Happenings

Reading this week:
"'Happenings' in the New York scene"by Allan Kaprow
From Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework by Douglas Engelbart
"Sketchpad: A Man-Machine Graphical Communication System" by Ivan Sutherland
"The Construction of Change" by Roy Ascott
"A File Structure for the Complex, the Changing, and the Indeterminate" by Theodor Nelson

Happenings, according to Kaprow, have "no structured beginning, middle, or end. Their form is open-ended and fluid; nothing obvious is sought and therefore nothing is won... They exist for a single performance or only a few, and are gone forever as new ones take their place" (85). This, to me, is the essence of the Internet. I often sit down with my computer simply to do so. I go through the blogs I normally read, and check out a few message boards. These events are not really reconstructible, and even if they were, there is a good change that the conversation has moved on-- that the place where I was cannot be the place you will be.

I received, at work today, a huge, 10in thick file, that I had to find room for in my desk. As I sifted through my paper files, to make room, I through out papers that I knew that I had electronic copies of in my "memex" or rather in my aging iBook. Of all the electronic gadgets that I have, the one that I would have the hardest time functioning without is my laptop with my word processor. Almost everything that I need is stuffed in there somewhere. I can sort and files according to words in the title, or even words within the text. I don't need notecards, except as a transition to my laptop. In this way, my mind is "augmented." Without this, my productivity would be diminished due to the amount of time that I would need to spend filing.

I am struck by the idea of a drawing program being new (as Sketchpad was in 1963). I don't know what that strikes me as being odd. Of course the TRS-80 that I first used had nothing but ASCII text forming pictures (there was a missile shooting game, as I recall). But I was only 10 or 11 when TRON was released (1982), and I recall knowing that some of it was "done on computers," although I am sure that I had no real concept what that meant. I am, however, certain that the Bamboo Fun (with Photoshop Elements) that my father got for Christmas eclipses the capabilities of those early graphics packages.

As a result of cybernetic efficiency, he [man] finds himself becoming more and more predominantly a Controller and less an Effecter. The machine largely self-regulating and highly adaptive, stands between man and his world. (Roy Ascott, 1964)

As I look at what I have I have written today, about how I use my iBook/memex, about how the movies I have watched have been "done" on a computer, I am more and more afraid that Ascott is dead on. Where does this leave me when my "friendly" little computer turns on me? When it eats the data that I should have backed up? I am sure that I will scrambling through my haphazardly labeled paper files, hoping against hope that the paper I need did not subcomb to my frenzied space-making.

Nelson proposes an interesting idea about writing with computers, when he says, "Surely half the time spent in writing is spent physically rearranging words and paper and trying to find things already written; if 95% of this time could be saved, it would only take half as long to write something" (135). I am afraid this has not been my experience. At all. While I can freely admit that editing has become easier with computers, and I am less resistant to proofreading since recopying and retyping are not involved, I do not believe that my actual writing has been made more efficient. If anything, continued editing beguiles me into spending more and more time trying to achieved (impossible) perfection.