Banning Tablets And Phones in the Classroom

NYU professor Clay Shirky teaches theory and practice of social media and has now decided he must ban the use of laptops, tablets and phones in his class - they are beyond distracting, they are barriers to learning.

He writes of his reluctant decision to ban the devices in an essay at Medium, and has some fascinating science to back his decision.

"A study from Stanford reports that heavy multi-taskers are worse at choosing which task to focus on. (“They are suckers for irrelevancy”, as Cliff Nass, one of the researchers put it.) Multi-taskers often think they are like gym rats, bulking up their ability to juggle tasks, when in fact they are like alcoholics, degrading their abilities through over-consumption.
---
"Humans are incapable of ignoring surprising new information in our visual field, an effect that is strongest when the visual cue is slightly above and beside the area we’re focusing on. (Does that sound like the upper-right corner of a screen near you?)

The form and content of a Facebook update may be almost irresistible, but when combined with a visual alert in your immediate peripheral vision, it is—really, actually, biologically—impossible to resist.

"I’m coming to see student focus as a collaborative process. It’s me and them working to create a classroom where the students who want to focus have the best shot at it, in a world increasingly hostile to that goal."

The idea of being unavoidably distracted gets a thorough investigation in the new book "A Deadly Wandering" by Matt Richtel. The book, based on a fatal texting and driving incident, is reviewed here.

How Many Web Sites Are There?

It's a guess, really, but trends and data available say that there is roughly one web site for every three people who use the web, according to this Washington Post report, which features the graphic shown above (via Internet Live Stats).

Meanwhile, the site WorldWideWebSize says there are 2.39 billion web pages as of today, estimated by the numbers of pages indexed by Google, Bing and Yahoo search. The Internet Live Stats estimates there were 1.5 million blog posts today - plus one, this one you are reading right now.

While these stats don't tell us just what is on all the pages (cats? porn? advertising?). 

Every day the visualizations of so many people on the planet are manifest on the Internet. I find it interesting that (according to the above) there are 1.5 billion searches on Google so far today - interesting because that makes it seem that half of the folks in the digital world are seeking something, some information, some photo (some cats, probably).

Email appears to be the most widely used aspect - I sent about 6 today, and likely will send out a dozen more before the day is done.

Capturing the attention of billions is no simple task, especially here on this humble blog, where I noodle about with words and images and ideas. I can usually grab a few hundred views here a day - sometimes more, sometimes less. Big numbers land here mostly when I link to an oddity or a bit of someone else's hostility or such. 

But I do perceive a few things in all these numbers - people have joyfully abandoned publishers and broadcasters to share every kind of thing imaginable. It has been and continues to be liberating - for the cost of obtaining Internet access and some device to access the Internet, anyone can reach global distribution. 

And still, after only 20 some years of such new technology, we are only at the edge of what is going to happen due to this massive shift in human interaction.

I often wonder what might happen if, as in some cheesy story, all that access was suddenly gone, never to return. 

I often wonder if over the next fifty years people will somehow master this wild and wooly digital world, or if such mastery is even possible (mastery meaning that the majority of users add something to this digital conversation that is beyond rude-boy antics and advertising).

I often wonder if the future will steadily erase ideas of borders and countries and race and state and tribe ... what then will follow?

Court Probes Smartphones, Crime and Privacy

The arguments Tuesday before the U.S. Supreme Court present very tough problems to resolve - should smartphones/cellphones/tablets always be searchable items by law enforcement with no warrant, or what, if any, restrictions, should be established.

The tech is way ahead of the law. And the court only has a few months to make a ruling - a ruling which I bet will get amended as laws and precedents start being created.

Via SCOTUSblog, some suggested reading:

Arguments:

"But, as the discussion went on, it seemed that there were two lines that would have to be drawn:  one, to define the kind of cellphone contents that were so private that they would be insulated from search; and, second, to define the limits of a search warrant so that the police stayed away from what was private.
The Justices seemed well aware that, even if they somehow were able to craft some Fourth Amendment limitations on searching cellphones, they still would have real difficulty in implementing those limits by telling a magistrate how to write a search warrant to guide the police.  “A warrant for what?” Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Antonin Scalia both asked. “What would police have to show [to get a warrant]?” Ginsburg added. 'Although there was a lot of talk about how to figure out what most cellphone users believed should be private among the contents on their devices, there did seem to be a rough consensus that they do believe that, to some hard-to-define degree."

Plain English:

"Going into the oral argument, both California and the federal government told the Court that, whenever police make an arrest, cellphones should be fair game for a search for all of the same reasons that police can search, for example, the arrestee’s wallet without a warrant.  But it’s hard to see five Justices voting in support of that rule, given the widespread skepticism that the argument met on the Court.  Justice Elena Kagan was one of the most vocal opponents of such a rule, telling California Solicitor General Edward DuMont that, following his logic, an arrest for a minor offense like driving without a seatbelt would allow police to look at every single e-mail on the arrestee’s phone, along with his bank records, medical data, calendar, and GPS data.  That, she suggested, “strikes me as a very different kind of world” from looking at someone’s billfold, given that “people carry their entire lives on cellphones.”  Justice Antonin Scalia later echoed this idea, calling it “absurd” that police should be able to search someone’s iPhone for that kind of minor offense.  Justice Anthony Kennedy, whom many often regard as a key vote on the Court, expressed concerns as well, telling Deputy U.S. Solicitor General Michael Dreeben (who argued on behalf of the federal government in both cases today) that “we are living in a new world,” in which someone arrested for a minor crime has her “whole life on [her] phone” and asking whether Dreeben could suggest some limits on the potentially broad sweep of the government’s rule.


'But even if California and the federal government seem unlikely to win outright, the chances that the Court will require police officers to get a warrant whenever they want to search an arrestee’s phone appear even slimmer.

Your History Is Being Rewritten

A chaotic event or even a mundane event might be recorded, then rewritten, then disappear, be rediscovered and rewritten many times. The furious speed at which information goes through these changes is mind boggling. These days, history is not written by winners of conflicts, it is endlessly revised by whim.

Writer William Gibson spoke about this in an interview with the Paris Review:

"Of course, all fiction is speculative, and all history, too—endlessly subject to revision. Particularly given all of the emerging technology today, in a hundred years the long span of human history will look fabulously different from the version we have now. If things go on the way they’re going, and technology keeps emerging, we’ll eventually have a near-total sorting of humanity’s attic.

In my lifetime I’ve been able to watch completely different narratives of history emerge. The history now of what World War II was about and how it actually took place is radically different from the history I was taught in elementary school. If you read the Victorians writing about themselves, they’re describing something that never existed. The Victorians didn’t think of themselves as sexually repressed, and they didn’t think of themselves as racist. They didn’t think of themselves as colonialists. They thought of themselves as the crown of creation.

We’ve gotten so used to emergent technologies that we get anxious if we haven’t had one in a while."

Whether the event is the recent chaos in Benghazi or the hysteria over "Duck Dynasty", our society seeks out revision over resolution.

2012: Days of Future Passed

As the new year approaches I tend to reflect some, as most folks do, on Past, Present and Future. In truth, I'm likely too reflective on a constant basis, perhaps part of the hard-wired nature of The Writer in My Head.

Given the purely tentative and fragile essence of Life itself, I confess to some surprise to still be a living creature here on this wee speck of a planet in an infinite Universe. Existence for more than a handful of decades defies the odds. Perhaps it is that I have felt as if I were an Old Soul since I was but a young boy. Now that I am far beyond young boyhood, the passage of Time perplexes me far more than ever.

This fading year, 2012, is one where I have realized I am aging to the point of cultural irrelevance, a fact which was driven deep into my thoughts rather too often for comfort. My time here has straddled two centuries, and the changes in how life is lived are radical and spectacular. A great many of the changes were expected, yet many more were not. (Not that such a state is uniquely mine.)

And there's the simple fact that the time which has passed in my life is now greater than the time which is ahead and yet to be lived. Spooky.

The year I was born, Time magazine proclaimed that the "Men of the Year" were Scientists. Scientists. 

Every day, new and startling discoveries are made about our world and how we manipulate it and use it and attempt to understand it. Sadly, this year, the dubious wisdom of the Tennessee state legislature decided that Science was a collection of random theories which were to be challenged and doubted by American grade school and high school students. 

Not that Science solves any and every problem, but the vast wealth of possibility and discovery has apparently been dismissed as if they were mere Superstitions while Superstition is now heralded as a beacon of Truth.

The men who were singled out in 1960 helped to create so many of the innovations which shape life today via technology and medicine, and much more, and hundreds of other inventors and innovators built on their ideas:

George Beadle, geneticist, Charles Draper, designer of the Apollo Guidance Computer, John Enders, "Father of Modern Vaccines", Donald A. Glaser, particle physicist,  Joshua Lederberg, artificial intelligence and genetics,  Willard Libby, chemistry,  Linus Pauling, quantum chemistry and molecular biology,  Edward Purcell, magnetic resonance creator and physicist,  Isidor Rabi, physicist and microwave developer, Emilio Segrè, physicist, William Shockley, "Father of Silicon Valley". Edward Teller, physicist, inspiration for "Dr. Strangelove",  Charles Townes, quantum electronics, James Van Allen, nuclear and astrophysicist, and Robert Woodward, organic chemist.

I often think that it will be the children who have been born in the last few or next few years who will provide the next major shift in how life on our planet is lived -- and I confess that I most selfishly want to live as long as possible just so I can be alive as our wee planet makes another monumental stride into and beyond the realms of possibility.

Here's to you 2013 and all the years and surprises yet to come. 

Music From Carmen, Played Via a Machine Shop in France

Nine French musicians (or, as noted on their home page "Neuf musiciens-comédiens-chanteurs") calling their group Zic Zazou perform the Habanera from Carmen on various tools and constructions made by the musicians. I think my favorite part though, is the way at the end they all stop and look at you ... or maybe the balloon squeezing ... tough call.

Their entire YouTube channel is here.

Merry Thanksgiving!!

Tennessee Designers Make Mars Rover Move

It's deeply gratifying to learn that some very smart folks in Ooltewah, Tennessee are responsible for making the massive, newly-landed mobile laboratory on the surface of Mars actually move around.

The American Bicycle Group in Ooltewah (population: 687)  designed the legs to withstand to the landing and be able to move around the surface for the next several years, according to the story in today's TimesFreePress:

"The Chattanooga team left its mark on Mars, too. Each one of their names is etched inside the legs they helped create that have now found a permanent home among the stars."

At KnoxViews, R. Neal noted today that the wheels of the car-sized rover will leave a "secret coded message" in the Martian soil.

As this new hallmark in robotic space exploration made it's landing, some thousands of folks gathered to watch it all live on the giant screen in Times Square. (click to enlarge)

More pictures of the evening here.

The rover has a nuclear battery which could power the robot for some 14 years - the graphic below, via Space.com, reveals how it is loaded with cameras and equipment. (click to enlarge)

Is Everything OK?

Is everything OK?

No?

Would you like to make sure that everything is OK? A simple one-step way to making everything OK .

TN Legislators Back Sweeping Changes to Internet Privacy via CISPA Bill

In stark contrast to the widespread awareness and opposition to the recently failed PIPA and SOPA bills, awareness of the vast and fundamental changes to internet privacy created in a new bill, called CISPA, is very low.

Part of the reason for this is that this new bill is framed as a must-have tool to protect vital computer operations from attack, a tactic Tennessee's legislative coalition is pushing, as presented in this article from the Tennessean, headlined "TN Seen As Likely Cyber Target":

"Tennessee Democratic Rep. Jim Cooper and Republican Reps. Marsha Blackburn, Chuck Fleischmann and Phil Roe have signed on to legislation that would encourage the intelligence community and private sector to share certain information to better protect computer networks from cyberthreats.

"The Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act would allow private companies and the government to share any information “directly pertaining to a vulnerability of, or threat to,” a computer network. Currently, the government can’t share classified intelligence on cyberthreats with the private sector.

“Because our Pentagon and other government agencies are attacked thousands of times a day, we have learned ways to help American business and individuals guard against identity theft of their customers, disruption of electricity and water service, and other threats to daily living,” he said."

But  there is far more is at stake here, and private businesses already are further ahead when it comes to security measures, since their businesses depend of secure operations.

Opposition to the legislation and the wide range of powers it creates gets a presentation here, noting that this legislation creates several problems:

• An overly broad, almost unlimited definition of the information can be shared with government agencies. And because that info is shared “notwithstanding any law,” CISPA trumps any federal or state privacy law that currently prohibits disclosure.
• Enactment is likely to lead to expansion of the government’s role in the monitoring of private communications.
• It could shift control of government cybersecurity efforts from civilian agencies to the NSA.
• It creates a backdoor wiretap program because the information shared with the government isn’t limited to just cybersecurity, but could also be used for other purposes, such as law enforcement or by intelligence agencies.

Pages and pages of rules and regulations such as this are akin to the long and confusing paragraphs for the average Terms of Service Agreements which the average internet user encounters and OKs without really reading. Forcing private business to give their information about you to an intelligence agency may well be the norm if this bill passes - and most internet users will never even know it's happening.

Kraftwerk Retrospective - The Art of Computers

We are driving on the Autobahn

In front of us is a wide valley

The sun is shining with glittering rays

The driving strip is a grey track

White stripes, green edge

We are switching the radio on

From the speaker it sounds:

We are driving on the Autobahn

Celebrating the works of a unique group of musicians, Kraftwerk, the Museum of Modern Art provided 8 nights of concerts from the German band, whose creations of minimalist techno tunes signaled  the beginnings of our digital age.

I latched onto their album Autobahn as a Christmas gift to myself in 1974 and absolutely loved it and still do. When I shared the music with some friends in my small town back then, they grimaced listening to the vocoders, looped tracks and computerized rhythms as if fingernails were scraping a blackboard and I told them, just like a time-traveling Marty McFly, "Your kids are gonna love this."

As much as I enjoyed the simple, hypnotic sounds (check out a sample from Autobahn or from Trans-Europe Express) I also marveled at what their work implied - music generated by computers and technology offered a glimpse of what was ahead for the world, which would soon be transformed by technology. It was a science-fiction soundtrack for this emerging force. So I'm not surprised, decades later, to see these musicians show off their work at the MOMA. Seems the most appropriate place for them:

"Kraftwerk anticipated the impact of technology on art and everyday life, creating sounds and visuals that capture the human condition in the age of mobility and telecommunication. Their innovative looping techniques and computerized rhythms, which had a major influence on the early development of hip-hop and electronic dance music, remain among the most commonly sampled sounds across a wide range of music genres. Furthermore, the use of robotics and other technical innovations in their live performances illustrates Kraftwerk’s belief in the respective contributions of both people and machines in creating art."

This past week audience members could capture the performance on hand-held devices we all think of as commonplace and ordinary.

Does The Internet Have A Future?

Technology leaps ahead thanks to computer usage and internet access - though some innovators fear the strongest threat yet to all-access open internet is here today, thanks to governements, businesses and even Facebook and Apple.

At least, that's the opinion of Google's co-founder Sergey Brin in this interview, part of a series of reports by the Guardian on the internet, as both support and opposition worldwide grows for the current round of new internet restricion legislation, CISPA, a new 'cyber-security act'.

"He said he was most concerned by the efforts of countries such as China, Saudi Arabia and Iran to censor and restrict use of the internet, but warned that the rise of Facebook and Apple, which have their own proprietary platforms and control access to their users, risked stifling innovation and balkanising the web.

"There's a lot to be lost," he said. "For example, all the information in apps – that data is not crawlable by web crawlers. You can't search it."

Brin said he and co-founder Larry Page would not have been able to create Google if the internet was dominated by Facebook. "You have to play by their rules, which are really restrictive," he said. "The kind of environment that we developed Google in, the reason that we were able to develop a search engine, is the web was so open. Once you get too many rules, that will stifle innovation."

Both Google and Oakley are working hard on new tech/internet delivery systems in the form of glasses which would project images and info right into your eyes, combining smartphone and, I suppose EyePhones. Actually it's called Google Glass, and here's a video of how it might be used ... funny, you'll notice in the video that a meeting at a 'bookstore" is featured. Is that supposed to be ironic?

Oakley's CEO says: 

 

"Ultimately, everything happens through your eyes, and the closer we can bring it to your eyes, the quicker the consumer is going to adopt the platform."

Google is busy in court these days too facing fines and lawsuits.

Unwired: A Non-Liveblog of Life Outside Cyberspace

I decided to do an experiment and shut off the internet for a while, eventually going 12 days with no email, texting, no connection with The Web. I was curious what the changes would be since I've been connected to The Web for about 20 years. And I didn't tell anyone, just wasn't there .. there being here, on The Web. What were the results of the experiment?

I'm awake, up writing on and off The Web daily and early, a longtime habit. So I decided that instead of surfing and reading online, I would keep sort of a non-published Twiter feed to document the effects of being so disconnected. And then publish the results on The Web.

So here is Part One of a Three Part series of the non-liveblog:

DAY ONE

11:30 a.m.
Have marked the first 24 hours with no online usage.

What if I were to decide to never return to explore the world via online access? What if this non-connected landscape becomes preferable? Will I become an oddity of creation? Not being part of online discussions, comments, image sharing and info sharing, will I become a person unwelcome should I prefer to engage the world in the flesh, face to face? Will I be perceived as a danger, a threat even?

12:20 p.m.
Should I have told people I was going to do this? As those who undertake some solo journey to an isolated location, like that guy in that movie “127 Hours” who did not let people know he was taking on a risky task, he got stuck in some rocks and had to saw his arm off, so should I have alerted someone?
Or have I already chopped off an appendage by abandoning my internet post?

I hope I don’t start calling people on the phone for no real reason or decide to become a phone texter. Texting seems alien to me now – maybe I should decide now not to fill in the internet absence with pervasive texts … I am getting a little nervous.

2:18 p.m.
No one here in the house has started a meme today.

There have been, however, several snarky and witty comments made, but no one wrote them down or shared them with anyone outside of the house.

My neighbors have not come by to show me any photos of funny cats or cute kids.

4:30 p.m.
It occurs to me that this document is sort of like live-blogging an event which is not really live, nor is it really taking place. It’s a running commentary on what is not happening. Or, it’s a commentary on something which is really just happening to me. I am going to continue, though, since I have encountered much which is utterly useless and self-serving on the internet, so this project seems worthy of coverage and reporting. To me. For now.

 ....

DAY TWO

5:30 p.m.
This day has not been too bad. One glaring difference is the ability to obtain news and information, as mentioned before. Cable local and national news are offering an astonishingly narrow selection of stories. So much of what I am seeing reminds me of the old Punch and Judy puppet shows of hundreds of years ago – laughable figures beating each other up in an endless loop. (Note: While I know the old P and J shows began many years ago, I cannot provide the actual date they began to take place and spread since I don’t have access to vast archives of research offered by the internet to verify or correct my claims.)
---

DAY THREE

8:24 a.m.
I had thought initially that I might try this experiment for a month, now I’m thinking a week will be my limit.        

1:20 p.m.
Daylight is really bright.


 DAY FOUR

3:05 pm
I miss being able to look at funny pictures of whatever I want. So, here’s a picture from my hard drive – Charles Napier in “Star Trek”

DAY FIVE
7:48 a.m.
Oh man, this tiny dribble of information coming into the house via radio and television is ridiculously inadequate. It’s barely a notch above using the Pony Express to share news and information.

I can measure this weak and puny stream of information not by the bytes arriving by second, it is words per hour. And I know too there are some in the wide world who may just be pining for my perspectives which have been absent.

I have resisted urges to go to a friend’s house or library to sneak online for just a minute to check email messages. But my resolve is fading … I imagine it will take at least one week to kill such urges.


8:48 a.m.
A few weeks ago when web site operators wanted to make a global protest against internet piracy legislation, the web sites shut down for only 24 hours to make their point and kill the legislation. 24 hours. What would the response have been if, like me, they shut down for 5 times as long (120 hours and counting)?

9:15 a.m.
Have I been released from a digital cage or have I been caged in an analog world?

9:42 a.m.
This was a terrible idea.
....

That's the end of Part One, and when the other parts are published in the next few days, they will be linked here and here.

And a question for you, dear readers: How long would you be willing to go without The Web?

Foxconn vs American Workers: A Losing Game

Rallying for their lives

American media is beginning to notice that our low-cost demand for consumer goods and the deep desire for only huge profits by bosses is driving us over an economic cliff. This NYTimes report peeks a little behind the curtains ...

"An eight-hour drive from that glass factory is a complex, known informally as Foxconn City, where the iPhone is assembled. To Apple executives, Foxconn City was further evidence that China could deliver workers — and diligence — that outpaced their American counterparts. 

That’s because nothing like Foxconn City exists in the United States. 

The facility has 230,000 employees, many working six days a week, often spending up to 12 hours a day at the plant. Over a quarter of Foxconn’s work force lives in company barracks and many workers earn less than $17 a day. When one Apple executive arrived during a shift change, his car was stuck in a river of employees streaming past. “The scale is unimaginable,” he said. 

Foxconn employs nearly 300 guards to direct foot traffic so workers are not crushed in doorway bottlenecks. The facility’s central kitchen cooks an average of three tons of pork and 13 tons of rice a day. While factories are spotless, the air inside nearby teahouses is hazy with the smoke and stench of cigarettes. 

Foxconn Technology has dozens of facilities in Asia and Eastern Europe, and in Mexico and Brazil, and it assembles an estimated 40 percent of the world’s consumer electronics for customers like Amazon, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Motorola, Nintendo, Nokia, Samsung and Sony. 

“They could hire 3,000 people overnight,” said Jennifer Rigoni, who was Apple’s worldwide supply demand manager until 2010, but declined to discuss specifics of her work. “What U.S. plant can find 3,000 people overnight and convince them to live in dorms?”

The economic engines in China and in Asia are fueled in ways American workers can't or won't work under. It isn't a matter of whether American workers are skilled or not.

I mentioned recently the mass suicide attempt by employees at one Foxconn complex in a bid to keep the wages they had.

Reports on Foxconn's business model are just barely being provided. But the information is grim. And a global solution which might ignite a boom in the American economy is at best a murky concept. It's as if we are debating what kind of boat to take to sea after we have already leapt over the rails of a ship and are swimming away.

Xbox Workers Threaten Mass Suicide

Conflicting accounts are beginning to get media attention about a group of possibly hundreds of workers at a plant in China who threatened to commit mass suicide over a pay dispute. Workers for Foxconn - which makes parts for the Xbox, iPhone, iPad, Kindle, Wii, and the PS3 - apparently took to the roof of one of the company dormitories and made the threat.

A report via Kotaku says the event followed an employee request for a raise, but were told they could either keep their jobs with no increase or quit and get severance pay. Other reports say the company told the employees their Xbox production line was being shut down and some would be transferred and the rest simply fired. As for the number of those who made the suicide threat, reports range from a few dozen to as many as 300. (More pictures here.)

Foxconn is the world's largest maker of electronic components, and is also the largest private employer in China. In 2010, one worker did commit suicide at one plant, which prompted the company to install 'suicide prevention netting' at some of their plants. Recent investigations at the some of the plants showed near-military like conditions for workers who are under constant surveillance as they work and live at the factory dorms.

Microsoft did issue a statement about the incident -

"Microsoft is one of many companies that contracts with Foxconn to manufacture hardware. Upon learning of the labor protest in Wuhan, we immediately conducted an independent investigation of this issue.

After talking with workers and management, it is our understanding that the worker protest was related to staffing assignments and transfer policies, not working conditions. Due to regular production adjustments, Foxconn offered the workers the option of being transferred to alternative production lines or resigning and receiving all salary and bonuses due, according to length of service. After the protest, the majority of workers chose to return to work. A smaller portion of those employees elected to resign.

Microsoft takes working conditions in the factories that manufacture its products very seriously. We have a stringent Vendor Code of Conduct that spells out our expectations, and we monitor working conditions closely on an ongoing basis and address issues as they emerge. Microsoft is committed to the fair treatment and safety of workers employed by our vendors and to ensuring conformance with Microsoft policy."

The radio show "This American Life" aired an episode on Jan. 6, 2012 about working in the electronics factories in China and for Foxconn.

The company's full list of customers is available here.

2011: The Year Movies Died

It’s harder to imagine the past that went away than it is to imagine the future.

As 2011 is set to end and 2012 to begin, I'd like to take a moment here to mourn the passing and the imminent extinction of an art form and a technology which has been an enormous part of my life and most of yours. (If you are say, age 20 or younger, the following will be a senseless old person rambling.)

2011 truly marks the end of movies. The use of 35 millimeter film moving past a light at 24-frames-per-second and projected onto a screen is fading fast in favor of digital technology. Even if I claim that digital is better, it is impossible to know if the claim is correct since we are in the midst of it's use and ascendance.

The quote at the start of this post from writer William Gibson, who coined the term "cyberspace" for his novel "Neuromancer" in 1984, a term already dusty and quaint. He made his remark in this interview with the Paris Review this year, and he had more to say on the topic, comments which seem appropriate in this eulogy for movies, for film, for cinema:

"It’s harder to imagine the past that went away than it is to imagine the future. … My great-grandfather was born into a world where there was no recorded music. It’s very, very difficult to conceive of a world in which there is no possibility of audio recording at all. 

"I can remember seeing the emergence of broadcast television, but I can’t tell what it did to us because I became that which watched broadcast television ... 

" ... we’re all constantly in a state of ongoing t­echnoshock, without really being aware of it—it’s just become where we live. The Victorians were the first people to experience that, and I think it made them crazy in new ways. We’re still riding that wave of craziness. We’ve gotten so used to emergent technologies that we get anxious if we haven’t had one in a while."

Thanks to the constant digitization of everything for storage and delivery via the internet, I do indeed have access to much more of the history of movies, as will all the world. But what goads me is the abandonment of the film projectors themselves, the end of film, the actual stuff you can hold in your hands composed of thousands and tens of thousands of frozen images, which can be made to race past a light and create the illusion of life, persistence of vision, a concept which has filled my life and my imagination and which I am still exploring, though now it will more as archeologist rather than anthropologist. I am now an antiquarian far removed from the cutting edge, a removal which took place pretty quickly.

What was once the product of gears, light bulbs and sprocket holes (ancient steampunk artifacts) is now the domain of the Digital Cinema Initiatives, pixels, gigabytes and hard drives.

There is no longer a need to change reels, mark the timing of that change with a "cigarette burn", or have stacks of film cans.

Is it a better image?

In this column, it is noted that:

"Vittorio Storaro has estimated that there are a minimum of 6000 x 3000 bits of information in one 35mm celluloid frame – in other words, eighteen million bits of pictorial information. In our HD transfer, there are roughly 2000 x 1000 bits of information per frame (or there would be, if we were working in Storaro’s ideal but theoretical 1X2 ratio) – i.e. about two million bits of information."

So that's where we are now, but that standard of image information is surely to change very quickly. Standards range from 24 FPS (frames per second) to 72 or more, and director Peter Jackson is using an army of more than 40 digital Red Epic cameras to film "The Hobbit" and is aiming for 48 FPS. I'm still yearning to own my own 35mm Arriflex camera. Some might say that's rather like asking for some papyrus and a few reeds to write some cuneiform.

Don't get me wrong - I don't want 8-track tapes or cassettes back, though I did like my old reel-to-reel sound system. I'm not wailing about the loss of hand-tooled buggy whips, or I hope I am not.

But if the only place you watch movies is on a screen you can hold in your hand, you are missing a major part how movies have served us best - they helped us form communities where we shared experiences all together, as one, at the same time, in vast darkened palatial rooms where overhead a beam of light raced above us and landed on a massive screen and life jumped out at us all.

But who knows what unimaginable discoveries and technologies might lie just ahead? That might be for those who dream more of the future, not the past.

Read more on the end of the 35mm movie world here from Roger Ebert or A.O. Scott.