Are we better entertained and educated within the current media convergence of ITC in our homes, schools, museums and at work or just more distanced and distracted from the world? The march of the techmemes which renders, instantaneously transmits and receive signals of orgasmically surreal fidelity is truly amazing (HDTV, DVDs, CD, computers, PDA, mobile phones, game box, etc...)., but the most complete documented evidence on collaborative social interaction in "Bowling Alone" indicates Social capital in declined for many years. Although smart mobs and social networking software appears to be shifting that, increased amounts of time are spent alone with our technology instead of with our fellows humans and in the physical world. Why?
Since 1991, and till this day, after many visits to various science museums and planetariums (on both sides of the Atlantic) with my young son, I continued to see huge problems with how we render and connect people to information and providing important context markers. Of particular issue, is that of positioning the users contextual links within and between space and time. Thus. mashed time and space and place can cause cognitive dissonance. I am amazed at how little innovation has taken place here.
Converging art and science music, math, and geo spatial areas offers much fertile ground for active engagement. The open source movement, supplies our needs to share with, teach to, and learn from the connections with each other in whole new ways. It is leading to exciting OpenGIS work specifically, which is already changing how relate to our world and planet, both in construct and content. Add to that kids prefer PDA's to laptops and the fact that much video game play is mostly an exciting 'context', with little valuable 'content' ; great at teaching how to blow up things up (if not yourself), but bad at delivering an entertaining enriching life skills experience and you start to get a glimpse of my passion. "With all that 3D graphics and audio processing power" I thought," we have to do better!
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