Brought home the April 2010 issue of Wired from the library to learn more about, “What Kind of Cyborg do you Want to Be?” And in the process poured through the pages, well designed, richly aesthetic and effectively romantic to hear the story play out between print and digital content. Will the tablet save the newspaper? Do androids dream of $100, water proof, flexable, solar or cranked, networked tablets loaded full of ebooks in Swahili or Gujarati? What really convinced me to keep a closer finger to the pulse of Wired were the contributions by the fake Steve Jobs and Martha Stewart. I think Patterson Hood said it best, “It’s great to be alive!” As human-machine teams duel in chess to the power of 3.0 and gaming consoles run on UI’s that reach out and find the user, allowing NUIs requiring no touch, no mouse, no speaking, just a fluid co-mingling of superhuman powers, man, machine, but without the Cyborg Wars (fingers crossed, wait, too late).
And just in time for me to start a new job negotiating library access for digital content that is distributed on the most poorly developed content management systems that you give up before you access the content because as a library user you aren’t paying for it and will find a pirated version instead while libraries fork over subscriptions for often times, leased, digital content that is impossible for the average user to access successfully. What a racket. The whole world is arguing about how to distribute ebooks at a cost that is reasonable to user and author alike and now there’s the e-magazine, not to be confused with the e-journal.
Arrrgh. Just using this laptop to dance out these words, this show and telling that is blogging that is the new multimedia experience if only it weren’t for these big hot, 5 pound clamshell buzzing in my lap and the mousing touch thing where the roller ball and the laser used to be that doesn’t work as well as my smartphone. Am I becoming a blur of a man on the cyborg line? Desiring the brain of the google search engine to find the buried links to these outstanding visions that I can’t seem to find digging around in the hierarchical web animal that is any powerful web site/digital magazine / tablet screen, whatever you want to call it. On the line…
And I’ve got to get one of these Destroy It Yourself chairs!
Jonas Lamb 