FACECOLLABORATION
well i just finished watching the Engelbart video and i can only imagine what the people of 1968 thought about his technology. It seems like that type of technology hasnt even been fully integrated into society yet at this time. I mean google documents sort of seems like it and people have been using different types of Virtual Office programs for some time but perhaps it is just that sense of online collaboration which hasnt truly gotten integrated yet. Most of the technology that we seem to use is in the medium of telecommunication. we are conversing, we are talking and talking but are we making things together simultaneously. i record things onto my laptop and then send them to a friend of mine in Boston who then records overtop of it but that doesnt seem like the type of collaboration that Engelbart was taking place in. oh how the computer makes us more together and more alone. alone in our rooms giving words and sounds to people anywhere in the world or even out in space. but no matter how much we want these things to exist they will not be real. i am waiting for the day that video testimony will not be admissible any longer in court cases because of how easy it is to manufacture fallacies that look like truth.
I am reminded of a passage in David Foster Wallace’s novel Infinite Jest that spoke about why the video phone never took off. He spoke about crazy things like how the slight distortion of your view would make you buy masks to correct the mistakes and then masks to make you look better and then masks to make us look the best and then we could never leave or room or even look at a mirror because the fake us was much better than the real us. that sounds like second life to me. that is frightening. i was talking to a friend of mine who told me that he heard about concerts given on second life. i think i want that to be my project for class, give a show on second life, it sounds so frightening that i have to do it.
February 4th, 2008 at 7:28 pm
[...] Original post by adamreadwrite [...]