People tend to forget why the personal computer got started and why many of us have spent our lives toiling in the software mines moving the PC revolution ahead. Some of it is explained in the “Manifesto” print ad in Microsoft’s new ad campaign. Full Size Image
WINDOWS
VS
WALLS
This epic struggle explains why we make what we make and do what we do. The thing that gets us out of bed every day is the prospect of creating pathways above, below, around and through walls. To start a dialogue between hundreds of devices, billions of people and a world of ideas. * To lift up the smallest of us. And catapult the most audacious of us. But, most importantly, to connect all of us to the four corners of our own digital lives and to each other. To go on doing the little stuff, the big stuff, the crazy stuff and that ridiculously necessary stuff. On our own or together. * This is more than software we’re talking about. It’s an approach to life. An approach dedicated to engineering the absence of anything that might stand in the way…of life. * Today, more than one billion people worldwide have Windows. Which is just another way of saying we have each other.
Mike's Rants 
August 19, 2015 at 10:15 am |
I so totally disagree with this view. For some of us the computer creates walls of complexity that make simple tasks a burden and rather than feeling like I am more connected or that “we have each other” through these “windows” the “information age” actually makes it harder to connect with the people and explicit information we seek. We must wade through so much cybergarbage to get to the “info-gem” we seek.
Moreover, it has been proven that the human brain develops more dendrites when a person is learning while in motion or in tandem with being physically engaged in activity, which means all the solo surfing kids do now is not helping their brains grow and is, in fact, making them less intelligent. I used to have to get on my bike, ride 2 miles to the university and climb stairs to get to the stacks, or the academic journals–now all a student need do is point and click a mouse. Is this magical or mundane?
You techies will all write me off, but there are some very serious downsides to all of this force fed technology. It divides us as much as it unites us, and what some of you fondly call “windows” to information still represent walls– both physical and intellectual– barriers in the lives of a variety of cohorts from whom you do not wish to hear.
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