The web has given rise to a “renaissance of personal creativity,” claims Steve Bowbrick in today’s Guardian.
“When Tim Berners-Lee invented the web he anticipated that we'd all want to write as well as read. The first web browser could edit web pages as well as display them. Later browsers also allowed ordinary users to do it themselves - until Marc Andreessen, founder of Netscape, decided that the mass of internet users wouldn't want to do that and stripped the edit function out.
…
Blogging has changed all that, though. The web is now properly "writable" again and people who found their voices in their weblogs are now ready for more.”
I mentioned recently in Mediajunk that fully editable and configurable sites such as Wikis may just be the “more” that blog readers (and users) are looking for.
In the meantime, we’re certainly witnessing the rise of editable web elements – not only weblogs and diaries, but photograph collections, bulletin boards, social-networking sites (such as Ryze.com and Friendster.com), etc.
The editable revolution may not be exclusive a single digital medium. Michael Marriott, writing in the New York Times, suggests that computer games manufactures are considering releasing editable versions of their products.
“For years, players have found ways to hack into the digital DNA, the primary computer code that operates some of their favorite games, and alter its rules.”
These teenage hackers have grown up to be mainstream game developers and “are increasingly willing to give away the very software tools they use to construct the games, including them on the disc with the game itself.”
Both these trends, I believe, reveal an increasing comfort with – and literacy in – computer-mediated communications.
In the future, everyone will be a geek.
Comments
1 comments
You're right, but you're wrong.
People are going to be divided, even more sharply than today, into technological manipulators and consumers. You should read Neal Stephenson's In the beginning was the command line (available free on his site). It's like this- consumers like interfaces, things that make it "easy to do stuff".
So they don't want to be geeks, but if geekiness is what's fashionable at the moment, they will demand a way of being geeky without the actual work involved (like reading manuals).
Mac is a good example of this- illeterate "artists" wishing to be elite.
Also note that many true "geeks" buy macs- do you notice the trend? They wand a "dumbed down" interface. More like geeks wishing (deep and not so deep inside) for a simpler, dumbed down interface.
So it's going to be a little different from what you've envisioned- true geeks will be able to manipulate the system. THe system will feed on consumers. And it' won't be run by geeks, but rather by "good old boy" networks.
That might be geeks, and might be not.
In short, it will be just like today.
But even more idiots will think they're sofisticated by consuming dumbed down products.
Hooray.