also come, he says, to shift some of the focus of innovation away from work and toward everyday life. The early users of digital devices are almost always business users, so product designers have a natural inclination to create and design products with the workplace in mind. But that tendency can make for bad design, especially when those products migrate beyond business. People put up with technical difficulties in their work lives that they would never tolerate in their personal lives. So forget "personal" computing, Thackara says, and embrace "social" computing. "As computing migrates from ugly boxes on our desks to something that suffuses everything around us, a new relationship will emerge between what's real and what's virtual, what's mental and what's material. There are few limits to the number of services that we could develop if we simply took an aspect of daily life and looked for ways to make it better.""

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“"You're not a designer, you're not a writer, and you're not an editor!"

Well, no, blogger, you're not. And therein lies your gift. Because even if it's true the vast majority of blogs would not be missed by more than a handful of people were the earth to open up and swallow them, and even if the best are still no substitute for the sustained attention of literary or journalistic works, it's also true that sustained attention is not what Web logs are about anyway. At their most interesting they embody something that exceeds attention, and transforms it: They are constructed from and pay implicit tribute to a peculiarly contemporary sort of wonder.

...[T]he Web log reflects our own attempts to assimilate the glut of immaterial data loosed upon us by the "discovery" of the networked world. And there are surely lessons for us in the parallel. For just as the cabinet of wonders took centuries to evolve into the more orderly, logically crystalline museum, so it may be a while before the chaos of the Web submits to any very tidy scheme of organization.”

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conflux

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