PC Turnoff Week

[nemorathwald]

PC Turnoff Organization wants us to turn off our computers August 1 through 7. Their website features articles like "Give Your Kids The Gift Of Boredom." I am not making this up. For a moment I thought it was a parody, but it's not.

I can hardly wait five years to carry a computer with voice recognition in a hip pack, wirelessly connected to a heads-up display and headphones embedded in a pair of glasses. Through augmented reality, networking with each other would no longer involve staring through a window into another "cyberspace" reality. Computer-mediation is coming out of the screen, and layering over our entire environment.

I'm all in favor of getting up from a desk to interact with the world around us. I'll do that more often after wearable computers with augmented reality have made the two worlds become one and the same. Lose the ball and chain to the location, not the computer.

Comments

[phecda.livejournal.com]

All I can think of is the techno-god from American Gods who's freaking out at the big meeting because there's no net covereage there.

Oh, and General Information from "Stars in My Pocket like Grains of Sand"

I'm looking forward to being off everything this weekend. No internet, no cell, just myself and nature.

People used to create their own entertainment, now we just sit around waiting for the next stimulus to make us twitch...

[matt-arnold.livejournal.com]

I liked that guy in American Gods. I toasted him at Campcon during Elven Toast for the round when we toasted gods. I don't know General Information though. (P.S. What's up with Elven Toast? Either I don't get the point or it's just stupid.)

You know what's funny? I like to be a creator, not just a reactive consumer, but yesterday when we had an internet outage I couldn't because I didn't have access to my projects. (Except for coating the sculpture, which was done for the day and waiting to cure.) So I read my new copy of Ghost In The Shell. Had it not been for that I would have been creating my own entertainment, literally. R and I went to the zoo earlier and I had an epiphany of an innovative new visual method to convey the inner struggle of a character, previously the exclusive domain of written literature. I gratefully jotted it down on my handheld, and went back to viewing animals in a simulation of their natural habitat, but the idea wouldn't leave my mind. What if the idea had been written down later while the iron was no longer hot?

Last month Bill was complaining about my problems with Campcon. He likes to get away from technology. But I think that's just because he's dyslexic. One might say that a dyslexic person is handicapped and isolated online. In the same way, I feel a discomfort similar to physical palsy when I'm in the lonely isolation of nature. I say "palsy" because my virtual hands, sensorium and speech organs are cut off. If it weren't for filth and mosquito bites, the darkness of the hinterland would be a sensory deprivation tank. I wouldn't go quite so far as to say that the internet is where life happens and everything else is either about it, or just exists to sustain it. I would say that being without internet access is being handicapped and isolated. You talk like internet is TV. I react to it and it reacts to me, making parts of it an extension of my body and mind, and myself an extension of it. It's an ecology. I postulate that this might be how you view nature hikes.

[sothisislife.livejournal.com]

I can't read this post because my computer is turned off. Maybe when I turn it back on after August 7th I will read this post and comment.

[protoblues.livejournal.com]

Thank you for reminding me. I've seriously got to start work on that VR system(and drivers) for Linux. Now that I have those new computers I should be good to go.