Less of the Same

Some time ago I saw a lecture by Steven B. Johnson: one of the people I love to quote in my whole video game dissertation thing. I’m particularly keen of his notion of “data making sense of other data.” I had hoped to hear more about the future, but ended up with a mouthful of Web one point oh.

This is not no hating. You must go buy and read “Interface Culture” right now, at once. But here’s my thing: despite his uncanny ability to identify and describe a decade age a lot of what is common today, I got the feeling that his edge has gotten, well, dull.

Johnson is pretty busy lately with trying to overlay the technosphere onto the urban environment. So, what he wants to know is how to generate “everything that is being said online about schools within a one mile radius” when considering where to stuff his children during the day. A cross-reference of whatever is being blogged out there with geographical space. Unfortunately, it seems, whenever people say ‘urban’ nowadays they generally mean ‘New York City’ or, in Johnson’s case, ‘Brooklyn.’

I’ve grown a little tired of basically doing nothing in the real world and everything on a screen. Yeah sure, it’s great to know about what’s happening on your block, but at this rate we’ll all end up as armchair citizens. (insert clever reference to Marcuse here)

My invitation would be this: instead of applying pretty technologies to learn more about the world, perhaps we can move toward acting within it. Despite all the hyper-connected Apple-gear that shows up in my neighborhood, I’m experiencing a dire lack of a sense of community. Why, for instance, do the 15 or so apartments in my building ALL have to have their own private WiFi connection?  

Surely, some things cannot be taught, but have to be discovered. Placing yourself at the center of the universe, but only to the extent that you insist on maintaining your own epistemological boundaries, amounts to very little. It is impossible to indirectly know everything that is out there. (insert clever reference to Plato here) Sometimes you have to leave your comfort zone.