"Bruce Sterling - The Wonderful Power of Storytelling" - читать интересную книгу автора (Sterling Bruce)

time a platform vanishes it's like a little cultural apocalypse.
And I can imagine a time when all the current platforms might
vanish, and then what the hell becomes of your entire mode of
expression? Alan Kay -- he's a heavy guy, Alan Kay -- he says
that computers may tend to shrink and vanish into the
environment, into the walls and into clothing.... Sounds pretty
good.... But this also means that all the joysticks vanish, all
the keyboards, all the repetitive strain injuries.

I'm sure you could play some kind of computer game with very
intelligent, very small, invisible computers.... You could have
some entertaining way to play with them, or more likely they
would have some entertaining way to play with you. But then
imagine yourself growing up in that world, being born in that
world. You could even be a computer game designer in that world,
but how would you study the work of your predecessors? How would
you physically *access* and *experience* the work of your
predecessors? There's a razor-sharp cutting edge in this
art-form, but what happened to all the stuff that got sculpted?

As I was saying, I don't think it's any accident that this is
happening.... I don't think that as a culture today we're very
interested in tradition or continuity. No, we're a lot more
interested in being a New Age and a revolutionary epoch, we long
to reinvent ourselves every morning before breakfast and never
grow old. We have to run really fast to stay in the same place.
We've become used to running, if we sit still for a while it
makes us feel rather stale and panicky. We'd miss those
sixty-hour work weeks.

And much the same thing is happening to books today too.... Not
just technically, but ideologically. I don't know if you're
familiar at all with literary theory nowadays, with terms like
deconstructionism, postmodernism.... Don't worry, I won't talk
very long about this.... It can make you go nuts, that stuff,
and I don't really recommend it, it's one of those fields of
study where it's sometimes wise to treasure your ignorance....
But the thing about the new literary theory that's remarkable,
is that it makes a really violent break with the past.... These
guys don't take the books of the past on their own cultural
terms. When you're deconstructing a book it's like you're
psychoanalyzing it, you're not studying it for what it says,
you're studying it for the assumptions it makes and the cultural
reasons for its assemblage.... What this essentially means is
that you're not letting it touch you, you're very careful not to
let it get its message through or affect you deeply or
emotionally in any way. You're in a position of complete
psychological and technical superiority to the book and its
author... This is a way for modern literateurs to handle this
vast legacy of the past without actually getting any of the