Computer Lib/Dream Machine

By Theodor Nelson

About the Author

• Theodor Nelson is a sociologist, philosopher, and pioneer of information technology. He is credited for creating terms as “hypertext” and “hypermedia”.

• He wants to create an interface easily accessible to ordinary people. So simple “that a beginner in an emergency can understand it within ten seconds.”

• He promotes four maxims: "most people are fools, most authority is malignant, God does not exist, and everything is wrong.”

About the Book

• It combines two books back-to-back.

• Computer Lib/Dream Machine is considered one of the most important books in the history of new media.

• It is regarded as the first book about the personal computer.

• It destabilized the existing computer order, brought about a conception of the computer as a personal device.

A summary of Computer Lib

• computers have been made a mystery to most of the world.

• A widen gap between the ordinary people (laymen) and computer people.

Nelson believes:• Everybody should understand computers.• Computers are as easy to understand as

cameras.

Computer Priesthood

• Evil professionalism: Experts don’t want people to understand what they do; they try to hoard knowledge so they can control one aspect of society.

• Computer is everywhere. This give computer people a stranglehold on the operation of organizations, government –everything they run in a society.

Computer Priesthood

• Guardianship of the computer can no longer be left to a computer priesthood.

• Ordinary people have legitimate complaints about the way computers are used, and legitimate ideas for ways they should be used.

• These demands can no longer be ignored.

Dreams Machines

The intentions of Dreams Machines:• To orient the beginner in fields more complex

and tied together than almost anybody realizes.

• To partially debunk several realms of expertise which Nelson thinks deserve less attention than they get.

• To chart the right way.

No More Teacher’s Dirty Looks

• The article is originally published in 1970.

• Nelson’s fundamental point: computer-assisted instruction (CAI), applied thoughtlessly and imitatively, threatens to extend the worst features of education as it is now.

Problems of Traditional Education

• In designing CAI, how can computers supplement and extend the traditional and accepted forms of teaching?

• But are the traditional forms, its framework and structure, of teaching without faults?

• Schools are designed at every level to sabotage the supposed goals of education. human motivation in all of us are warped and destroyed by the educational process.

Problems of “Conventional” CAI

• Many of the inhumanities of the existing system are being continued into CAI.

• In this conventional model, CAI is the presentation by computer of bite-sized segments of textbook material, involuntary choices by the student and some sort of pseudoconversation between computer and student.

CAI: General Wrongfulness

• Computers offer us the first real chance to let the human mind grow to its full potential

• Most of the systems for CAI seem to be endorsing much that is wrong or even evil in the educational system.

• The “conventional” CAI form enlarges and extends the faults of the American educational system itself.

Responding Resources and Hyper-Media

• Responding resources are computer-based presentational resources where a student may browse through a variety of writings, pictures and apparitions, data structures and facilities for twiddling them.

• Hyper-media are branching or performing presentations which respond to user actions, systems of prearranged words and pictures which may be explored freely.

• By using responding resources and hyper-media, CAI should discard the sequences of instruction.

• Let student to control the sequence: put student in control of material, and make them feel comfortable, interested, and autonomous.

• Allow students to choose what they will study, when they will study it, how they will study it and to what criteria of accomplishment they will aim.

Some Hypermedia Examples

• Discrete Hypertexts branch or perform on request

• Performing Hypergrams branching pictures:• Stretchtext fills in the details.• Hypermap zoom in and out.• Hyper-comics straightforward illustration.

Fantics

• Informational revolution: a new medium through the merging of electronic screen presentation and audio-visual technology with branching, interactive computer systems.

• Nelson believes that responsive computer display systems can, should and will restructure and light up the mental life of mankind.

Design of Media

• We live in Media, as fish live in water. We are prisoners of the media, some are manipulators of it, some want to use it to communicate artistic visions.

• We should understand the way media work, balance our understanding of the things that media misrepresent.

• We should and must design the media.• computers will involved in every presentational

medium and thoughtful medium very soon.

Define Fantics

• The art and science of getting ideas across, both emotionally and cognitively. “Presentation” is fantics.

• Two characters that always get across: explicit structures (exactness), and feelings that go with them (connotation).

• The reader or viewer always gets feelings along with information.

• Fantic Space is the space and relationships sensed by a viewer of any medium, or a user in any presenting or responding environment.

• Fantic Structure consists of its noticeable parts, interconnections, contents and effects.

• Fantic Design is the planning and selection of effects; is the creation either of things to be shown at the lower end, or media to show things in, or environments.

• Nelson predicted that we are moving toward a generalized and universal Fantic system.

• To achieve this, interior computer technicalities must be subservient.

• To create the richest upper level structures we want, we the users-to-be must dictate what lower-level structures are to be prepared within.

• We, the users-to-be, must develop the fantic imagination. We must learn to visualize possible uses of computer screens.

Designs toward Dream Machine

• The Walking Net• Stellavison • Thinkertoys• JOT: juggler of text• The parallel textface• Xanadu