User:Inge Hoonte/Personal Computers

Notes

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