User:Inge Hoonte/Personal Computers

Author unknown, Personal Computers with Personal Meanings

• adults are afraid of the new, and protective of the familiar
• impersonal system that only knows you as a number. programmers work on small parts of a problem, not part of whole concept. at home, they are.
• addiction to machines
• the beauty of understanding a system at many levels of complexity
• 'a room of one's own'.... building a room for yourself, a space, within the computer, your home
• aptitudes and ineptitudes
• learning to program is becoming a member of a culture you previously felt excluded from
• information becomes practical, playful, concrete, rather than theoretical, inaccessible > opens up imaginative possibilities > empowering to feel part of a larger, current movement. power of knowing the system you communicate with. doors open unto a future of where you understand all machines that you interact with on daily basis.
• transparency, intelligibility, open, participatory
• in 70s, computers were seen as making possible new forms of social interaction > knowledge coops instead of food coops, bulletin boards instead of neighbor's gossip
• save on transportation and energy costs by working from home
• computer became image for individualized, self-run society > enables to bend things to your will (unlike society)
• enables thinking about issues beyond the self > politics, education, society
• desire for control