The Web vs. Computers

Please allow me to state the obvious: the Age of the Web is succeeding in part because it is undoing the excesses of the Age of Computers. With the introduction of the PC, we spent our days staring into a screen, manipulating data and composing words in clicking silence. With the Web, we spend our days staring into a screen looking at other people, or at least looking at how other people choose to present themselves.

But the Web runs through and on computers. The way computers have changed us persists in our online selves. Just as we can manipulate symbols and words with computers, we can manipulate our selves on the Web, if only because Web conversations are mediated through written language and thus can be drafted and revised. Even the immediate conversations – chat, IM – occur through keyboards, allowing us to compose ourselves as we compose our words.

We are writing ourselves into existence on the Web. Together.

MiscLinks

Here’s a site I like: tinyapps.org.It aggregates small, humble, useful apps. [Thanks to those of you who wrote to tell me I had the link wrong for most of the day. Damn!]

Mark Dionne points us to KurzweilAI.com, a site about developments in AI. Glitzy but useful, even for those of us who are hugely skeptical about the claims made on behalf of AI. Even for those of us who are hugely skeptical about books like Kurzweil’s The Age of Spiritual Machines.

Categories: Uncategorized dw