Florian Brody...My Home is My Memory...Doors 2

< < < Previous Page   |   Conference Report   |   Doors 2   |   Mediamatic Index

Home -- `The place of one's dwelling and nurturing', a definition dated back to 1460 by the OED, defines us by the way we think and perceive the world we live in'.

The most important home for ideas in our culture is books and the Printing Press is possibly the first `machine célibataire', the celibacy machine that steps in where human relations leave off.

Reading at home was a common activity until the TV took over and sucked up everybody in the same story rather than leaving the diversity of different books for different interests. This also proves that electronic books will happen on small laptop PC's rather than on TV.

This mock-up of a Sony Sports reader, water resistant, with a high res., high contrast screen and stereo sound shows how `sexy' a consumer electronic book reader could look in the near future. Books of the next generation will emerge from the books we know today, but as Alan Ginsberg points out, we have to break up the old form as gently as possible to leave space for a new form to rise.

The major link to home today is the telephone and a pay phone is sometimes as close as you can get to home. In movies from the US, there are many scenes where people call home from the middle of nowhere. A study in the USA today shows that many US homes have three or more phones -- far more than neighborhood relations, phones integrate the average home into a social net. Is the computer becoming more and more the defining environment in a non-communicative society, replacing neighbor-communication with long-distance communication via electronic devices? The telephone has long taken over direct contacts- the next step may be the PC.

Conference Report   |   Doors 2   |   Mediamatic Index   |   Next Page > > >

Last updated: 26 jan 1995