Alan Jacobs

Perhaps the most important thing to be said about the Art Project is that despite all the talk of interactivity and the application of Google’s street view technology to the museumgoing experience, what we have here is just a new version of an old dream—the dream of bringing an ever expanding audience into contact with works of art. The greatest museums, some of which are featured in the Art Project, are dedicated to that democratic promise, which is a promise not that everything is for everybody but that anybody should have the chance to experience anything. I am passionately committed to that principle, but even when more people do indeed have access to more works of art, we are still left with the nature of the individual’s experience, which is finally the only experience that matters. Some will say that the Art Project allows users to customize their experience, at least up to a point, by deciding which galleries in which museums they will visit, and how they will circulate around the rooms. But advances in technology do not necessarily make art more democratic. And in any event Google places severe restrictions on what we are able to see. At the Museum of Modern Art we gain access to a gallery of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century works, including Cézannes and van Goghs, but the adjacent gallery, full of Picassos, is just a blur, because his work is still under copyright, and thus not available for this particular tour. The Google Art Project may have the same relationship to museumgoing that Facebook has to friendship. It will take you only a small part of the way.

All right, dammit, I’m back. Posterous is seriously problematic.

Friends, enemies, and followers —

I’m giving up on Tumblr, which I have only been able to access intermittently for months now. Henceforth, More Than 95 Theses will be on Posterous. At least until I change my mind.

I am grateful that, thanks to the miracle of RSS, I’ll still be able to follow my favorite tumblelogs.

See you over at Posterous, I hope!

The New Atlantis (2)

Fabulous chalk lettering by Dana Tanamachi

Adiaphora: Our Refusal to be Spoken To

via socks-studio.com

In a new book, “Virtually You: The Dangerous Powers of the E-Personality,” Stanford University psychiatrist Dr. Elias Aboujaoude argues that the time we spend on the Internet doesn’t just cause us to have online alter egos. It influences who we become and how we interact with others when we’re offline as well.

“I see my book as my attempt at dissecting this thing called an e-personality – the changes that happen in our personalities when we go online, the new traits that we take on,” he said. “What I see, more and more, we are starting to resemble our avatars.”

At the core of science fiction is the notion of extrapolation, of asking, “If this goes on, where will it lead?” And, unlike most scientists who think in relatively short time frames—getting to the next funding deadline, or readying a product to bring to market—we think on much longer scales: not just months and years, but decades and centuries.

That said, our job is not to predict the future. Rather, it’s to suggest all the possible futures—so that society can make informed decisions about where we want to go. George Orwell’s science-fiction classic Nineteen Eighty-Four wasn’t a failure because the future it predicted failed to come to pass. Rather, it was a resounding success because it helped us prevent that future. Those wishing to get in on the ground floor of discussing where technology is leading us would do well to heed Alvin Toffler’s advice by cracking open a good science-fiction book and joining the conversation.

via www.chicagotribune.com