History has plenty of examples to counter this optimism…

Radical Novelty

E.W. Dijkstra chose the term to help him describe a particular choice facing educators in the field of Computer Science in 1988.

Coping with radical novelty requires an orthogonal method. One must consider one’s own past, the experiences collected, and the habits formed in it as an unfortunate accident of history, and one has to approach the radical novelty with a blank mind, consciously refusing to try to link it with what is already familiar, because the familiar is hopelessly inadequate. One has, with initially a kind of split personality, to come to grips with a radical novelty as a dissociated topic in its own right. Coming to grips with a radical novelty amounts to creating and learning a new foreign language that can not be translated into one’s mother tongue. (Any one who has learned quantum mechanics knows what I am talking about.) Needless to say, adjusting to radical novelties is not a very popular activity, for it requires hard work. For the same reason, the radical novelties themselves are unwelcome.

By now, you may well ask why I have paid so much attention to and have spent so much eloquence on such a simple and obvious notion as the radical novelty. My reason is very simple: radical novelties are so disturbing that they tend to be suppressed or ignored, to the extent that even the possibility of their existence in general is more often denied than admitted.

We’re all searching around trying to find just the right analogy to describe the internet to make it easier to digest for others… perhaps this is not the right path to take. The internet and the live web that resulted is a radical novelty.

I hope this makes sense… I’ve been sick the last few days.

–Mike–