Machines will never be able to give the thinking process a model of thought itself, since machines are not mortal. What gives humans access to the symbolic domain of value and meaning is the fact that we die.
An imbalance in technologies tends to provoke a corresponding refocusing on ethnic values … I think we should negotiate a contract for mediodiversity in a mediosphere that is continually threatened with increasing uniformity of content because of the spread of global networks … By transforming three-quarters of the world into a cultural proletariat, you will make people of this class into more determined rebels in the 21st century. Far more determined, in fact, than the economic proletariat has been in the 20th century.
This could be a breakthrough for humans learning about humans, not just men and women learning about each other.
We have access to mind-numbing amounts of data – the trash and the treasure, the ridiculous and the not-so-sublime … We were promised that all these new options would enrich us. And yet even with this gluttony of choices, our diet is getting thinner … The acceleration of daily life, this confusing mad rush to get ahead of the future, the speed of life in and about the media, is eroding our ability to gather the building blocks to do the real and necessary work of creating new products.
Being digital is positive. It can flatten organizations, globalize society, decentralize control, and help harmonize people in ways beyond not knowing whether you are a dog. In fact, there is a parallel … between open and closed systems and open and closed societies … The nation-state may go away. And the world benefits when people are able to compete with imagination rather than rank.
I think that for most Wired readers, the golden years are over. [Laughs.] I mean, the little club that they had called the Internet. The little club, all the cute little faces they made [Emoticons]. It’s over. It’s done. Your club is about to be invaded. It’s about to be totally changed. And your snooty little view of the world and “aren’t-I-cool” sentiments are about to go crashing down on your ears. That’ll piss a lot of people off, but that’s good! And I say, Good riddance to the old Internet.
If one buys into the generalization that men attempt to be self-contained power centers and women attempt to be networked and connected, the change in the document paradigm probably won’t change anything at all. Instead of pushing men toward connectivity, it may just turn them into competitive knowledge jockeys. Some things never change.
Philosophical phenomenology of the sort championed by Martin Heidegger will make progress on this continent, as it believes that humans are not containers of perceptions but instead are always already out of themselves, into the world and toward the future; this is a philosophy that already characterizes itself explicitly as kstasis.
As every reader becomes an author – assembling information and making it available – the role of authors will be not only to assemble interesting links or even to express a point of view. Readers will seek authors for their voice, the way they express and condition the information pointers they assemble.
The relationship of ideas becomes more important than the ideas, just as information is more important than data. The expert is the one who sees (or can find out) how things relate, not the one who has the most facts.