Doug:

You did it again!

Great job. One of the best, most relevent docs I have seen on Frontline. You accurately captured the technological zeitgeist. Well done!

Alex in Toronto!

Henry Jenkins just *blasted* the documentary on the Digital Nation Roundtable http://pbsdigitalnation.org

I frankly found the documentary itself mind-numbing and relentless. It rarely trusts the viewer to draw their own conclusions about what they are seeing and it deploys much of the material in ways which point towards a much less nuanced conclusion than any of the participants in the conversation might have advocated. The website allows us to ask our own questions, while the documentary tells us what to think.

The observation about the MIT students’ writing was interesting. The show was kind of similar. There were only two paragraphs and lots of sentences. Some were real poppers, tho!

Perhaps the show *did* capture a zeitgeist. The segments about classroom applications and the military Applications were mildly discontinuous but definitely made up the “bookends” 4 me. (heh heh) As the show’s sentences about examining the phenomena allow and, (for the time), demonstrate, that time may never tell how much VR stimulus (if any) are advisable/practical in the classroom or when we will understand that the military applications are more than enough. Nutshell: Education is adopting a weak/pathetic rear guard while military is way out in front, a perilous Avant-garde.

Now that i think of it the gaming people sentence and the IBM sentence were evocative sentences. Again, no conclusions were drawn by the show. Actually, the show drew no conclusions for me except one writer/correspondent has decided to immerse one of her children and the other rather enjoys pretending to turn the damn thing off.

More sentences:

IBM’s offices have been “empty” since the conference with the SS.

It was hard to tell if the editing of talking heads with sentences and paragraphs was poor or by design, i.e. an attempt to make no comment/draw no conclusions.

Personal Disclaimer:
I am increasingly feeling that the only benefit to having my web connected devise has been wasting time playing pinball and other arcade games, managing spreadsheets, doing banking, and having a few significant conversations that inspired me to new (albeit non digital) thinking. Not bad for a kid who used an Apple in late 70′s, used a typewriter in college (early 80′s) and went dry until accepting an old DOS machine in 1995. Call me, then, if you will, a devoted rear guard, post-structuralist catcher in the rye (my first recent reference to the recent fuss or buzz).

My virtual reality.
We are actually on a vast ice shelf. To be sure the world outside and within appears to be a vast rye field. But there is a sort of Kafkaesque or Benjaminian situation in play. The ice shelf beneath a significant portions of the rye field is falling into the ocean and we can’t stay or we must drown and suffer a sea change into something – hopefully rich, certainly strange. I don’t know how or where i will choose to remain. But like Stewart said, it’s only a game.

Feel free to stick anything that strikes your fancy into the proceedings at PBS DN & dragons. My heart is not up to attending personally. I guess it’s becoming an “immersion thing.”

immense, a good overview in its 90 minutes. liked that part on the obsolecence about any tech study; a comment on documentation, the film itself maybe, or anything on the topic in general, meaning we keep the discussion going. on topic, to share:

http://thefanzine.com/articles/features/282/five_hundred_eighty-six_days,_fourteen_hours,_forty-six_minutes,_eleven_seconds
very compelling read, gamer addiction

http://www.friezeartfair.com/podcasts/details/is_the_underground_over/
underground culture, symposium, with simon reynolds, tg’s cosey fanni tutti