[-empyre-] screens

[Cynthia Beth Rubin]

HI All

Thanks for an interesting discussion on screens.  I also have not been able to read it all, but a few days ago I read a post in the Forward that has bothered me, and it seems relevant to Martin Rieser's comments, but a slight detour into an example of specific history being told on a screen.

Hinda Mandell, writing a blog published by the Forward (the on-line English version that is now the form of the old New York Yiddish newspaper) laments the appearance of Anne Frank, the App.

What seems to be the problem with the Anne Frank app is not that it presents information on your screen, but that the developers followed some trendy formula of how to present this information. The smiling face of teenage girl who we know was about to meet her death is perhaps not the best choice of icon for serious content that requires contemplation.  
 
http://blogs.forward.com/sisterhood-blog/158879/anne-frank-the-app

Turning a contemporary city into a place of history is a useful way to communicate to a younger generation the very thoughts that we normally have as those of us of a certain age wander the real world.

Is the issue that "screens" are foremost about fun and entertainment for a significant part of the public? Do we need a different screen for the not-fun-content? 

Cynthia B Rubin


from Martin Rieser:
> I think we are bogged down in the materiality and I am looking at a social changes in the nature and uses of screen (of course predicated on that materiality) -how we enter them , access them and use them in an age of pervasive and interactive media, and therefore what  concepts of the nature of content and its experience we are now constructing-I do think we are getting well off beam.