[Sigia-l] Keeping pages current on an intranet / Best Practic es

[Ziya Oz]

"Fiorito, David" wrote:
>> So you think setting lead type for a pamphlet is equivalent to, say, going to
>> Watson and automatically correlating all the movies playing with theaters
>> showing them within a given radius from home and reading reviews and actually
>> seeing a trailer all with three simple clicks  is the same experience?
> 
> Yes.  The process is basically the same although the speed at which it is
> completed is very different.  All you are talking about here is gathering
> data and presenting it to an audience.  There is nothing revolutionary about
> it.

This is beginning to sound really absurd. By this definition there's been
nothing new about, say, telephone or television and that they've had no
transformative effect.

I have five minutes to select a movie: Watson allows me see all theaters
within, say, 5 miles of my house showing a particular movie, or shows me all
the movies being shown in those theaters and start times; it shows me info
about those movies and perhaps reviews; and it actually shows a streaming
preview of each. All with a few mouse clicks. In real-time. I make a choice.
The process is done.

If I can't do this in the next five minutes, I will have missed the show and
I don't really care what other laborious, Paleolithic processes I'd have to
go through to get the same info the old fashioned way, if I had to wait a
whole week.   
 
>>> Information exchange has always been a part of the human experience.
>> 
>> Yeah, but one would hope the means by which we deliver that exchange and
>> thus the effect it can have on the users have evolved a bit since 1895.
> 
> Mechanisms may change but the essential transaction has not.

Well to the extent that as homo sapiens we still have the five senses, not
much is going to change in that regard. But to claim that, again, the
telephone, the television or the PC changed nothing is, I think,
trivializing the issue.

> Frankly I see little difference between a cave painting telling where good
> hunting could be found and the wireless service that tells me all of the
> traffic conditions between my current location and my destination.  Its all
> just communication.

You mean the a child's scribbles on a piece of paper (or the monkey's
tapping on the typewriter) are the equivalent of "War and Peace"? Sure we're
all made of molecules, but do we just stop with that notion?

Best,

Ziya