BTW, I’ve been trying to remember the story that switched my green genes on to climate change. New York is drowning … A girl with a cat called HausMaus (in German, I think) is part of the same memory, but I’m probably wrong. I read it in the 1970s (probably c1975). ???Ballard’s “Drowned World”??

I suspect that the old style mailing list actually appeals to a different participant set because it’s old-tech and works better with ancient hand-me-down PC’s, whereas Wordpress has turned into a beast. However, I’d also like to venture the idea that self-selecting groups tend to make for better discussions and having a couple of hurdles to participation is no bad thing.

there are plenty of low income households who, even if given a free computer, struggle to make it work with the internet.

I was thinking about this in another context recently. It seems to me that it wouldn’t be unfair to say that the blogosphere and comments threads are overwhelmingly middle class and educated. That may have something more to to with certain protocols and practices of discussion which are classed, but it must also have something to do with access - let’s not forget also a lot of jobs don’t enable people to spend part of their working day on the net. There may also be a generation effect - the “digital natives” thing - though I’m still sceptical as to whether those “digital natives” aren’t mainly middle class kids.

That’s one of the reasons I found the use of the language of class (and essentially Marxist terminology) in Barbrook’s stuff interesting.

DeeCee is on to something with miniaturization, not to mention the affordability of one’s one computer, but there’s another obvious point.

Weeeellll. I still don’t think computers are affordable in the sense that a television is affordable. Us middle class types might think that the home PC is something of a ubiquity having grown up in suburbs full of Commodore 64s in the 1980s, but even in 2008 some 30 years after the Apple II, there are plenty of low income households who, even if given a free computer, struggle to make it work with the internet. A lot of people still rely on schools, libraries and internet cafes to get online. Computers are still overly complex, relatively expensive devices prone to viral infection and hardware failure.

I thought, back when I started playing with computers, that they would become so ubiquitous that they’d practically be free. It never happened, mostly because the “killer app” that is the internet changes so frequently that a 10 year old PC is virtually unusable on the modern web. It’s this reason that truly cheap hardware never takes off - WebTV, JavaStations, X Terminals etc and etc have all been failures and pretty much always will be until the technology settles down. It shows no signs of doing so - it isn’t regulated like Television and therefore will never be pinned down to a particular set of frozen standards like TV.

At the time, lots of people thought something like HAL was a realistic possibility in the near future. As it turns out, we have made virtually no progress towards making HAL, or anything resembling it.

Mind you, as a technologist I find data mining combined with increasingly linked-up databases just as scary, but nobody’s written the definitive data mining dystopia movie yet so it hasn’t penetrated into the consciousness of the general population yet.

The Matrix truly was an insipid pastiche of such sci-fi geekdom references. Not that I would know *cough*.

Easy. Miniaturisation!

As a SciFi reader, in the early 70s I knew where computers were heading - to ever bigger, ever more controlling machines. One of the last books I read before a happy SciGeek brought me news of miniaturised computers, was “This Perfect Day” (?Ira Levin). Not much later, I read “I have no mouth but I must scream” (no longer sure of exact wording), and couldn’t wait to get to work for a good old table-thumper with the pseudo-geeks. SciFi’s giant thinking, controlling techno-monsters would, only a few years later (as I might have posted before), become the home-made desktops kids cobbled together with Radio Shack parts & old B&W TV monitors. BIG, BAAAD!!! Small, good! Of course, as board members will argue, both types of computers exist in the netted world: zillions of small computers linked through Internet to one another via networks of supercomputers / servers.

My initial reservation about computers was their uni-logic, although those TechnoGeeks argued that this was countered by fuzzy-logic’s possibilities (I’m still not convinced). Whilst I just love the educational possibilities (oh to have had “Time Team” in my AncHist teaching days) I’m frightened by networked-computers potential for indoctrination, control and beyond “I can remember it for you wholesale” mind-manipulation. CCTV & webcam are well beyond “1984″, yet still of it. The “convergence” of CogSci & cybertech creates scenarios that make me glad I won’t be around to see if they’re right.

I could, at this point, launch into “you-name-it, I’ll try it” analytical/ critical paradigms; but as one taught the difference between “history” & “historiography” by a UNE wonderful faculty - and able to draw parallels between criticism of the evils of printing machines (and attempts to put the Chinese / Gutenberg genie back in the bottle) and similar efforts today - I won’t. Thank goodness I retired before I had to hold forth for 3,000 to 10,000 words on this round of Counter-CultureWars & New Dominicans.

I remember reading (in the ?early 70s, just after the publication of the first Club of Rome tome) that we were losing faith in progress, in the ability of our species to solve problems, in the belief that we could make our world a better place. I still haven’t.

(NOTE: Hope my aged brain didn’t confuse SciFi works this time.)

But enough to scare the pants off some ppl.

Scientology comes to mind.

They also tend to giggle a bit too much, talk into their sleeves a lot, and sometimes wear pants that are two sizes too large. Collectively, they demonstrate the co-operative instincts of a herd of cats, open-source projects notwithstanding.

I speak of them with affection, but they are not the stuff of revolutionary armies, methinks.