link via www.kottke.org but with credit to Steven Johnson who presented Jane Jacobs’ ideas so cogently in his book Emergence
Cities and Web Economies: Interview with Jane Jacobs: by Blake Harris
Q. So much of what you have talked about and thought about over the years in terms of neighborhoods, so much of it is about people going outward, whether it is on the street, whether it’s their neighbor, whether it is in their community. Yet there is a new concern that we might start turning inward with our computers, in our little nests at home. Are you concerned that this computerized world is also going to change the focus of the neighborhood?
A. [There is] a very persuasive argument that the computer, in the form of things like the World Wide Web and the Internet, is actually [giving] people firsthand experience with use of a Web and making virtual changes in a Web-like way.
This is not real. But after all, quirks and quarks and atoms are not real, for all we know. But thinking of them, picturing them and seeing the world with these things, really illuminates our understanding. It may be untruthful and it may be wrong, but usually, each of these things gets a little nearer the truth.
So this Web-thinking in the place of the mechanical, cause/effect kind of thinking is certainly closer to the truth. The use of the computer [may be] indispensable to this, both for the complications we have to understand and have begun to understand and also because of a different notion this gives people.
You know it’s always been available to people that they be hermits. But think of how few of them have been. So, no, I don’t think the human race will suddenly be smitten with an overwhelming urge to become hermits because of a new machine.
What is so interesting about this is that people like me ARE turning to our computers, but in so doing we are then being exposed to a vast raft of information and opinion. The Internet is now our news feed, our opinion feed, our education feed… it is replacing books, TV, newspapers, encyclopedias, hi-fi,… it is replacing the traditional certainties of my life (BBC News, The Independent, Radio 4) with a broader, more challenging, spectrum of ideas…
I’ll feel happier when I can spread my computer screen across the breakfast table – but, for the moment, the medium is less important than the message…