Mm, that's true. Turkle's entire book is full of these binary classifications, and I do worry that it's sweeping up unrelated things into the clusters.
For that matter, maybe I should make some disclaimer that Stephenson is definitely sweeping up too many unrelated things, like saying that working with text instead of images necessarily puts you in the "bottom-up understanding" mode (which I don't think is true for a lot of literary fiction), or that his command-line users are the productive members of society and GUI-users are consumers. Certainly, Turkle would disagree with those claims.
The main thing that I think they agree on, though, is the idea that there has been a big shift in the "culture" of using computers, which roughly coincides with the CLI->GUI transition and is characterized by [the clusters hinted at above]. The question of whether there has been a change or not seems less likely to be biased by psychological effects.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2018-12-10 11:47 pm (UTC)For that matter, maybe I should make some disclaimer that Stephenson is definitely sweeping up too many unrelated things, like saying that working with text instead of images necessarily puts you in the "bottom-up understanding" mode (which I don't think is true for a lot of literary fiction), or that his command-line users are the productive members of society and GUI-users are consumers. Certainly, Turkle would disagree with those claims.
The main thing that I think they agree on, though, is the idea that there has been a big shift in the "culture" of using computers, which roughly coincides with the CLI->GUI transition and is characterized by [the clusters hinted at above]. The question of whether there has been a change or not seems less likely to be biased by psychological effects.