Andy’s New Media Blog

Although most of the people we’ve read thus far in the semester have had some interesting insights into the future of computing, many of which are currently in common use.  That said, one thing that I’ve noticed a lot, especially with the new reading by Kay/Goldberg is that they seem to put a high premium on user’s ability to make personalized and useful programs for themselves.  It would be unfair to say that this turned out to be completely untrue since it is technically possible to use a computer to make whatever kind of program you want, but I think by and large the average computer user is not innovating their computer experience in any way.

For instance, one of the draws of the Dynabook is the ability to use it to make programs that can assist musicians.  I suppose it would be possible now to do something like that with enough training, but 99.9% of computer users are just going to get on Google and download Audacity.  I guess it’s worth pointing out that someone out there had to make that program and that proves that people are really making innovative software on their own, but that doesn’t change the fact that very few people are truly making new and useful things with their computers.  I don’t think this is a problem of creativity, but rather one of complexity.  So many of the mainstay programs that we use (including our operating systems themselves) are made by massive teams of programmers and are far more complicated than anything  even a star computer science student could do on his or her own.  As a result, it seems like the small projects we’re seeing the most of are small things that add on to already massive projects such as Firefox add-ons, or Facebook apps.  It will be interesting to see whether some of the things Dr. Campbell showed us in class such as Yahoo Pipes do anything to change this pattern.