The greatest of the United States’ homegrown religions – greater than Jehovah’s Witnesses, greater than the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, greater even than Scientology – is the religion of technology.
.. In 2014, the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen sent out a rhapsodic series of tweets – he called it a ‘tweetstorm’ – announcing that computers and robots were about to liberate us all from ‘physical need constraints’.
.. And: ‘The main fields of human endeavour will be culture, arts, sciences, creativity, philosophy, experimentation, exploration, adventure.’
.. By spreading a utopian view of technology, a view that defines progress as essentially technological, they’ve encouraged people to switch off their critical faculties and give Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and financiers free rein in remaking culture to fit their commercial interests.
.. Intellectuals spanning the political spectrum, from Randian right to Marxian left, have portrayed the computer network as a technology of emancipation.
.. The culture that emerged on the network, and that now extends deep into our lives and psyches, is characterised by frenetic production and consumption – smartphones have made media machines of us all – but little real empowerment and even less reflectiveness. It’s a culture of distraction and dependency.
.. And it is to deny the assumption that the system, in order to provide its benefits, had to take its present form.
.. John Kenneth Galbraith coined the term ‘innocent fraud’. He used it to describe a lie or a half-truth that, because it suits the needs or views of those in power, is presented as fact.
.. The computer screen was becoming, as all mass media tend to become, an environment, a surrounding, an enclosure, at worst a cage. It seemed clear that those who controlled the omnipresent screen would, if given their way, control culture as well.
.. The Valley-ites were fierce materialists – what couldn’t be measured had no meaning – yet they loathed materiality.
.. In their view, the problems of the world, from inefficiency and inequality to morbidity and mortality, emanated from the world’s physicality, from its embodiment in torpid, inflexible, decaying stuff. The panacea was virtuality – the reinvention and redemption of society in computer code.
.. What we’ve always found hard to abide is that the world follows a script we didn’t write. We look to technology not only to manipulate nature but to possess it, to package it as a product that can be consumed by pressing a light switch or a gas pedal or a shutter button. We yearn to reprogram existence, and with the computer we have the best means yet.
We would like to see this project as heroic, as a rebellion against the tyranny of an alien power. But it’s not that at all. It’s a project born of anxiety. Behind it lies a dread that the messy, atomic world will rebel against us. What Silicon Valley sells and we buy is not transcendence but withdrawal.
.. What I want from technology is not a new world. What I want from technology are tools for exploring and enjoying the world that is ..
Music Mediums: LP & CD Share the Type of Music
Take an average record. A piece of vinyl 12 inches in diameter, a groove cut into the surface contains music. For a standard LP, the groove is 1,500 feet long.
.. But pop musicians playing with the limits of 45s began to longer art during the 1960s, exploiting the 50 minutes or so of music that the 1,500 feet of groove allowed. This, in turn, precipitated change in music discovery medium of the day — radio — and on it went.
..
Every physical medium had its little quirks. Recall: most tape players couldn’t skip tracks. But it was easy to record on tapes. Meanwhile, it was a revelation when CD players could loop individual tracks or the whole disc at the touch of a button. But man, did they skip with the early portable players. And the read-write capability was lost for most systems. You could burn CDs from your computer, but no one recorded the radio onto CDs like they did with tapes.
We expect this kind of thing to influence the way we experience, maybe evenhear, music. But what about the digital interfaces that now dominate the market? Shouldn’t they exert just as much of an influence over how we listen and how artists create?
Knewton: Technological Determinalism: The Unstoppable Wave
Education didn’t use to work this way. There may have been unpredictable one-off events, but there were no system-wide surprises. But that isn’t how digital industries — which education is now becoming — work. A technology wave can take years or decades to develop, but when it crests it reshapes everything in its path. It is unstoppable, but with some intelligent foresight it is partially predictable.
.. In classic disruptive innovation style, this may initially gain widespread traction with courses a given student’s school doesn’t offer, and which hence are only available to that student online from other institutions.