When was the last time a movie made you cry?
A book?
A blog?
Imagine an 15th century peasant, familiar with writing only as a concept, watching you work on your computer. You write a paper while listening to music, and a friend sends you a link to a joke. You add it to the five or six windows already open on your browser. A bleep, indistinguishable to the peasant from your normal computer noises, tells you that your friend on the other side of the world has come home and turned on his messenger program. In another window, you make love to a stranger whose gender you can only approximate.
Look 20 years into the future at yourself. How strange will that life seem to you?
How real is the internet to you? Are there places that are more real to you than others, more honest, more truthful? Do you assume a certain degree of truth for certain websites?
Is the last Facebook page you looked at more likely to be real then the last Ebay page you looked at? Deviant Art? Myspace profile? Livejournal?
If I sent you a link to a youtube video, what assumptions do you make about what you're about to see?
A book?
A blog?
Imagine an 15th century peasant, familiar with writing only as a concept, watching you work on your computer. You write a paper while listening to music, and a friend sends you a link to a joke. You add it to the five or six windows already open on your browser. A bleep, indistinguishable to the peasant from your normal computer noises, tells you that your friend on the other side of the world has come home and turned on his messenger program. In another window, you make love to a stranger whose gender you can only approximate.
Look 20 years into the future at yourself. How strange will that life seem to you?
How real is the internet to you? Are there places that are more real to you than others, more honest, more truthful? Do you assume a certain degree of truth for certain websites?
Is the last Facebook page you looked at more likely to be real then the last Ebay page you looked at? Deviant Art? Myspace profile? Livejournal?
If I sent you a link to a youtube video, what assumptions do you make about what you're about to see?