New Media Reader: Ch. 26-30

Chronology:

• 1977: Alan Kay and Adele Goldberg publish "Personal Dynamic Media"
• 1980: Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari publish "A Thousand Plateus", Seymour Papert publish "From Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas" and Richard Bolt publishes "Put That There"
• 1981: Theodor Nelson publishes "Proposal for a Universal Electronic Publishing System and Archive"

Summary:

• Kay championed the idea that computers should be accessible and used by everyone and not just the business and engineering elite.
  
• Kay and his partner Goldberg helped create the first generation of notebook through their jobs at Xerox PARC.
• Deleuze and Guattari's text is "rhizomatic" in that it challenges the ideas of dichotomy and paradoxes and asks the reader to reconsider the idea of multiplicities.
  
• Papert views computers as tools for educational purposes. Instead of seeing the machines of purveyors of information, he sees them as something that the student manipulates to learn from. Instead of the computer directly instructing the student, the student learns through active manipulation.
• Bolt believed in the idea of multi modal computing wherein the interface for the usee would require not just simply 2d, touch based interaction but 3d visuals combined with speech recognition.
• Nelson's revolutionary Xanadu platform contains his vision of having everyone connected in the same sphere where photos, text, movies and everything else can be seemlessly connected and colloborated upon. While the platform is meant to be as open as possible, it is still far more structured than the web. It is supposed to be guided towards media sharing.