|
As mayor, city manager, and webcrafter, it's my job to put Linkville on the map.
Not too clearly on the map, though--it's awfully nice here just the way it is.
The Mayor's mansion is a farm house built in the early 1880's,
located near the beating heart of Silicon Valley. I've found that the
twice-a-day commute between the past and the future has created an
atmosphere where assumptions about information transmission, acquisition and
transmogrification are questioned and new practical real-life configurations
experimented with. How does digitizing, enhancing and adding sound bites to old family
pictures modify our experience of the past and our relationship with the
people who lived there? How can we best retain authenticity and
continuity with the past and integrity in the present while immersed in digital
video?
Many of Linkville's citizens are consciously developing ways of
integrating new information transfer technology into their daily
lives, regardless of their level of technological sophistication.
- Posting pictures on the web, to share with family, circle of friends or the whole world
- Self-publishing through blogs, sending whatever is on your mind out to the 'blogosphere' to be lauded, attacked or ignored.
- Communicating directly with the rest of the world, bypassing traditional news media, from places like Syria, Egypt and China.
- No longer wearing a watch, because now they have one small piece of equipment that contains a clock. And a calendar,
a calculator, an organizer, a portable telephone, a game console, a detailed map of the world with turn-by-turn verbal directions,live
broadcasts of news, movies, comedy shows, music, art, travel information and every book in the Library of Congress.
Posting your pictures or creating a home on the internet that is truly yours, and being
able to access the internet from a pocket device anytime, anywere is
technologically marvelous--but the tools we use do change us and our perceptions
as we use them. Will we use these tools to build Linkville or Dystopia?
Can YOU ignore a ringing phone, no matter what you might be doing? How many times a day do
YOU check your e-mail? Does the proliferation of disgusting and irritating spam
affect your mood, even when you step away from your computer? Have you experienced a virus invasion of your computer or
other device recently? What percentage of your discretionary income do you pay per month for internet and cell phone access?
How much of your time is spent communicating on-line, rather than face-to-face? Do you think that the control over digital
music distribution wielded by the recording industry will affect the free flow of other digitized information? Are you concerned
about the privacy of your communications through Google, Facebook and others? What is your feeling about government monitoring
of internet and cell phone traffic, and how do you think that compares to the information your drugstore and grocery store collect
about your shopping habits?
Our world and the way we relate to it and to each other is being changed by technology in
ways we can't anticipate--but as long as that technology is used to create places which connect rather than divide us, there will always
be a Linkville to come home to.
|
![[new link!]](http://www.linkville.com/images/FLOPNEW.GIF)