By:

herwin John C. Malubay

 What needs to be
articulated, regardless of
the format of the man-
machine relationship is the
goal of humanism through
machines.
-Nicholas Negroponte
Personal
Renaissance
Gutenberg made everybody a
reader. Xerox made everybody
a publisher.
-Marshall McLuhan
One change that computers
seem likely to cause is a
decline of canonical texts
produced in uniform copies. In
some ways this change will
signal a return in print to the
style of the manuscript, or even
to ways of oral
conversation
-Ithiel de Sola Pool
Communication Ecologists
The mail and the press are the
nerves of the body politic.
-Sen. John C. Calhoun, 1817
Marshall McLuhan wrote of
the global network that has
much of the character of our
central nervous system. Our
central nervous system is not
merely an electric network, but
it constitutes a single unified
field of experience.
The society of mind takes great pains to divide
experience into workable fragments opaque to
each other.
-Steward Brand
 Marvin Minsky

Alan Kay
Danny Hillis
The behavior of the
market is driven by the
behavior of the market.
-Peter Schwartz
NASA scientists found that the depletion of ozone
was so severe that the computer analyzing the data
had been suppressing it, having been programmed to
assume that deviations so extreme must be errors. The
scientists had to go back to 1979.
-International Herald Tribune, 1986
Overly rational systems, including social structures
such as armies, prisons, schools, and hospitals, easily
become obsessed with uniform simplicity and
tidiness. Besides being brutal and boring, they are
inefficient and unstable as ecosystems. Complex
information systems will generate variety out of sheer
self-defense, if allowed to.
Ecologists of communications,
like biological ecologists, may
well wind up promoting
diversity as a sign and
protector of information-
system health.
Communications growth needs to keep moving or it
could go static, but if it goes too fast it could
generate massive resistance or crash by
misadventure.
If the world city goes smash, theyll pick up the
pieces, as theyve done before. Whatever happens,
they are a reminder that electronic communication
may be essential to one kind of living, but it is
superfluous to another.
Humanism through Machines
Media Lab devices are the
opposite of industrial machines.
Their function is not the
production of same-same-same,
but the endless creation of a
different-differentdifference,
because if its not different, its
not information.
-Jay Ogilvy
The idea is not to arrive at variety as rich as the variety
of human beings, but to start from there and expand
even further.
Connecting, diversifying, increasing
human complexity rather than
reducing it- these are instruments of
culture.
As for the media lab of the world, some serious
choices are in the process of being made. A major one
is whether human individuals will be the experiments
in the world lab or the experimentees, users of the
future or mere consumers of the future.
The most ethical of all tools are tools of
adaptiveness, tools that make tools,
tools that remake themselves. Our
machines have to welcome us inside
them and help us hack around in there.
A world of experimenters equipped with
such tools can always do the right thing
about the roster of technological futures
being offered at any time: invent better
ones.
Gratias
vobis
attente
audientib
us!