Talk:Chapters for Characteristics of new media
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Not sure how to fit this into the article's flow -- editing someone else's work to add your own opinion is tricky, unless you just want to vandalize the original article. However, there's a crucial flaw (IMO) in the opening paragraph. Very often faster-better-cheaper IS revolutionary, if it's FBC enough. Consider that there is nothing a modern computer does, mathematically, that an ENIAC couldn't do. Given sufficient time (and some amount of human aid), an ENIAC could render a Quake IV frame, or at least do all the math for it. (Perhaps a human could color in squares on a big piece of graph paper as the results were spit out.) It would just tkae a few centuries or so to complete. Indeed, a computer doesn't do anything a human mathematician can't do -- it just does it a little bit faster and a bit more reliably.
So don't look for some new, revolutionary medi(a|um) to emerge from the Internet. Rather, think of ways in which FBC==Different. --Lizard 07:27, 10 October 2006 (PDT)
Thanks for this comment, which makes the good point that you can't drawing a hard-and-fast line between different types of change. The railroad revolutionized travel, even though it's just a faster mode of travel than a horse and wagon. On the other hand, railroads still carried goods, whereas the telegraph was (in my opinion) a more radical form of revolution because it allowed information to be carried faster than goods could be carried. Is it relevant to try to define different dimensions of change? I think it's worth trying.
Luckily, the premise of the article doesn't depend on the idea in the first paragraph; it's just a way of drawing the reader's attention to big changes that I see going on. Andyoram
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I have taken Lizard's comments to heart and redone the first three paragraphs. The article needs a strong start, not one that will cause people to complain. I hope I have gotten rid of the weak assertion that was a potential stumbling block to reading on and finding the main points of the article. As a side benefit (indicating that what I did was an improvement) the beginning is shorter by a whole paragraph.
There will probably be many more places that need toning down, because the article is deliberately bold. Andyoram
