Marhshall McLuhan argued that in each socio-cultural era
the medium in which information is created and transmitted
determines the essential characteristics of that culture. He
also predicted the evolution of an interconnected "global village". The shift from a centralized media industry
modeled on industrial revolution structures to a
decentralized chaotic information-age soup is having a
profound effect on the messages we exchange and shaping the
characteristics of our culture. The global village comes to
a crescendo with podcasting, and you can participate in the
revolution with tools that are easily within reach: your
imagination, the computer you're using to read this web
page, and a video camera. We're not going to predicting
what's next, as that's going to depend on what you, yes you,
plan to do with new media. If the flutter of one butterfly wing, can
trigger a chain reaction of events resulting in a storm
half-way across the planet, imagine the effect millions, or
billions, of individually produced videos will have on the
characteristic of the global village and the media
landscape.
Trapper Callender on 11 Feb 10On December 9, 1968, Douglas C. Engelbart and the group of 17 researchers working with him in the Augmentation Research Center at Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, CA, presented a 90-minute live public demonstration of the online system, NLS, they had been working on since 1962. The public presentation was a session of the Fall Joint Computer Conference held at the Convention Center in San Francisco, and it was attended by about 1,000 computer professionals. This was the public debut of the computer mouse. But the mouse was only one of many innovations demonstrated that day, including hypertext, object addressing and dynamic file linking, as well as shared-screen collaboration involving two persons at different sites communicating over a network with audio and video interface.
