A better pencil
There is a interesting short interview over on Salon with Dennis Baron, author of A Better Pencil. In his book, Baron looks back across history at how every advancement in communications has been met with a level of fear and suspicion, particularly from those who are strongly invested in the medium that is being displaced by the new one. At the heart of this reaction, according to Barron, are issues of power and control:
” The more people use technology, the more people communicate, the more people in power become concerned with how to control that use. There are two forces pushing against each other. Whether it’s government or religious organizations or schools controlling what children do online or parents controlling what their kids are doing with communication technologies or groups online self-organizing and deciding how to control what does and does not get expressed — it’s similar to what happened when printing presses became a major means of communication or when radio and TV became major communication players. How do you license, how do you control what gets said on the air?”
2 comments
1 Brian { 09.25.09 at 9:30 am }
I was sent this link via a friend on Twitter, came here to post it… Dang, foiled by Miller yet again. Book sounds interesting.
2 Delphine Williams Young { 11.05.09 at 3:15 am }
This is a very interesting interview especially as I just read an article entitled ” Whither Psychoanalysis in Computer Culture” by Susan Turkle, published in the Psychoanalytic Psychology journal in 2004 vol. 21. The internet offers even more outlets for people to be stress free. If you can take on identities due to the anonymity that can be created using the internet then you can never be bored. There are some of us who will always be learning and trying out new things and this is why we have not remained stagnant. Despite opposition there are those who will continue to find new ways of representing new ideas and replace the old ones if neccessary. Look at how slow telegraph became after a while because we found quicker ways of sending messages. I feel that if the older generation (of which I am a part)would be less resistant to change and spend more exploring the advantages of new technology then the wisdom of the old could merge with the new and then even more possiblities could emerge. For those of us who are learning from the young there is no time to be bored or stressed. And as Baron suggests we have never been able to access all the information available to us within a generation so why are we complaining so much rather than embracing the new and helping our young people appreciate the value of the old. In other words help then to use the new pen with more wisdom. If we don’t know anything about what they are doing we are not in a position to judge them.
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