[-empyre-] Re: empyre Digest, Vol 29, Issue 9: forward from Deborah MacPherson

[Christina McPhee <christina112@earthlink.net>]

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forward from Deborah MacPherson   debmacp@gmail.com


Hi Alan -

RE: "...the Net itself was developed as we know out of military  
contracts; television connects to WWII radar
technologies, and so forth.'

THEN"...does all art have to reflect its political-sociological- 
militarist-etc. origins"

I guess not.

Probably the only person fairly happy with the Internet may be Tim  
Berners-Lee - but is it creative enough yet?

Even though anyone can now participate, in the words of Edward J.  
Barkmeyer at NIST today on Ontolog Forum (http://ontolog.cim3.net/cgi- 
bin/wiki.pl, more scientific/semantic approaches) ".....no one is  
responsible for much of it, we have no civil engineering discipline,  
we have no land use planning, we have random patchworks of streets,  
we are carrying the water on foot in buckets from the most convenient  
well, we have no police force and no fire brigade, we have sewage  
problems, crime problems and frequent plagues.  Some communities  
thrive and some die out, and we don't really understand why.  And yet  
people keep coming here, because there is education, and jobs, and  
entertainment, and money to be made. Ultimately, technology enabled  
us to get control of it, and fires and plagues forced us to."

THANK YOU for not lurking. This bull has got to be taken by its horns  
for a number of purposes. It is not simply for kids to communicate  
with all their friends at once or military applications. Internet  
communications and modern forms of public record keeping has got to  
be made sense of - and why not now, sooner, rather than later so we  
don't miss all the first time exchanges going on.

The Internet will evolve itself but we should also steer it for many  
of the reasons stated here in Empyre digest and others.

Debbie MacPherson