Believe it or not, I nearly believed that Magic Ink link would be “super-brief.”
Well, in terms of disillusioning, I guess the readings did a great job. On the other hand, I wasn’t really interested (at least at the beginning) in the topic – yes, it’s obvious from the first paragraph what the reading is up for. And my mere response to that would be, ‘Okay, maybe that’s not a promising vision, but I still want us to achieve it someday.’ However, beyond the ‘rant’ itself, what intrigued me was the idea of ‘the conventional means of interfacing the brain to the world (i.e., the body).’ Essentially, from my perspective, that is my first impulse to get in touch with IM: how are we going to interact (input and output info) as human beings in the future?
I always told people that I don’t like to read—but I’m forced to do so just because it holds (arguably) the most dense info on this planet. That’s in terms of ‘the media’—whatever that delivers information. At least for now, according to the scope of info that we can quantify, text still has its edge. (Honestly, it’s really sad news for me to acknowledge at the beginning – like a couple of years ago – that probably music that is based on audio (2 parameters) and paints based on images (arguably three parameters?) as the art forms I love has their inherent limit to express—even if we haven’t (or maybe already) reached).
On the other hand, what about humans? I mean, what about our bodies? I would say that people who strive to devise new media and convey and people who strive to plunge into our cognitive system are two teams that approach the same theme from two angles. I cannot answer if ‘bypassing’ the body is a good thing or not. But, for now, I would say the body is still a component of what we call ‘human.’