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John Brockman Utne Reader
I'd like to see an electronic newspaper that has multiple
translucent layers, each layer evolving at a different rate. The
top layer is late-breaking stuff, and as I delve down into the
layers, I'd get more detailed information. I wouldn't have to read
it for days or weeks because I could rewind and fast-forward
through everything I've missed. And I could read it with my eyes
closed: If I'd had a hard day in the office, I could lie down on
the couch, close my eyes, and listen to audio versions of the
stories I select. Maybe these features are not the ones that will
make a billion dollars for a new company, but whatever it is,
someone is going to have to have an idea different from the product
out there now.
RELATED CONTENT
What kind of people use the Net and what are their activities
doing to the country, the world, the culture? It may sound like a
parochial issue that women don't much like computers, but they
don't, and the issue is a tremendously important one. It's a fact
that there are not many women majoring in computer science, and
people are doing handstands to get more women in the field. An
article in Time magazine 15 years ago about the first wave
of video games observed that boys played them and girls didn't, and
experts were asking how we can get girls more involved. My response
is, Why should they want to be? They're not attracted to this
world, certainly not to the extent that men are, and that's one of
the reasons why it's such a spiritually impoverished world. Most
reasonably sophisticated men are happier in an environment that
includes women. One of the problems with the computer society is
that not only is it an almost all-male society, but it's a
little-boy society, part of an ongoing infantilization of the
society over the past half century.
Temperamentally conservative people don't like machines and
never will. These may be very bright people for whom the computer
world is never going to be a completely satisfactory world. In
addition to this 35 percent, there's another 35 percent who might
be great computer users but now realize that computer software
stinks. They realize that the whole computer world is set up on a
primitive basis: They shouldn't have to worry about compatibility;
they shouldn't have to worry about backing up disks or about the
format of a floppy disk. Consumers wouldn't put up with any of this
if they were serious.
Excerpted from a chapter in Digerati:
Encounter with the Cyber Elite(Hardwired, 1996.) In this
chapter David Gelertner, a Yale University computer scientist,
comments on the net.
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