Posts by BenWilson
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I won't say I agree with you, Gio, but I am trying to understand. One counter argument for my Grandma example is that there's nothing stopping someone like me, who already helps her with the television, from helping her get stuff off the net.
I have actually already done this - just before the current Iraq war she commented to me how horribly disconnected she felt from the truth, that what she was thinking about the war was not being represented in any of the media she could easily access. I made a point of finding a whole bunch of articles from Google News and various other places (including Hard News), printing them out, and giving them to her to read. Next time I saw her she was mighty grateful and asked what newspaper I'd got them out of. When I said it was all off the internet and had taken me only an hour to compile, she perked up interest, but when I began to explain it in any more detail it was pretty clear to me that she became frightened and angry. She's never asked for a repeat.
Now, was that fair of her ?
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Gio wasn't suggesting that anyone who did get connected was losing out. Nor was he making excuses not to connect for those who haven't yet. It was more that the connected world has a big influence on the non-connected world, and that it can hurt the non-connected world mightily, and responding to that with "SO CONNECT" isn't totally fair.
His point is especially in the context of this copyright discussion, wherein the wholesale movement to electronic form of authors will basically disconnect people who weren't connected from something they valued greatly.
My Grandmother would be a good example. I think I can safely say she will never in her life use a computer. She has enough trouble with the television. But she is still a voracious reader, indeed it's one of her last remaining joys, and probably the main thing keeping her very old mind very sharp. Any author that she reads who shifts to cut out the middle-man is going to cut her out too.
My wife's father was pretty much laid off because he couldn't really handle having to use a computer. Which was barely relevant to his job, something he was still doing quite adequately (at least the way he tells it).
Will somebody please think of the old folks? :-)
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I'm not a futurologist, but I forsee you're going to have no difficulty at all falling asleep for the next several nights, Ben.
Just as well you aren't. You might be underrating how compelling what you're talking about is. At risk of making a joke that only you will understand, reading what you're saying is like taking a walk down memory lane, something I always enjoy.
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I'm starting to think your arguement with me is actually with your own assumptions
Aren't all good arguments like that?
My point is rather that the people who are afraid and the manifestations of their fears, which are so easily dismissed as conservative and backward looking, deserve to be understood and properly evaluated.
I often feel that way in my work. Experienced programmers get a good feel for what is easy and what is hard to program, and also what is a good way to do it, and what is not. But when confronted with a potential change to organizational procedures that are 'plainly worse' us old guys are often seen as simply recalcitrant. Sometimes that is true, and recalcitrance is exactly what it's about. But other times (IMHO most of the time), it's really that we've actually been down these stupid paths before, often many times, and we're sick and tired of being told how to program by non-programmers. It's not any inherent dislike of the proposed 'efficiencies' of the 'new' idea, it's annoyance at how inefficient and old the ideas often are, how divorced from practicality, and how hard it is to convey that without the years of experience.
Which can lead to a feedback loop. If management thinks you're recalcitrant and treats you that way, then you very often become so.
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You're only part reptile, dude. I've got a copy of your thesis on my PDA now, so that I can read it in bed. I can't promise not to fall asleep if I hit a particularly postmodern patch, but I am trying to get what it is you fear so much about the future of the digital age.
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The people it does happen to include have an obligation I think to examine their privileged speaking position, and not assume that they represent a totality, *the* people.
In this debate, the potential losers being existing copyright holders? People whose very work was undertaken on the explicit assumption that they would own a piece of the means of reproduction?
Certainly they will lose out some. Is this in dispute? Anyone?
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Starting in Ionian islands and then on through troublesome relationships with religions that were around over time, so I kinda left it out on purpose.
I'm not one to discount the vast array of ancient philosophers who weren't Greek, just because I haven't particularly studied them. But of the Greek ones, you'll find if you actually read them, that the basic assumptions they started with were begun by the theories of the culture that they lived in. They were the kind of things that humans are likely to come up with as the first shot at explaining things. Very often the second shot, and many subsequent ones, would seem equally absurd to us today. But they were progressing. To even be paying attention to trying to explain the movements of the cosmos was a good start. At some point, one of the theories, whether it contains references to supernatural beings or not, starts hitting nearer the mark, and real progress is being made.
Believe it or not, it was actually the scientific observations of Aristotle that created a great deal of the difficulties for the Catholic Church in accepting the idea of Copernicus, that the Earth moves. It was not much to do with the Bible and supernatural beings, and everything to do with the fact that parallax could not be observed at the time. Certainly they erred in oppressing Galileo for his beliefs, but I don't buy fully that the oppression was religiously motivated. It had a great deal to do with 'who owns the science?'. The Church thought they did, and certainly they had the bulk of the scientists of the time.
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The, er, what now?
I'm not about to think I really understand Gio's point until I've finished reading his dissertation. So I hope he doesn't take umbrage at my possible misunderstanding.
Being able to write well confers a very big advantage in discussions here
For sure, but I was actually talking about being able to read and write at all which some people still can't. But that doesn't mean that being able to wasn't an incredibly empowering thing for the human race, even if a lot of humans never took advantage of it.
Gio was suggesting that whilst the internet is surely empowering to some, as a result it may have undermined other institutions that were doing some good, and thus has simply shifted power, rather than 'generally empowered humanity'.
Oh, and TradeMe is awesome. Both for buying things, and for researching alternatives. I could have been led to believe that an electric bike should cost $3000 if I went only by what retailers offer them for. I got mine for $200 delivered, and when I went to test one of these $3000 ones to compare, it was basically a little bit more shit, at 15 times the price. Now my cycling is quite literally empowered.
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purely by the medium that PA occurs in it is bias to the people that frequent it.
Sure but that doesn't refute the idea that a lot of people have been mightily empowered by the net, and that looks likely to continue. I'm curious in what ways Gio thinks people have been disempowered by it, as a source of his fears about the 'dangerous kind of thinking' involved in pointing out how empowering it has been. The pool of literate people was small in times past too, but has anyone ever said that becoming literate was disempowering? Or is he claiming that becoming literate disempowers other people by giving you some unfair advantage?
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So I guess we agree.
Not sure yet :-)
Im guessing here but you saying this because you see theist's and atheist's as two sides of a coin, ying and yang?
Hardcore ones, yes.
Yet you say you are an atheist but of a different stripe? Im completely nonplussed as to why you say this.
I'm, softcore. I think there is no all powerful and benevolent God, but there could be any number of gods which don't fit one or other of those adjectives. Furthermore, I'm not convinced when the Argument From Evil is refuted with "It's not for us to know God's divine plan". But equally, I find the ability of Evolution to explain absolutely everything, given a good enough story, to be a weakness rather than a strength sometimes. There is almost no way the general theory could be refuted. So my conviction on the non-existence does not have the diamond hardness of most Atheists.
Now thats a bold claim.
Heh, I'm always happy to be proved wrong on those - they're just to get the ball rolling.
Are you trying to insult me or something. I find it bizarre.
Nope. Just discussing the topic raised. No insults intended.
And I thought the usual descriptions for people in the ancient world who theorized about creation was priest, shaman or holy man. But if you want to think them scientists go ahead.
Cheers. You left out "Philosophers", btw.
And I thought that once a creation theory was um created. Its creators didnt try to prove or disprove it, they just passed it on to the next generation.But I'll never know I wasnt there.
My guess is that like most mythology they are constantly built upon, and what seems silly at the time is just not used and eventually forgotten. And you only have to read ancient works about science to see that they looked for proof and disproof of the ideas a lot.
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