There is a reason for the “persistence of the past”. And it
is not always a bad thing. It’s ok for the past to be persistent, even if it is
outmoded. It is how it’s supposed to
be. Sheldon and his text-adventure game story tells something: He lacks the creativity
if this is not delivered by present technology-- not having a visual map in
front of his eyes, he does not realize that “going North” three times will bring
the same result.
To me, Sheldon is representative of the modern man completely
absorbed by technology: without visual representations fed by external sources,
he can’t see the forest for the trees. By the way, why it is necessary to play
laughing machines when something funny happens in the movie? Do we need
technical assistance to figure out when to laugh? Aren’t we like Sheldon?
Well, if we don’t take away what is good from the past, will
be difficult to be creative in building a future, even with the best technology
at hand. That is why I liked Elizabeth Eisenstein’s persistence
of the past idea because the expression “blocks of text get moved by
punching keys” reminds me of some XIV
century great invention: The keyboard we are using these days are, in fact,
some mini-copies of the Guttenberg’s movable type. The old printing press was not
used to represent smiley faces or other emoticons, but the books were embellished
with flowers, birds, fruits, human faces.
A nice handwritten letter was also created with
imagination: To express their passion, excitement or anger, people cared to use different ink colours, to include
flowers or other graphic representations in their writings. They used their
hands and brains to create something.
The past remains persistent because human
nature does not change in space or time. We just change the tools to express
ourselves.
I just hope that modern tools will not transform us in 24 h/day couch-potatoes.
I hope that will find the right balance between text and visual, computer and
brain, technology and human thinking.
