I’ve been typing lots of stuff on a 386 laptop lately. It’s an IBM PS/2 L40 SX, upon which I’ve installed Windows 3.1 and Microsoft Word 2.0.
Quick tip: In Windows 3.1 there was no user folder or Documents folder. When you went to save a Word file, the default would be to save it inside the program files folder for Word, which is a weird place to keep your documents. But if go in to properties dialogue for the Word shortcut in Program Manager, then you can change the working directory of the application. That way you can choose where in the DOS path the program thinks it is running. So if you made a folder called C:\DOCS and then made that the working directory for Word then your first File->Save command would automatically open up within your new
In 2004, prolific online poster humdog wrote a extremely insightful analysis of the nature of internet communications and the “board ho”.
people do amazing acts of self-disclosure online. they do it, and i think they do it for one reason only. there is a different economy online and the payout is in attention and in time, not money attention is the big payout online.
The idea is that internet forums grow and thrive on the irrational self-disclosure of Too Much Information by people who commoditize all the private details of their lives and give it away in return for attention.
one of the things i see on blah blah boards is that many of the people who frequent them regularly appear to be people whose lives are not working for one reason or another. voices on the boards seem to
After I spoke with Howard for my podcast, he invited me onto his own show which is broadcast on Manhattan Neighborhood Network local access cable television. Since I started working on Silicon & Charybdis I’ve been neck-deep in studying the works of Marshall McLuhan and trying to apply them to computers. I’ve found a few friends in the McLuhan scene since, many of which have been on Conversations in the past, so I am honoured to do so in kind. It was a pleasure to share some of my thinking on computers as a medium and their role in society and current events. I look forward to many more such occasions, with Harold or anyone else!
An interview with television broadcaster Harold Channer, who has been interviewing guests on his hour-long television show Conversations with Harold Channer in New York City since 1973. With over 4000 hours of recorded interviews, Mr. Channer is one of the most prolific figures in the world of public access cable television.
This is the first episode of Life in the Foam, where I chat about media studies, early internet history, and many other interesting topics with regulars!
As you can see from part one, each modern computer itself is a vast terrain for exploration. Every application is a maze of screens and dialogues and options, providing tools which offer an incalculable variety of possible workflows and possibilities. Operating systems themselves are highly configurable and have deep levels of access and abstraction going down from the high-level user interface deep into the internals upon which it depends. All the files and resources which came with software can be pulled apart and opened, modded and configured. A modern computer is an entire cyberspace in and of itself.
The Web
But, of course, once the internet gets thrown into the mix, computers often seem to become flattened into mere machines which run your web browser. It wasn’t always this way, but started in 1993 when the world wide web …
Everyone has their own cyberspace; this is the story of mine.
My family first got a computer when I was about 6 years old. It was a Compaq Contura 4/25c laptop, a 486 computer running DOS with Windows 3.1. There were two games, both for DOS. One was a Berenstain Bears colouring book, the other was educational involving several minigames with a frog and lilypads. I spent a lot of time exploring every nook and cranny of that computer. I discovered typing “help” at the DOS prompt provided a list of commands to try out. I found the “dosshell” which I thought was edgy because it had the word “hell” in its name. I liked watching the Surface Scan in ScanDisk. I couldn’t figure out the difference between edit.com and qbasic.com beyond a few extra menu entries. I increased our …
Hello World! My concerns, fellow netizens, are about how cyberspace has affected our sense of embodiment and existence in our physical world. I study and tutor on Marshall McLuhan, and develop my ideas in what I am calling a Full Stack Media Ecology.
My earnest questioning began in 2014. Answers finally manifested in 2017 with my video documentary series Silicon & Charybdis.
In March 2024 I released a book-length culmination of my work the past decade titled Cheating at Peekaboo Against a Bad Faith Adversary detailing how the work of Jean Piaget was used to hijack early childhood development in kids like TempleOS creator Terry A. Davis.
Read more about the complementarity between media ecology and developmental psychology here in Who You Callin’ a Robot?
In June of 2019 I “Toppled the Pillars of Cyberspace” in Toronto at the 20th Annual Media Ecology Association Convention. Watch or read my presentation and paper to get to know more about how this all started.
I’ve also presented twice at LibrePlanet for the Free Software Foundation. My 2023 talk on the Long History of Metrics Before and After Cybernetics presents a sprawling overview of how mechanical calculation and optimization took over our world, inspired by Marshall McLuhan.
