Reading Response

This idea of bi-directional information transfer or communication (...is that redundant?) really stuck with me and caused me to rethink a lot of fundamental definitions and assumptions I seem to have made about connectivity...on various levels.

"We all communicate with the future, don’t we. Email, credit cards, texts. Anything that goes into the records speaks directly to the future. The question is, can the future speak back?"

This is a quotation from Tenet, a movie I saw recently, about an international espionage mission to save humanity in a world where the entropy of all things can be reversed. It didn't occur to me until I watched the lecture video- specifically the Project Xanadu part and the "invisible" web part- that the word "connection" is being largely misunderstood in the digital realm. "Connection" assumes interaction, bi-directional flow of information- a "thing" that speaks back to us when we speak into it. These thoughts are still very foggy and preliminary in my mind, but I realized (and hopefully what I'm about to say isn't too radical) that we aren't really "connected" to the Internet at all.

Like the above movie quote and what Dr. Kleinrock was saying about "the room speaking back" in Lo and Behold, it's weird to stop and think about how a lot of the operations we do on our computers are really just uni-directional. Yes, we might be more "connected" to each other as a result of the Internet, but it's interesting to think that (outside of those "technological horror" scenarios where the computer comes to life by some supernatural power) there isn't an actual connection between user and device...unless mediated by another user.

I don't know, makes my brain hurt thinking about Project Xanadu...