## Metadata - Author: [[Alan Moore]] - Full Title: Quotes - Category: #articles - Summary: Computers are becoming more like television, books, and themselves. Efforts are being made to make them more TV-like. The potential of computers and networks to provide self-teaching media on the Internet is discussed, tailoring learning experiences based on user age and sophistication. Such dynamic media is seen as crucial to preventing a decline in learning and thinking culture. - URL: https://worrydream.com/quotes/ ## Full Document [Now computers can be television-like, book-like, and "like themselves." Today's commercial trends in educational and home markets are to make them as television-like as possible. And the weight of the billions of dollars behind these efforts is likely to be overwhelming. It is sobering to realize that in 1600, 150 years after the invention of the printing press, the top two bestsellers in the British Isles were the Bible and astrology books! Scientific and political ways of thinking were just starting to be invented. The real revolutions take a very long time to appear, because as McLuhan noted, the initial content and values in a new medium is always taken from old media. Now one thing that is possible with computers and networks, that could get around some of the onslaught of "infobabble," is the possibility of making media on the Internet that is "self teaching." Imagine a child or adult just poking around the Internet for fun and finding something--perhaps about rockets or gene splicing--that looks intriguing. If it were like an article in an encyclopedia, it would have to rely on expository writing (at a level chosen when the author wrote it) to convey the ideas. This will wind up being a miss for most netsurfers, especially given the general low level of reading fluency today. The computer version of this will be able to find out how old and how sophisticated is the surfer and instantly tailor a progression of learning experiences that will have a much higher chance of introducing each user to the "good stuff" that underlies most human knowledge. A very young child would be given different experiences than older ones--and some of the experiences would try to teach the child to read and reason better as a byproduct of their interest. This is a "Montessori" approach to how some media might be organized on the Internet: one's own interests provide the motivation to journey through an environment that is full of learning opportunities disguised as toys. This new kind of "dynamic media" is possible to make today, but very hard and expensive. Yet it is the kind of investment that a whole country should be able to understand and make. I still don't think it is a real substitute for growing up in a culture that loves learning and thinking. But in such a culture, such new media would allow everyone to go much deeper, in more directions, and experience more ways to think about the world than is possible with the best books today. Without such a culture, such media is likely to be absolutely necessary to stave off the fast approaching next Dark Ages.](http://worrydream.com/refs/Kay%20-%20Powerful%20Ideas%20Need%20Love%20Too.html)