Ted Nelson struggles with uncomprehending radio interviewer (1979) [audio]
It would be interesting to ask whether or not Ted Nelson's vision for personal computing has been achieved. In the podcast, personal computing was to be the means of liberation from a centralized priesthood on the one hand, and from ignorance (i.e., access to means of learning) on the other.Personal computers are now ubiquitous, and we've been liberated from central priesthoods which had restricted access to (expensive) computers in the past. But new forms of centralization emerge, whether they arise in the form of bloated, draconian corporate software foisted on workers within a company, or as public products such as Google and Facebook, which have been gobbling up the open web and replacing it with means of control and manipulation. [1]In fact, this latter concern of manipulation begs the question of what people really need computers for, and brings into question Ted Nelson's presumed answer to it: i.e., that people have an inherent need to use computers to facilitate their own creativity. But what about the possibility that the majority of people prefer to be passive consumers? Neil Postman warned that we would become a trivial society, rife with distraction, like in Huxley's Brave New World. [2]Perhaps computers have succeeded in universally capturing our imagination, but corporations (centralization!) have once again captured computing, and by extension our imagination as well, as Tim Wu laments [1]: am I more likely to open up my personal computer at odd moments of the day to check Facebook or Hacker News to momentarily capture my imagination? Or have I instead acquired the habit of pulling out a tablet to accumulate further progress in a creative work, which perhaps only requires internet connectivity for the purpose of reference? And if the answer is the former, is the reason because we don't have actual Dynabooks [3], but instead a more asymmetric device skewed toward consumption and away from creative expression? Or is it because the majority of people in fact prefer passive consumption anyway?[1] http://www.timwu.org/AttentionMerchants.html[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynabook