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“Their editing programs applied information-processing techniques rather than allow direct human interaction with texts on video monitors.”
Greater productivity for words → fueled by capitalism
“You learned to speak of files having no apparent physical dimensions, menus offering a selection of nonedibles, and monitors providing vigilance over your own words.”
foreshadowing how the virtual world will become so important it overrides the real world and life, first seen in language, then action, then our environment and now it is inescapable. (reminds of the power of language shaping reality and 1984 george orwell newspeak)
“This is bliss!" No more cutting paper and pasting, no more anxiety about revisions. Now you can get to work without the nuisance of typing and retyping”
in the quest to automate writing and infinite efficiency, at what point do we lose what makes writing, writing and how does technological advancements like this affect other art forms too? For eg. ai writing for us, are we just heading to a direction where because all action and art involves thinking we will just let computers think for us? Feel for us? Links to detachment like in the first quote. It feels like the tech just alienates the person from the physical action by putting a screen in between.
“You can snap any passage into any place with the push of a key. The flow of ideas flashes directly on screen. No need to ponder or sit on an idea—capture it on the fly!”
lack of stillness and living in the moment is becoming a lost art in the creative process as technology further mediates it. Can art become too convenient? Is what makes part of art, art the process of creation and removing the friction and obstacles is removing the process and therefore the art itself? It's also affecting how we enjoy art, due to lowering of attention spans. So many comments with people saying something like “I wish I could read this or do that but I don’t have the attention span for it”. How many lived and art experiences will we miss out on due to such factors?
“Your prose now reads—well—differently. You no longer formulate thoughts carefully before beginning to write. You think on screen.”
In design too, like when doing digital art then going back to traditional art I forget I can't do cmd + z and have accidentally tried to do it by impulse in my brain, but then I remember that's not possible. I also feel like unlike before I don't do traditional art as much anymore because of lack of patience. And it's a shame because not only was I really good at it, it was why I got into design in the first place. I used to say it felt too physically exhausting but now looking back maybe it was meant to be that way. Standing by an easel for hours moving across the studio to fetch more water, talking to the people next to me. Instead of always being hunched over a laptop in my room. This also may feel more isolating over time.
“Reporters would write a piece and show it to their editor; after blue-penciling it, the editor would discuss it with the reporters. The reporters would then take responsibility for making the changes. Now things are different. The editor gets the electronic text, makes the changes, and then sends the reporters a copy.”
Feeds the isolation point, reporters and editors used to discuss in person more now it's just sending documents.
“Books like Joyce's Finnegans Wake deserve another look as hypertext."
→Checking this out for later.
“The question is whether thinking, too, will end in the business of information processing. He saw a growing obsession with data without a concern for significance.”
Or rather a significance for data that has been predetermined for us by capitalism, so in this case profit (our data, behaviour and ways of being are now sold for companies)
“We get into the habit of clinging to knowledge bits and lose our feel for the wisdom behind knowledge.”
This, especially on apps like Tiktok.
“The painful translation into symbols signals acute infomania. But when logic works on the computer, this pain turns into convenience.”
“Through minute logical apertures, we observe the world much like a robot rapidly surveying the surface of things.”
And now AI does this “robotic” work for us, so what does that make us if we're not even the robot? The one observing the robot? The quality control for whatever the robot spits out? → This links to the quote about how reporters' jobs changed, the job of a writer changes to the editor as AI becomes the author.
“Book libraries hold unsystematic, unfiltered collections of human voices and thoughts.”
This is like the antithesis of how algorithms feed knowledge to us.
“Books still remain a primary source, but they are rapidly becoming mere sources of information.”
And now that information is fed to AI to create more text. Losing touch with the physical world.
“Any book more than two years old is of questionable value. Books more than four or five years old are a menace. OUT OF DATE = DANGEROUS”
I just recently searched my childhood books that I read in the library and they were gone. Replaced with newer books, where do the old ones go? Will they be archived or are they all given away?
“Given a constant stream of information, we must be skeptical of any structures that narrow its flow. For us, no single overarching order can set up proper channels for the incoming information. We also need to sort through and make sense of the tide of information. Information is abundant but without any fixed center around which to organize it. Our task is to hold onto the anchor of our own experience to find meaning in the sea of information.”
“Hypertext thinking may indeed reveal something about us that is agitated, panicky, or even pathological. As the mind jumps, the psyche gets jumpy and hyper. We can only hope that the postmodern hyperflood will not erode the gravity of experience behind the symbols, the patient, painstaking ear and eye for meaning.”