Watch what Clay Shirky said at Web 2.0 Expo SF 2008 (transcript here):
The quote that everyone likes, for a good reason, is the following:
I was having dinner with a group of friends about a month ago, and one of them was talking about sitting with his four-year-old daughter watching a DVD. And in the middle of the movie, apropos nothing, she jumps up off the couch and runs around behind the screen. That seems like a cute moment. Maybe she's going back there to see if Dora is really back there or whatever. But that wasn't what she was doing. She started rooting around in the cables. And her dad said, "What you doing?" And she stuck her head out from behind the screen and said, "Looking for the mouse."
Here's something four-year-olds know: A screen that ships without a mouse ships broken. Here's something four-year-olds know: Media that's targeted at you but doesn't include you may not be worth sitting still for.
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It's also become my motto, when people ask me what we're doing-- from now on, that's what I'm going to tell them: We're looking for the mouse.
Kevin Kelly likes it. Bjoern Brembs says:
Most scientists have not made the transition of this four-year-old, yet.
The thing is....it's not just screens. I keep looking for the mouse and the "post comment" button whenever I read a book!
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Errm, why has no one else commented yet?
I think Bjoern Brembs' comment is spot on. I guess it may partly be because most scientists are slower uptakers, and also because the right app hasn't come along (well, if we exclude Genbank).
Thanks for the plug. The other day, I was reading an article cut out of a real paper newspaper. It had a word printed in bold where I wanted to click on, because I wanted to see if the link contained what I expected. To my dismay I quickly realized that this was still paper 1.0...
The few times I still write by hand on paper and I'm not sure how to spell a certain word, I sort of expect some red wriggly line to appear under my writing - until I realize I'm writing on paper 1.0.
When will they invent paper 2.0 I wonder? :-)
Paper 2.0! Awesome. I hope they have sense enough to use that term when it hits the market, and there are several schemes in the works already.
I have a friend who is trying to get one of his classes to create their own textbook by the end of the semester, on a wiki platform. This will be the first semester he's tried it.