G'day All,
Since the transparency issue
came up at the beginning of the quarter I
have been wondering: isn't there
an inherit danger in what Turkle calls
the "Macintosh Interface", whether
that is to be considered transparent
or opaque (depends how you look at it)?
If the users of computer systems
only know the surface, the desktop and it's
icons, and have no clue what
is going on behind it, isn't that asking to be
manipulated? If you can
no longer open the hood of your car when it breaks
down, you have no
choice but to bring it to a garage and have it repaired,
and pay
whatever they charge you.
The book "This Perfect Day"
by Ira Levin comes to mind again and again.
It it, the protagonist finds out
that a small elite of programmers are
the ones really in power in his
seemingly perfectly organized,
computerized society. Dibble make a point
somewhere about the Power
Elite of Lambda MOO existing of the geeks you
don't mingle with in High
school. What if a person like Bill Gates gets to
be more powerful then
the government? It's for a good reason that one of
possible the
solutions to the Anti Trust suit against Microsoft is to force
them to
make public the source code of their windows operating system. It is
like forcing them to lift the hood of the Windows car.
On a slightly related note:
Does the implementation of spell check, and
especially grammar check, have
an influence on the way we write? Could
it influence the evolution of the
language? Including certain words in
the dictionary, and leaving out others,
those are powerful choices.
Seems like the perfect way to introduce "New
Speak". And favoring a
certain style of grammar, for instance short and
simple sentences, might
influence our style of writing. Don't we all edit
our documents 'till
most of the red and green squiggly lines under the text
are gone? What
if Word immediately and automatically corrected "Microsoft
Sucks" into
"Microsoft Rules"?
Wobbe.
(Darn, there it just happened again: I clicked the wrong button
and
suddenly I was Wobble...%-/)
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Fri Mar 17 2000 - 08:00:02 EST