Technoculture-on-EuroScientist #2 Robin Boast
Channel: Federica Bressan
Date: 2019-11-28

Robin Boast is Professor of Cultural Information Science at the Department of Media Studies, University of Amsterdam, NL. In 2017, he published the book "The Machine in the Ghost: Digitality and its Consequences" (Reaktion Books.)

Full article on EuroScientist: https://www.euroscientist.com/tecnoculture-podcast-episode-22-robin-boast/
Robin's interview on Tecnoculture: http://podcast.federicabressan.com/robin-boast.php

3:45 Files and folders were information technology that was invented at the beginning of the 20th century. 

4:03 Melvil Dewey's "The Library Bureau."

4:51 Steve Jobs and IBM are mentioned.

5:16 The digital workspace with files and folders have changed us all into being secretaries. 

8:00 A physical folder and a folder on your computer are the "same" because they were "made to be the same," but behind all these layers, the medium is fundamentally different.

8:32 It "took work" to make the physical folder and the digital folder "seem very similar."

10:13 Ted Nelson is mentioned.

10:46 Doug Engelbart is mentioned.

11:25 The flexibility of digitality was intentionally "locked down", so that it would to be "narrowly mediated."

13:47 It takes a lot of work to make a digital text look like paper. Current designs "keep us from using text as though it was digital." About Adobe PDF.

14:04 It takes a lot of effort for the computer not to be digital, to be just like paper. 

19:38 The current design of digital devices is the consequence of an economic situation, it has nothing to do with digitality and its potential. 

19:58 You don't get a lot of choice because you get what they decide is valuable for them to sell.

20:25 The lack of choice we have comes out of an economic system, it has nothing to do with digitality. 

21:19 MIT and the first computer graphics (and video game) are mentioned.

23:31 Xerox PARC and Alan Kay are mentioned. 

23:53 Smalltalk (programming language) is mentioned.

25:00 Logoscript: an implementation of Logo (programming language) in JavaScript.

25:28 Steve "Woz" Wozniak and the Lisa computer are mentioned.

26:02 IBM and Microsoft, "a small startup from Seattle," are mentioned.

26:13 QDOS (Quick and Dirty Operating System)

27:17 A lot of what we wind up with now is a consequence of those "technological commitments" that were made in the 1970s and early 1980s.

28:00 With mobile devices, with smartphones, computing is shifting... we're moving away from a "typewriter with a screen," which is the model that has been dominating since the late 1940s. 

29:45 Why the new business models demand that we forget [previous ways of doing things, possibilities that were not considered valuable for the business?]

30:38 Should we build our own machines? #breakTheMould

31:54 The digital revolution hasn't even begun and will not begin until we all program (paraphrasing Alan Kay.)