22 FEB 2013 by ideonexus
William Gibson 1996 Observations of the WWW
In the age of wooden television, media were there to entertain, to sell an advertiser's product, perhaps to inform. Watching television, then, could indeed be considered a leisure activity. In our hypermediated age, we have come to suspect that watching television constitutes a species of work. Post-industrial creatures of an information economy, we increasingly sense that accessing media is what we do. We have become terminally self-conscious. There is no such thing as simple entertainment. ...WWW is emergent, we see consuming information as work, Beavis and Butthead are meta in that we are watching someone watching TV. Lots of good stuff here.