"The Internet, an immeasurably powerful computing system, is subsuming most of our other intellectual technologies. It’s becoming our map and our clock, our printing press and our typewriter, our calculator and our telephone, and our radio and TV."
"When the Net absorbs a medium, that medium is re-created in the Net’s image. It injects the medium’s content with hyperlinks, blinking ads, and other digital gewgaws, and it surrounds the content with the content of all the other media it has absorbed."
"As people’s minds become attuned to the crazy quilt of Internet media, traditional media have to adapt to the audience’s new expectations. Television programs add text crawls and pop-up ads, and magazines and newspapers shorten their articles, introduce capsule summaries, and crowd their pages with easy-to-browse info-snippets."
These ideas resonated for me and brought up some conflicting feelings. On the one hand, I love having a calendar, calculator, dictionary, access to driving directions, and the ability to remember the name of the actor who played in that one movie at my fingertips whenever I have a computer available (haven't made the leap to having my phone be my computer just yet.) On the other hand I HATE the way many of the traditional media have adapted to the ADHD environment of the web. It drives me nuts when I'm watching a TV program and little graphics pop up in the corners of the screen telling me what show I should watch next, or when television shows return from a commercial break only to recap everything I just watched and then show 2 minutes of new information before repeating the process all over again, or when I pick up a magazine and have to page and page and page to find something long enough to feel worth reading. Am I teaching my fourth graders to summarize so that summaries are all they will ever need read in the future? And is the reason they have so much trouble doing it because they never have to read anything longer than a paragraph unless I assign it? Makes me sad to think about the printed word becoming so "efficient."
I've said this in other places, but I believe what we are seeing here are the growing pains that come with most advances. We tend to keep the good/necessary and rid ourselves of the bad/extraneous when given the opportunity to do so. At some point, this will be what happens with Web 2.0 too, I think.
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