by
SNORTER
AKA
roops@freeuk.com
It's the question (it's the answer) on everyone's lips. Mentioned, picked up, augmented, amplified.
Of course. CONVERGENCE. Sounds right. Sounds good. But what does it REALLY mean? It's sort of, you know, stuff-plugging-into-stuff, interconnecting, becoming ONE. All streams running into the BIG Ocean.
EAST meets and greets WEST, they intermingle, get watered down (some more than others), the schizophrenic world smashes the two sides of its brain together, the walls come down, we awake blinking in the light of a BRAND NEW (tm) dawn, a rosy future, a utopian VISION. We CREATE the ultimate tool, the MM_Meta [1] tool, the wonder thing that does EVERYTHING, that can be changed, sculpted, squashed, expanded, through LANGUAGE, through CODE. But the MACHINE is hungry. It wants to CONNECT, it wants to grow, it wants to TALK. It wants to PROCESS. INFORMATION. faster and faster and smaller and smaller, cloning itself, the language made flesh. The in-your-face INTERFACE. Mind/Body code-breaker. What's that RINGING?
AhAH! Pluginpluginpluginplugmeinplugmein. Suddenly we EXTEND our nervous SYSTEM to include the lines where the voices go, where they run and flow, where they CONNECT and DISconnect, where they EXCHANGE, and so the VIRUS expands grows and TEXT again becomes important, it's small, it can be broken down, into BINARY and therefore into blips of ELECTRICITY, of SOUND. So we CHAT. through our FINGERS. we WRITE. we PUBLISH. and in the age of the VOYEUR and ANTI-VOYEUR we SHOW and we LOOK, we EXPLORE.
there is NO PRINTING COST. relatively. They talk of Information RICH and Information POOR. They talk of DIGITAL DIVIDE. mathematics. MONEY. to play in the FREEDOM, you have to have the TOOL. And the tool costs. MONEY. and the time ONLINE costs. MONEY. And if you don't have a PHONE? If the lines aren't DRAWN. [2] No problem. SATELLITE. but that's WAY out of REACH. and HANG_ON, so WHAT? I can't FEED, HOUSE or CLOTHE myself, why do I want to PLAY with a COMPUTER?
EXACTLY.
But the computer is now the language, and if you don't speak computer, then you don't speak, you have lost your voice. and the computer and telephone network is not natural convergence/development/fate it is like a black hole that sucks everything into it. It will provide you with a job, with an education a game to play a music distributor. it will do everything. and if you don't accept it, you will be left behind like a CRO-MAGNON, a sub-species left to die in the wilderness. Evolution will side-step you.
So you reach out, you want to KNOW. you want to SHAPE, you want to CREATE. You want to use the tool.
So you DO. But you want to talk, you want to DISCUSS. you want to CONNECT. Where the walls WERE, the grass has still not grown back together and there still seems to be an INVISIBLE barrier. so you talk. No answer. You RAISE your voice. a whisper comes back. you SHOUT.
you hold COMMUNICATION FRONT
[1] MM_Meta: Allusion to the JavaScript functions generated by Macromedia's Web-page editor Dreamweaver, e.g., MM_SwapImage (where MM presumably stands for MacroMedia), which unlike MM_Meta only serves to implement rollover images - eds.
[2] For CFront 2000, in order to have Internet access, a digital phone line had to be drawn to the lab in the Old City of Plovdiv, which turned out to be difficult, because in principle there are no digital lines going into the Old City - eds.