roundtable: Re: Internet Economics Workshop

roundtable: Re: Internet Economics Workshop

Re: Internet Economics Workshop

Jeff Briggs (jbriggs@capital.edu)
Tue, 21 Mar 1995 05:25:19 +0500 

Date: Tue, 21 Mar 1995 05:25:19 +0500
From: jbriggs@capital.edu (Jeff Briggs)
Message-Id: <9503211025.AA23620@athena.capital.edu>
To: roundtable@cni.org
Subject: Re: Internet Economics Workshop


Systems designers should also include artists - not just social 
scientists, etc. (I speak as one trained in anthropology how practices 
a variety of arts). It is the aesthetic that always gets short shrift 
in America because its primal function is not understood.

     Two small but typical examples: (1) When I taught at Denison 
University I was on a committee to decide what basic skills education 
students should have. I was the only one who suggested that art is an 
essential basic skill, and was ignored (politely); (2) at Capital 
University, where I teach now the new computer room has PCs, Macs, and 
Sun stations - all of which have word processing programs and little 
else. The students play Solitaire intstead of creatively exploring 
paint, animation, image processing, digital photography, or MIDI music 
programs in between assignments.

     If cyberspace of the future is to be an instrument capable
of playing more than business, commercial software (movies, TV), and
text, some discussion of its enormous creative potential - creative
both in the sense of individual creativity, as well as some as yet
unknown creative potential, as in Cyber Renaissance, must be considered
now.

     I have had the good fortune to have as a valued friend and mentor 
Charles Csuri, a pioneer of computer art, who is now a professor 
emeritus and founder of the Advanced Computing Center for the Arts and 
Design at Ohio State. He was/currently featured in the Smithsonian 
magazine. He is perhaps the only computer artist that the word "great" 
could be applied to, but he is also a visionary of cyberspace as well 
as an artist. He thinks creatively about everything. It was he who 
first inspired me to explore the Internet, and it has exceeded my 
expectations by far.

     Art expresses the essence of man's humanity. Any NII or GII that 
doesn't step back for a minute from the technical and policy minutae 
at the moment of its conception and contemplate the vast aesthetic, 
multicultural, and creative possibilities which stretch before us could 
be constricting the cyberfetus in its own umbilical cord, and possibly 
unconsciously restricting the very aspect of this new and universal 
human tool that can do us as a nation and a race the most good - race 
used here in the sense of human race.

Jeff Briggs
jbriggs@capital.edu

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