Many of you know Boris Anthony–wonderful guy and Citizen of the World
reaching out from his meat space home base in Montreal..Here is Boris’
slightly cosmic but thoroughly enjoyable and insightful response to my
previous post on personal television networks. Boris is in Japan right now, btw, hanging out with
Joi Ito and other friends..
From: Boris Anthony
Date: Sun Apr 18, 2004 2:02:47 PM US/Eastern
To: Jim Moore
Subject: tele
Howdy Jim!
Still in Tokyo, got till the 30th of April… even considering staying
longer… maybe all of May as well. We see. Awesome place. 
In your blog entry titled “Personal Television Networks”, you wonder
about a comparison. While I have none specific to Individual
Audio/Video Broadcasting, I do think the bigger picture here can be
described as “we are building out telepathy”.
The Jobs observation that “computers are bicycles for the mind” is a
very McLuhanish (and others surely) thing to say. Essentially, every
thing man creates is an externalization/extension of some faculty he
already possesses. The wheel extended our legs and feet
(transportation), etc…
The computer itself is merely a memory bank and a processor. Pictures,
sounds, text, video etc are stored (memory) and via increasingly better
software, processed, or rather: “packaged for sharing” … (sharing
afterall IS communication, and vice versa…). So with the computer, we
externalized memory storage of external things: addresses, memos,
audio/video/photo (a/v/p) of our environment in raw format, etc, and
formalized (and continue to formalize) ways of packaging that data into
shareable media (be it RSS, HTML, MP3, MPEG4,etc etc etc etc).
Internally we do this with stored experience, and package it up with
languages, such as english, french, music, oil paints, granite,
architecture, math, etc…
So, now we plug in a cable into this computah thingo. A network. We
bang out basic communication protocols and spend 20 years moving
files… until one day… poof… hmmm… all of a sudden all this
moving of files… increases our awareness… I know a bit of what
30-40 people think of everyday (weblogging/syndication)… I know a bit
about where 5-10 people are at and what they are doing at any given
time(A/V/P mobile weblogging), I know a bit about who my friends know
and how (Social networking software)…
This is all beginning, but moving ahead quite rapidly. We are building
out telepathy, Jim. Telesthesia is perhaps as far as we’ll get, for
now, but still: we are using all our knowledge and experience to
provide ourselves with one faculty we do not posses naturally. We are
extending not only our minds, thoughts, experiences, but also applying
our development of languages and codification techniques and
formalization, in order to reach this goal.
Taken to extreme, we are continuing our stretch towards omniscience. Tower of Babel?
Hope you are well!!
B.
