Er, Robin--or rather, Nick Negroponte--how many people just watched the
Super Bowl? I haven't noticed many changes since last weekend. I'm
familiar enough with your thinking,Robing, to suspect/hope that there
was at least a smidgen of irony in your post.
 
Seriously, the Media Lab/Negroponte pontifications about how technology
is going to change the world strike me as hopelessly naive, culturally
biased in the extreme, and partaking of a curious form of infinite re-
gression: it's always the NEXT technology--the current insiders' term
is "frontier technology" (talk about a loaded term...)--which is going to
effect this alleged change. It seems like the historical progression of
styles is being supplanted by a succession of media, wrapped up in the
rhetoric of democratization, but actually perpetuating the control of
these media (and, to a large degree, the messages) by established
interests. Read the 1988 Stewart Brand Media Lab hagiography: on the
one hand, art is employed as a guarantor of "quality;" at the same time,
art is looked at as a non-essential, leisure pursuit without political
or social consequence.
 
Negroponte is speaking at a bookstore in Brookline (Boston) next week,
he said, rubbing his hands together in anticipation.
 
Brian Wallace
 
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