• critique of early Artificial Intelligence practices
• believes early goals of AI are misguided because they do not reflect human actions and behavior
• develops the notion of Planned vs. Situated Action
• belives that AI should reflect situated action, or ad hoc decision making based on the changing aspects of a situation
• calls for the mutual intelligibility between man and machine

Michael Joyce: Siren Shapes, 1988

• describes the modern uses of hypertext systems as being very different from the intended systems of Vannevar Bush, Doug Engelbart and Ted Nelson
• develops two differing classifications of hypertext sytems
• Exploratory vs. Constructive model
• exploratory represents a hypertext model that is constructed by another user, one that cannot be altered, whereas the constructive model represents a hypertext model developed by the user him/herself
• believes constructive hypertexts hold “much omre promise for transforming education thatn does simple electric reading with links”

Bill Nichols: The Work of Culture in the Age of Cybernetic Systems, 1988

• “The computer is more than an object: it is also an icon and a metaphor that suggests new ways of thinking about ourselves and our environment, new ways of constructing images of what it means to be human and to live in a humanoid world”
• the essay serves as un update of Walter Benjamin’s 1936 essay “The Work of Art in theAge of Mechanical Reproduction”
• believes that the radical change in making art that is a byproduct of the computer also radically changes that way in which the individual sees and is able to see the world, himself and others

Lynn Hershman: Fantasy Beyond Control, 1990

• “Alteration of the basis for exchange of information is subversive in that it encourages participation and therefore creates a different dynamic audience”
• Hershman is an early interactive video artist
• creates the first interactive video disc artwork, Lorna (1979 – 1983)
• branching structure of Lorna pre-dates the branching structure of CD-ROMs and DVD menus
• sets the stage for further works of interactive video
• an example of the use of hypertext in new media outside the computer

Pelle Ehn and Morten Kyng: Cardboard Computers; Mocking-It-Up or Hands-On the Future, 1991

• calls for the user’s creation of his/her own individualized system of tools
• concerned with the nature of computer design and human computer interaction
• Ehn and Kyng are leaders of the Utopia project, “one of a number of projects that have taken the approach of working with users, from the outset, on the design of new media tools”

Chip Morningstar and F. Randall Farmer: The Lessons of Lucasfilm’s Habitat, 1991

• describes the new laws – both of etiquette and technology – that govern the new universe of online virtual gaming
• “You can’t trust anyone.”

J. David Bolter: Seeing and Writing, 1991

• discusses the typographic study of writing with the computer
• describes how “the history of typography and printing relates to the present movement of writing onto the computer screen”
• important innovation of word processor is the immediate re-sculpting of the text via the reshaping of the application window
• “While a scholar can hardly hop to be an expert on every form of communicatio – on every ‘extension of man’, as McLuhan woudl have it – thorough understanding of a particular medium being used for a particular can often be accomplished by understanding that medium’s close relatives, and by close study of several relevant works in those media.”

Stuart Moulthrop: You Say You Want a Revolution? Hypertext and the Laws of Media, 1991

• discusses the use of hypertext in new media
• hypertext does not replace the medium of printed literature, but rather comes closer to replacing the medium of television for the adolescent age group
• believes that the possibility of revolution through the use of hypertext will only allow for an overthrow of contemporary administration with the maintaining of the current system of broadcasting and information sharing

Robert Coover: The End of Books, 1992

• “the single article that arguably has made more readers aware of hypertext fiction and inflamed more critics than any other”
• possible ends of books: “provocation, the communication of different perspectives, the pleasing rearrangement of thought through language and narrative”
• believes the Golden Age of literature has given way to the next text experiments and arrangements of the computer and World Wide Web

Scout McCloud: Time Frames, 1993

• McCloud is described as the Aristotle of comics
• describes comics as a sequential art that developed in the time of the Egyptians

Philip E. Agre: Surveillance and Capture, 1994

• describes “Panopticism” -  a term developed by Jeremy Bentham – as an early theoretical method of constant surveillance that will induce a state of conscious and permanent visibility
• believes that, as with Enzensberger, that a model of total surveillance ala 1984 is impossible
• argues that the new developments in technology allow such information harvesting to be possible
• “The capture of private information is accelerating as computing becomes ever more integrated with our life processes and spaces, whether in the guise of Web forms, swipe cards, or the implanting of computers and tracking devices under the rubric of ‘ubiquitous computing’”
• develops the notion of a “capture model” – a method of obtaining a great deal of private information that is able to be further processed or discarded
• discusses the controversies of Web cookies – small files implanted on a users computer from a website in order to track the users movement throughout the site and automate interactions on the site
• discusses the sharing of personal information as transcending the issue of privacy, coming to affect the notion of an individuals identity
• “It is also objectionable because of the way we exist as social beings – managing our personae in the public world by deciding what to disclose, and to whom. Cookies don’t simply threaten the security of our credit card data, they also compromise our ability to manage how we present and define ourselves”
• new technology of cryptography developing as a response to this new trend in computing

Espen J. Aarseth: Nonlinearity and Literary Theory, 1994

• approaches computer literature from a removed standpoint rather than from the perspective of a new media artform, develops new theories to discuss these works

Critical Art Ensemble: Nomadic Power and Cultural Resistance, 1994

• “Rhizome language has been adopted as a language of liberation, as an alternative to the New Left that in retrospect seems to have died in the streets in 1968″
• discusses the use of new media and the internet as a means of political and cultural resistance
• “hacktivism” and “cyberhippies”
• discusses the difference between using technology as a means of virtual resistance and using technology to organize events of physical resistance

Tim Berners-Lee, et. al.: The World-Wide Web, 1994

• at this stage, the web is still a primitive hypertext system
• it has fulfilled one of its initial goals as being a repository of knowledge
• at the time the NMR was written, the web was still competing with television and film as the main medium of entertainment – at this time the Web is consuming these other media
• still developing and subtly changing the the nature of society around the globe

I first read this book four years ago when I was writing a comparative literature paper in my junior year of high school. The assignment was to choose an American author, read a number of books by this author and find some kind of unifying theme throughout the works – I chose Don DeLillo. Now as a junior in college I’m reading White Noise again. This quote has always stuck with me and in many ways has informed the direction I’ve taken in my studies. At the heart of this quote are the issues I’m addressing with my chosen area of concentration.

Heinrich: “It’s like we’ve been flung back in time,” he said. “Here we are in the Stone Age, knowing all these great things after centuries of progress but what can we do to make life easier for the Stone Agers? Can we make a refrigerator? Can we even explain how it works? What is electricity? what is light? We experience these things every day of our lives but what good does it do if we find ourselves hurled back in time and we can’t even tell people the basic principles much less actually make something that would improve conditions. Name onee thing you could make. Could you mae a simple wooden match that you could strike on a rock to make a flame? We think we’re so great and modern. Moon landings, artificial hearts. But what if you were hurled into a time warp and came face to face with the ancient Greeks. The Greeks invented trigonometry. They did autopsies and dissections. What could you tell an ancient Greek that he couldn’t say, ‘Big deal.’ Could you tell him about the atom? Atom is a Greek word. The Greeks knew that the major events of the universe can’t be seen by the eye of man. It’s waves, it’s rays, it’s particles.”
Jack: “We’re doing all right.”
Heinrich: “We’re sitting in this huge moldy room. It’s live we’re flung back.”
Jack: “We have heat, we have light.”
Heinrich: “These are Stone Age things. They had heat and light. They had fire. They rubbed flints together and made sparks. Could you rub flints togehter? Would you know a flint if you saw one? If a Stone Ager asked you what a nucleotide is, could you tell him? How do we make carbon paper? What is glass? If you came awake tomorrow in the Middle Ages and there was an epidemic raging, what could you do to stop it, knowing what you know about the progress of medicines and diseases? Here it is practically the twenty-first century and you’ve read hundreds of books and magazines and seen a hundred TV shows about science and medicine. Could you tell these people one crucial thing that might save a million and a half lives?”
Jack: “‘Boil your water,’ I’d tell them.”
Heinrich: “Sure. What about ‘Wash behind your ears.’ That’s about as good.”
Jack: “I still think we’re doing fairly well. There was no warning. We have food, we have radios.”
Heinrich: “What is a radio? What is the principle of a radio? Go ahead, explain. You’re sitting in the middle of this circle of people. They use pebble tools. They eat grubs. Explain a radio.”
Jack: “There’s no mystery. Powerful transmitters send signals. They travel through the air, to be picked up by receivers.”
Heinrich: “They travel through the air. What like birds? Why not tell them magic? They travel through the air in magic waves. What is a nucleotide? You don’t know, do you? Yet these are the building blocks of life. What good is knowledge if it just floats in the air? It  goes from computer to computer. It changes and grows every second of every day. But nobody actually knows anything.“

The cyborg is a matter of fiction and lived experience that changes what counts as women’s experience in the late twentieth century.

By the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs.

• discusses the rise of Artificial Intelligence in light of the feminist movement
• deals with the blurring of societal boundaries that has come about with the advent of computing technologies and the newfound responsibility of the re-construction of new, more appropriate social roles

Richard Stallman: The GNU Manifesto, 1985

• GNU, a recursive acronym – GNU’s Not Unix!
• Stallman sees the changing face of commerce that arises from the popularity and widespread usage of computers and certain computer programs
• wants to develop a free and open source alternative to the Unix system
• develops a new style of copyright, which he entitles “copyleft”, that will ensure that his work and the work of his team will remain to be free even after others have modified the original code
• the effects of the copyleft idea are seen in the contemporary Creative Commons licensing agreements
• wishes to create a more utopian vision of software development and computer programming in which code is freely shared and the overall goal is a well-designed product, rather than profit
• creates a long-lasting niche that has become the open source/freeware community

Terry Winograd and Fernando Flores: Using Computers: A Direction for Design, 1986

Ontologically oriented design is therefore necessarily both reflective and political, looking backwards to the tradition that has formed us but also forwards to as-yet-uncreated transformations of our lives together. Through the emergence of new tools, we come to a changing awareness of human nature and human action, which in turn leads to new technological development.

• considers the recursive nature of technological development in which a new technology is developed, which changes the way individuals interact or perform a certain task, which in turns leads to changes in this new technology: “There is a circularity here: the world determines what we can do and what we do determines our world.”
• considers computer design from the point of view of philosopher Martin Heidegger
• rejects the idea of creating computer technologies that reflect human interaction, instead encourages designs that are transparent in practice, design that the individual does not have to think about when using but rather becomes second-nature and is incorporated into basic human interaction
• refers to the interface of the automobile as an example – the experienced driver does not have to think about the act of steering, the steering wheel becomes an extension of his body that he innately understands how to control

In ontological designing, we are doing more than asking what can be built. We are engaging in a philosophical discourse about the self – about what we can do and what we can be. Tools are fundamental to action, and through our actions we generate the world. The transformation we are concerned with is not a technical one, but a continuing evolution of how we understand our surroundings and ourselves – of how we continue becoming the beings that we are.

Brenda Laurel: The Six Elements and the Casual Relations Among Them and Star Raiders: Dramatic Interaction in a Small World, 1986 & 1991

• discusses computer design and human-computer interaction from the standpoint of dramatic theatre
• approaches basic HCI using the principles set forth in Aristotle’s Poetics
• argues that to understand the nature of HCI, one must consider the Poetics

Jan L. Bordewijk and Ben van Kaam: Towards a New Classification of Tele-Information Services, 1986

• considers the social role of various digital media in terms of communication
• “the basic technology employed does not determine the category of service a telecommunications system provides”
• believes that information systems based on the computer are poised and ready to enter every aspect of human life and alter the very face of current information architecture

As a consequence the spread of knowledge, the cornerstone of democracy, sems to be headed towards a time of flourishing, but this optimistic expectation reflects only one side of the coin. The reverse side tells us that the penetration of technolog in human information paths, on such a large scale as we witness today, can only succeed thanks to a huge information services industry. Such an industry, providing information-oriented products as well as technical facilities and employing many, many pepople, saddles us with a new concern: its own power. In order to avioid the risk of an Orwellian scenario, society should at least have at its disposal a clear and simple picture of what the power positions and relations are on the vulnerable terrain of human communication.

• identify four basic forms of communication: allocution, conversation, consulation, and registration
• allocution refers to the broadcast of information from a controlled center to various individuals, there is no feedback or communication between individuals and the information center – this is represented in television and radio broadcast and film
• conversation refers to the exchange of information between two individuals, there is feedback between the two and each individual has essentially equal power in the conversation
• consulation refers to the dispensation of information from an information center upon the request from an individual, this is represented in internet searches and basic research in books and libraries
• registration refers the solicitation of information from individuals
• with these four basic building blocks of tele-communication there is the possibility of multi-pattern services and networks that utilize all of these methods in creating a communication system
• the most important aspect of the essay is the forewarning of a conglomeration of information by a coproration or some equally powerful entity – we must learn from 1984!

Langdon Winner: Mythinformation, 1986

The use of computers and advanced communications technologies is producing a sweeping set of transformations in every corner of social life.

Some observers forecast that “the computer revolution” will eventually be guided by new wonders in artificial intelligence. Its present course is influenced by something much more familiar: the absent mind.

• discusses the idea of the computer revolution and more appropriately refers to this idea as a myth
• approaches the myth of the computer revolution, also referred to as information revolution or technological revolution, from the perspective of legitimate political revolution, tries to identify the goals of such a revolution and how this upheaval would change the face of contemporary politics and social conditions
• attempts to show that advances in technology do not lead to revolutionary change – this change must be initiated by the individuals and the ways in which new technologies are used
• identifies the basic manner of thinking that leads individuals to assume that there is an impending computer revolution: “(1) people are bereft of information; (2) information is knowledge; (3) knowledge is power; and (4) increasing access to information enhances democracy and equalizes social power.”
• sets forth a few underlying issues that will slowly and nearly invisibly change the face of contemporary life
• 1: Extended surveillance of individuals using information gathered from their uses of the internet and other networked communications systems, such as television, cell phone, etc.

As people handle an increasing range of their daily activities through electronic instruments – mail, banking, shopping, entertainment, travel plans, and so forth – it becomes technically feasible to monitor these activities to a degree heretofore inconceivable.

• 2: Increasing use of electronic tools are replacing certain social objects and changing the face of human interaction and social life.

The point of many applications of microelectronics, after all, is to eliminate social layers that were previously needed to get things done. Computerized bank tellers, for example, have largely done away with small, local branch banks, which were not only ways of doing business, but places where people met, talked, and socialized.

• 3: The linking of computers and telecommunications conquers the problems of space and time by creating a global communication network where distant places can be instantaneously connected. This creation of a truly global community will change the face of global and national politics.
• 4: The breakdown of individual communities will eventually undermine the notion of the home. Individuals are untethered, floating, left to find new methods of defining and understanding themselves – turn to the computer to do so.

Human beings and human societies, however, have traditionally found their identities with spatial and temporal limits. They have lived, acted, and found meaning in a particular place at a particular time. Developments in microelectronics tend to dissolve those limits, thereby threatening the integrity of social and political forms that depend on them.

• discusses multimodal interfaces
• combination of spoken and gestural interaction is a supposed preference to typing alone
• epitomized in Nicholas Negroponte’s “Media Room” at MIT
• spatialization of the computer, user enters a space for interaction
• gives birth to a new modality of human-computer interaction

Ted Nelson: Proposal for a Universal Electronic Publishing System and Archive, 1981

• envisions a Xanadu system of the web
• “The past is continually changing – or at least it seems to be, as we view it”
• foreshadows the ever-changing face of the the internet, information that previously existed in one space may be moved or deleted or altered from one moment to the next, there is a need to link information in order to create a trail to backtrack from page to page, similar to Borges’ story The Book of Sand
• recognizes certain legal principles that should govern the use of the internet, for example user privacy and freedom of speech/the press
• eternal revision of documents

Bill Viola: Will There Be Condominiums in Data Space?, 1982

• “Worlds are waiting to be explored”
• recognizes the power of the computer for artistic creation
• similar to Engelbart’s suggestion of the power of the word processor for writing, Viola suggests the power of digital non-linear editing in the creation of films and video
• envisions the total merging of computer systems and video
• “Despite the anti-technology attitudes which still persist (some, it should be added, for very good reasons), the present generation of artists, filmmakers, and video-makers currently in school, and their instructors, who continue to ignore computer and video technology, will in the near future find that they have bypassed the primary medium, not only of their own fields, but of the entire culture as well. It is imperative that creative artists have a hand in the developments currently underway.”
• finally, he warns that we must first understand ourselves before we turning to our technologies
• applications of technology are nothing more than reflections of the user

Ben Bagdikian: The Endless Chain, 1983

• old and new media are being increasingly compatible and comparable
• the computer has usurped the power of the television, but in doing so has absorbed all the negative aspects of television
• large corporations still control our media although the medium for distribution has changed
• if we expect this new medium to empower us and deliver cultural change, we must disallow the corporate takeover of computers and the internet

Ben Shneiderman: Direct Manipulation A Step Beyond Programming Languages, 1983

• beginning of the move away from the command line towards graphical user interfaces for computer applications
• empowering the mouse as a tool for control on the computer screen
• emphasis on immediate visual feedback systems
• visual programming languages rather than text-based programming
• direct manipulation of data with clear and obvious response
• certain graphical applications can become just as difficult to learn as programming languages
• direct manipulation becomes a new aspect of human-computer interaction rather than replacing former methods of text-based control
• a harmony of several interface concepts makes for powerful interaction

Sherry Turkle: Video Games and Computer Holding Power, 1984

• video games as a model for study on how people of all ages encounter and interact with the computer
• suggests the psychological and social importance of video games
• “how we interact with computers influences our outlook on the world and our perspectives on ourselves”
• video games have become part of the cultural landscape
• “By 1983 the computer had become so mcuh an d so active a part of the every that Time magazine chose it to fill the role usually given to a Man or a Woman of the Year. Only one other gift of science has been so universally recognized as marking a new era of human life. That was atomic energy.

Manifesto, 1966
The Education of the Un-Arstist: Parts I-III, 1972 & 1974
Art Which Can’t Be Art, 1986

“For most of his career, Allan Kaprow has been working to shift that site from the specialized zones of art toward the particular places and occasions of everyday life. For him the modernist practices of art is more than the production of artworks; it also involves the artist’s disciplined effort to observe, engage, and interpret the processes of living, which are themselves as meaningful as most art, and certainly more grounded in common experience.”
“For him, the contents of everyday life – eating strawberries, sweating, shaking hands when meeting someone new – are more than merely the subject matter of art. They are the meaning of life.”
“In other words, he wants more than anti-formalism: he wants the shapes, thresholds, and durations of experience itself – the conventions of consciousness and communal exchange, whether personal habits or a Labor Day parade – to provide the frames in which the meanings of life may be intensified and interpreted.”
- Introduction

“Art art has served as an instructional transition to its own elimination by life. Such an acute awareness among artists enables the whole world and its humanity to be experienced as a work of art. With ordinary reality so brightly lit, those who choose to engage in showcase creativity invite (from this view) hopeless comparisons between what they do and supervivid counterparts in the environment.”
The Education of the Un-Artist, Part I, p. 102

I first became interested in Allan Kaprow after reading his 1961 essay Happenings in the New York Scene in the New Media Reader a few weeks ago. Suggestions of further readings led me to this collection of his essays spanning 32 years of his career from 1958 to 1990. These essays put into words many sentiments I have long held, feelings that have appreciably grown during the past two years. These feelings concern the nature of art and the practice of art making in relation to nature itself. Over the course of his life, Kaprow seems to move farther and farther from the making of art objects, focusing more on the experiences that become the subject of art, on life itself. He refers to the impending dissolution of art as a necessary cultural enterprise, citing the movement of contemporary art towards non-art and anti-art as seen in the growing popularity of his own works, as well as the ready-mades of Duchamp and Dada, the cultural appropriation of Pop art, and the practice of Earth art, among others. Kaprow wishes to eschew the rectangular prison of traditional art spaces – the gallery, the canvas, the monitor – instead returning art to the site of its creation, which he actively pursued in the 1960′s with the performance of his Happenings in and around New York. Ultimately this move away from the gallery will deliver art to its initial form – experience of life. In The Education of the Un-Artist, Part I Kaprow gives some examples of actual experiences that are unsuccessfully imitated in contemporary artistic practice: “that the broadcast verbal exchange between Houston’s Manned Spacecraft Center and the Apollo 11 astronauts was better than contemporary poetry; that with their sound distortions, beeps, static, and communication breaks, such exchanges also surpassed the electronic music of the concert halls” (97). This reminded me of the Lev Manovich introduction to the New Media Reader, in which he made the claim that contemporary computers scientists and technology developers will one day be seen as the most important artists of our time. At first I disagreed with this, thinking that these individuals were not attempting to create art, they were engineers building systems to be implemented in the real world, not designing art objects. Now I’m not so sure. If the purpose of art is to inform the viewer, to provide a unique guide to understanding oneself and the world, it would indeed seem that these individuals are representative of Kaprow’s “un-artist,” whose work will eventually be drawn into the realm of art, which in many ways we are seeing in contemporary art today.

It is everyday life that is most beautiful. There is something here that simply cannot be recreated as art, that cannot be hung on a gallery wall or screened in a theater but must be experienced first hand by the individual.

• creator and early practicioner of responsive environments – live interaction between man and machine
• first generation virtual reality and augmented reality
• seeks to create a dialogue between the participant and the environment through a feedback system of action and response
• believes the responsive environment is a new medium of artistic expression, claims Response is the Medium!
• stresses the importance of the interaction over the aesthetic content of the environment
• new roles for artist and participant: artist “operates at a metalevel”, the participant becomes involved in the creation of the work
• provides the examples of several unique works: GLOWFLOW, 1969; METAPLAY, 1970; PSYCHIC SPACE, 1971; VIDEOPLACE, 1975-1977
• uses PDP-11 computer and Adage AGT-10 Graphic Display Computer to create these projects, writing programs that respond to changes in the environment that are related to the computer via electrical switches and or cameras
• stresses the use of these environments in the fields of education, psychology, and psychotherapy

Finally, in an exciting and frightening way, the environments dramatize the extent to which we are savages in a world of our creation. The layman has extremely little ability to define the limits of what is possible with current technology and so will accept all sorts of cues as representing relationships which in fact do not exist. The constant birth of such supersititions indicates how much we have already accomplished in mastering our natural environment and how difficult the initial discoveries must have been.

We are incredibly attuned to the idea that the sole purpose of our technology is to solve problems. It also creates concpets and philosophy. We must more fully explore these aspects of our inventions, because the next generation of technology will speak to us, understand us, and perceive our behavior. It will enter every home and office and interede between us and much of the information and experience we receive. The design of such intimate technology is an aesthetic issue as mcuh as an engineering one. We must recognize this if we are to understand and choose what we become as a result of what we have made.

Alan Kay and Adele Goldberg: Personal Dynamic Media, 1977

If the “medium is the message,” then the message of low-bandwidth timesharing is “blah.”

• proposal for the Dynabook, an early prototype of the personal computer
• Kay and Adele foresaw the coming age of personal and notebook computers, sought to move past the practice of timeshared computing
• envisioned computers that would be usable and useful to the normal person for both practical and creative means, rather than computers used solely by businesses and universities
• present the computer as a new “conversational” media different from the passive media of paper, paint, television and film due to it’s system of feedback between user and machine
• describe the computer like a Universal Turing Machine, a device that can model all the communicative abilities of all other media

Every message is, in one sense or another, a simulation of some idea. It may be representational or abstract. The essence of a medium is very much dependent on the way messages are embedded, changed, and viewed. Although digital computers were originally designed to do arithmetic computation, the ability to simulate the details of any descriptive model means that the computer, viewed as a medium itself, can be all other media if the embedding and viewing methods are sufficiently well provided. Moreover, this new “metamedium” is active - it can respond to queries and experiments – so that the messages may involve the learner in a two-way conversation.

• describe the capabilities and features of the Dynabook in comparison to existing computers, stressing the need for flexibility, resolution, and a quick response time between input and response
• utilize an insertable disk memory, a high-resolution black & white CRT, a typewriter keyboard, a chord keyboard, a mouse and several musical-keyboard devices for creating computer music
• develop the Smalltalk programming language as the underlying language of the Dynabook
• highlight several uses of the machine, including file storing, editing, drawing/painting, animation and music

Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari: A Thousand Plateaus, 1980

• co-authors of Capitalism and Schizophrenia, made up in two parts by  Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus
• introduced the term “rhizome“
• I didn’t understand anything they were saying

Seymour Papert: Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas, 1980

In most contemporary educational situations where children come into contact with computers the computer is used to put children through their paces, to provide exercises of an appropriate level of difficulty, to provide feedback, and to dispense information. The computer programming the child. In the LOGO environment the relationship is reversed: The child, even at preschool ages, is in control. The child programs the computer. And in teaching the computer how to think, children embark on an exploration about how they themselves think.

• Papert was a student of Jean Piaget in Geneva during Piaget’s studies of children’s schemas of learning and understanding the world
• developed the theory of Constructionism, based on Piaget’s Constructivist theory of learning
• views the computer as “a powerful tool for supporting children’s learning – for learning in a self-directed, self-motivated way”
• wants to implement computer programming as a method for teaching children – differentiates between contemporary educational practices of strict definitions of right and wrong and the programming methods of debugging, where one must make mistakes in order to create a fluid program
• develops a new programming to be used in education: LOGO, “allows children to take control of the computer, learning about mathematics through the experience of mathematical concepts”
• programming teaches basic skills of logic and problem solving

• Nelson – inventor of the hypertext – writes in an attempt to bridge the gap between so-called “computer people” and the everyday man

The people who know about computers often seem unwilling to explain things or answer your questions. Stereotyped notions develop about computers operating in fixed ways – and so confusion increases. The chasm between laymen and computer people widens fast and dangerously.

• written in two parts, the first is a manual on computer use, the second details possible uses of computers in the future, specifically addressing the use of computers in education
• Nelson is described as the Tom Paine of the digital computing revolution – a call to arms to every person, “You can and must understand computers NOW.

This book is therefore devoted to the premise that
EVERYBODY SHOULD UNDERSTAND COMPUTERS.

• seeks to de-mystify the inner-workings of the computer and destroy the computer elite that are seemingly reluctant to share knowledge of computing systems
• in Dream Machines, Nelson writes of our ability to control media with new computing systems, recalling Enzensberger’s essay

But today, at this moment, we can and must design the media, design the molecules of our new water, and I believe the details of this design matter very deeply.

• discusses at length the idea of CAI : computer-assisted instruction, discrediting the contemporary education system and offering advice on its possible improvement

A child arrives at school bright and early in his life. By drabness we deprive him of interests. By fixed curriculum and sequence we rob him of his orientation, initiative and motivation, and by testing and scoring we subvert his natural intelligence.

Computers offer us the first real chance to let the human mind grow to it’s full potential, as it cannot within the stifling and insulting setting of existing school systems.

• offers up methods of improving the education system through using computational systems and hypertexts that would allow for the student to guide his own education based on his personal interests and motivations

The alternative is straightforward. Instead of devising elaborate systems permitting the computer or its instructional contents to control the situation, why not permit the student to control the system, hsow him how to do so intelligently, and make it easy for him to find his own way?

• argues that the structuring of education into individual subjects is an enormous problem that tends to lead to a lack of creativity
• attacks testing as an unnecessary and meaningless method of evaluating an individual’s knowledge of a subject
• believes the human intellect cannot reach its full potential through contemporary education and that the key to harnessing this potential is through computers, largely reminiscent of Engelbart’s belief of augmenting the individual’s thinking abilities through the organizational abilities of the word processor and the ARC
• a learning environment should be comfortable, the student should be interested and autonomous
• ultimately Nelson introduces his Xanadu system that would incorporate these theories on teaching and apply them to be used in a single machine, he continues by describing several of the functionalities of the Xanadu system
• introduces the idea of “fantics” which describes the transmission and presentation of information by electronic media
• believes that humankind is on the verge of a revolution in information processing and handling that will come with the proliferation of the personal computer
• stresses that the inherent and most important issues of the computer are not technical but rather deal with the individuals consciousness of media, the consciousness of how information is being transmitted and presented to them
• discusses the issue of product design, introducing the notion of human-computer interaction and the immense importance of an intuitive interface that will promote ease of use and understanding of the machine
• uses terms such as fantic space, fantic structure,  fantic design to describe organizing constructs that determine the nature of interaction between user and system

Our goal should be nothing less that REPRESENTING THE TRUE CONTENT AND STRUCTURE OF HUMAN THOUGHT. But it should be something more: enabling the mind to weigh, pursue, synthesize and evaluate ideas for a better tomorrow. Or for any at all.

• through this selection, Nelson seems to cover many issues presented by some of the most important computer scientists we have read thus far in the New Media Reader, mostly he calls to mind the works of Alan Turing in attempting to create a mechanical model of the human mind and also like Engelbart in his humanist desire to improve the abilities of the individual that will in turn allow the individual to create better machines, creating a feedback system that will improve the standard of living

Augusto Boal: Theater of the Oppressed, 1974

• Boal is a Brazilian performance artist focusing on human interaction, with a particular interest in the politics of human interaction and the essence of the human body as a vehicle for performance and expression
• the notion of embodiment is particularly important to his work
• describes performances that attempt to equate audience and performer by using solely members of the audience as performers while those who are not performing are directing the performers, thus equally partaking in the perfomance
• discusses the dichotomy between the subject and object of a performance

Man is Man’s fate. Thus Man-the-spectator is the creator of Man-the-character. Everything is subject to criticism, to rectification. All can be changed, and at a moments notice …

• reminiscent of contemporary cyber-interactions between users on certain websites
• Youtube is the new Theater of the Oppressed, users are able to criticize the works of others in a public forum – may determine the users use of the site, the nature of his videos, etc. (see user Pruane2Forever)

Nicholas Negroponte: Soft Architecture Machines, 1975

• designing structures for human activity in both architecture and software design
• architect Nicholas Negroponte uses computers to aid his design work, believes the user should be empowered by the computer rather than discouraged and forced to consult a computer engineer
• Negroponte founded the Architecture Machine Group at MIT Media Lab in 1967, developed methods of spatial data management
• involved with Wired magazine, was the first investor in 1992

Joseph Weizenbaum: From Computer Power and Human Reason; From Judgment to Calculation, 1976

• programmer of the infamous chatterbot ELIZA – performed a programmed set of scripts called Doctor that would impersonate a psychiatrist depending on a user’s input to the system
• troubled by the possible implications and uses of his invention and called for the responsible use of technologies, like fellow MIT professor Norbert Weiner
• first example of a “thinking machine” in terms of Alan Turing’s test of machine intelligence vs. human intelligence
• proposes several questions on the nature of computing and the relationship of man and machine

1. What is it about the computer that has brought the view of man as a machine to a new level of plausibility?

2. The fact that individuals bind themselves with strong emotional ties to machines ought not in itself be surprising. The instruments man uses become, after all, extensions of his body. Most importantly, man must, in order to operate his instruments skillfully, internalize aspects of them in the form of kinesthetic and perceptual habits. In that sense at least, his instruments become literally part of him and modify him, and thus alter the basis of his affective relationship to himself.

But at bottom, no matter how it may be disguised by technological jargon, the question is whether or not every aspect of human thought is reducible to a logical formalism, or, to put it into the modern idiom, whether or not human thought is entirely computable.

“If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – forever.”

Since it was first published in 1949, Orwell’s 1984 has been transmuted from a work of literature to a cultural symbol. Over the course of sixty years, this novel has unconsciously seeped into our cultural awareness. Until this year I had neither read the book, nor discussed it in an academic setting, but I inadvertently knew about it – I knew about the watchful eyes of Big Brother and the dystopic vision of the future that was supposed to have developed nearly a quarter of a century ago. This is not the only novel to have ingrained itself into our collective psyche – the same can be said for Moby Dick or Huckleberry Finn. But whereas these novels seem to have faded from cultural relevance, 1984 has only become increasingly pertinent to social issues since it was written.

The theme in the book that is most relevant to today’s issues is the societal control of information. Since the development of the digital computer, the topic of information architecture has become a growing concern in politics, economics, and everyday life. With the invention of the World Wide Web by Tim Berners-Lee in 1989 and its subsequent proliferation, the information systems of our society have drastically and irrevocably changed. This revolutionary model of data structuring that is our current version of the internet represents a global sharing of information by networked users. At the surface, the modern internet is antithetical to the information systems Orwell depicts in 1984. In these systems, information is controlled at all levels by an authoritarian elite. This total control of information allows these individuals to essentially rewrite the past in order to create and sustain a model of history that best fits the needs of the government, maintaining the status quo and thus securing their power. This system effectively eradicates any notions of authenticity of information, for a conscious individual is hopelessly incapable of determining whether an event in the past has actually happened or if it is a fabrication of the Party.
In this light, it would seem that our methods of communication and information architecture represented by the internet are far superior, both practically and ethically. But, further inspection seems to suggest that the internet is particularly similar to Big Brother’s totalitarian regime.
With the growing number of internet users, the plethora of information on the web is ever-increasing (just go to the flickr home-page, or to any blogging platform’s site and they will proudly show you just how much new user generated content is uploaded to their site on a daily basis). As of now, there is no method of authentication on the net, allowing for any and all misinformation – whether purposeful or accidental – to become readily available and with little to no differentiation between a trusted and questionable website. Of course, there are sites that are by nature more reliable sources of information than others, but still there exists no comprehensive means of preventing misinformation via the web, though this has been suggested by Berners-Lee as a necessary innovation. Naturally, the analog basis of our information architecture remains – books, periodicals, magazines – but the reliance on this information is slowly declining, being supplanted by the digital realm of the computer. Though the greatest and most morally significant difference that exists between our culture and that of Oceania is the ability to choose from differing sources of information, the current trend seems to suggest a significant dependence on the internet as the ultimate source of knowledge.

For more sophisticated examples, see these works:
The Internet is Shit by Alain A-Dale
Art Since 1960 (according to the Internet) by Hanne Mugaas and Cory Arcangel and here

In the end, I’m glad to have finally read 1984. More than anything, I was surprised by how brutally descriptive Orwell could, or rather, was allowed to be in 1940′s Britain (think of Winston’s trip to Room 101). Also, for such a popular book I was again surprised that it would be so unapologetically bitter towards the future of man (see quote at the top).

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