something I felt like posting. I've only quoted a tiny part of
Carsten's original comment (and as it was originally made in a
closed community, I do have his consent to re-publish). He went
on to make some very salient points about how the skills required
to produce technical artifacts are by no means necessarily those
required to construct a society based on their use. However,
here's the original jeu d'esprit...
Carsten Bormann wrote:
"In medieval times, somebody who could read and write would,
in today's terminology, be considered a geek.
If you think about it, *this* is a large part of why medieval life sucked."
I almost agree; the people who could read found themselves
able to exploit more information (and more reliably, over an
indefinite period) than those who couldn't. The analogy there
might be those corporations who, in the 60s, first started to
exploit computing technology for business ends.
The people who could write were generally of two types;
some were the same people as above... i.e. the beneficiaries
of the technology. The others were the true "ur-geeks"...
the monks and clerks who sat in a scriptorium all day
doing the menial piecework which enabled the first group
to capitalise on the technology.
This second group of writers were like programmers in
many respects;
- they coded (even if you studied Latin, it's incredibly hard
to read medieval manuscripts, because they had all kinds
of little time/energy-saving tricks, abbreviations and so on.
Just like trying to read someone else's code...);
- they hacked (they re-used other people's parchment, and
knew how to 'wipe a disk' and over-write it... media being as
precious as ferrite ring memory...)
- they "Easter-egged" (when they got bored, they would hide
stuff in the text, like the identity of the scribe, or little
rebus-like puzzles)
- they had a certain grasp of PR... what's an illuminated manuscript,
if not a 'special edition DVD'? I.e., exactly the same content
as the regular edition, but with a lurid and fancy front cover.
You can take the computer away from the hacker, but you can't
take the hacker out of the human...
Posted by racingsnake
@ 09:40 AM GMT+00:00
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