Disintegrating Computers
Somewhat related to Many Tiny Screens, Combined, Tim Maly writes about Disintegrating Computers:
Where I’d once do that by opening up a new window, I now grab my smartphone and look there. Instead of metaphoric operating system windows, I have a pile of devices acting as a windowing system. I can physically switch between them as needed, lay them out on the surface how I like, and work accordingly.
I increasingly do this myself: open up some manual for reference on the iPad while working on the computer, using the calculator instead of its desktop counterpart on my iPhone, etc.
See also: this lovely example of Screen multiplicity in a Swiss train by Nicolas Nova.
Jamais Cascio on Surviving the Future
Surviving the Future: Jamais Cascio excerpts from Jamais Cascio on Vimeo.
On Thursday, October 21, CBC TV will show Surviving the Future, an hour-long documentary on both the major challenges facing us over the next half-century and the amazing technologies and social shifts underway to meet those challenges.
Postcards from the Future
Map of the Decade
The Institute for the Future’s Map of the Decade combines a ten-year future forecast with a board game:
Reading in a Whole New Way
Kevin Kelly for Smithsonian Magazine:
Books were good at developing a contemplative mind. Screens encourage more utilitarian thinking. A new idea or unfamiliar fact will provoke a reflex to do something: to research the term, to query your screen “friends” for their opinions, to find alternative views, to create a bookmark, to interact with or tweet the thing rather than simply contemplate it. Book reading strengthened our analytical skills, encouraging us to pursue an observation all the way down to the footnote. Screen reading encourages rapid pattern-making, associating this idea with another, equipping us to deal with the thousands of new thoughts expressed every day. The screen rewards, and nurtures, thinking in real time. We review a movie while we watch it, we come up with an obscure fact in the middle of an argument, we read the owner’s manual of a gadget we spy in a store before we purchase it rather than after we get home and discover that it can’t do what we need it to do.
Future of Screen Technology
The Future of Screen Technology, as envisioned by Swedish design company TAT:
