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This is absurdly wrongheaded, and perhaps one of the most misguided things I've ever read on HN. The medium, as the old saying goes and in many cases, is the m

by zorpner 11y ago

This is absurdly wrongheaded, and perhaps one of the most misguided things I've ever read on HN. The medium, as the old saying goes and in many cases, is the message, and the way information comes into our brains fundamentally changes the context of the information, how we learn it, and how we're able to access it (for a trivial example, look at the connection between scent and memory). How toy blocks are toy blocks, whether they're made of wood or abstract vertices; No. Muscle memory and spatial skills are based on physical manipulation with the hands and arms. One cannot develop good body awareness/proprioception without actually using their limbs (this becomes even more important as we potentially move away from finger-based controls for computers). how a novel is a novel, whether it has a battle engine or not No. Control over the outcome and process of an artistic object fundamentally changes the object -- an appropriate analogy would be to an echo chamber where people manipulate art into forms they prefer rather than be challenged by it. Games can be art, but a process you engage with and alter is different from a process imposed upon you as a single vision by a writer. how a war simulation is a war simulation, whether the bullets are made of plastic and paint or network packets No. Physical reflexes and adrenaline responses operate in different ways when someone is perceiving real operations rather than an obvious simulation. Virtual reality may overcome some of these issues but it will do so by narrowing the analogue, not by analogizing bullets and packets. and that talking to strangers is talking to strangers, whether it's on a playground or on Facebook; No. Humans use an incredible number of feedback mechanisms to interpret person-to-person interaction, ranging from facial expressions to pheromones -- the idea that these responses can be coded into text or emoji in a coherent way is absurd (particularly given that many of them occur at an unconscious level). The computer is not a place -- it's a manipulatory environment that currently engages the fingertips, the eyes, and occasionally the ears, three of dozens of sensory inputs that our brain uses to model the world. The brain is plastic in many ways, but it is not so plastic that these inputs can replace scent, visual responses to faces, physical action of the limbs, the skin's response to environmental factors such as cold or sunlight, and many more. Messages are never independent of their medium, and this is never more true than when those messages are human experiences.

derefr 11y ago
Did you read my response to maaku above? You're arguing against a bunch of strawmen points. I'm not saying that there is no difference between the two things; I'm saying that an "activity" is a concept that belongs primarily to the cluster in conceptspace representing that activity's goals and affordances, and you should evaluate an instantiation of an activity relative to other instantiations of that activity, rather than relative to other activities available in the same medium. Or, to put that more simply, I'm saying that you should treat e.g. Minecraft as an instance of the kind of thing that Lego is, compare the two based on their merits (with e.g. Lego on the motor coordination side, as you said), and only then decide what you want or don't want your kids playing with. The point I was trying to make is that, for example, telling a child to "turn off their computer and read a book" is nonsense if they were reading a book on the computer. Both things are books. In this case, there is no additional merit on either side of the ledger; in either case, the affordance is "text" and the interaction is "moving your eyes to absorb it." Likewise, it is nonsense to tell your child to "get off the computer and go play with your friends" when all their friends are stuck at home due to their own overprotective parents, and so the only place they can freely see their friends is on the computer. You're making an assumption based on the medium (that the computer is solitary and real life is social), whereas in the specific case-by-case evaluation at that moment, the opposite is true. Again note how I'm not suggesting the experiences are one-for-one replacements for one-another. Of course they're not. But the degree to which they're not is exactly the same degree that any other instantiation of the same {goals, affordances} tuple—any other instance of the same activity—is not. And one more alternate phrasing, for redundancy's sake: in the set {computer game, board game, card game}, the adjective "computer" doesn't magically make the first element more N-dimensionally distant from the other two than they are to one-another. You should do the same evaluation when comparing the merits of the computer game to the card game, that you would when comparing the merits of the card game to the board game. Don't bias yourself by assuming that anything on a computer is going to have the same merits and the same drawbacks. The medium is not the central cluster to which the activity belongs. It's just a property in the equation.

by zorpner 11y ago

derefr 11y ago

Did you read my response to maaku above? You're arguing against a bunch of strawmen points. I'm not saying that there is no difference between the two things; I'm saying that an "activity" is a concept that belongs primarily to the cluster in conceptspace representing that activity's goals and affordances, and you should evaluate an instantiation of an activity relative to other instantiations of that activity, rather than relative to other activities available in the same medium. Or, to put that more simply, I'm saying that you should treat e.g. Minecraft as an instance of the kind of thing that Lego is, compare the two based on their merits (with e.g. Lego on the motor coordination side, as you said), and only then decide what you want or don't want your kids playing with. The point I was trying to make is that, for example, telling a child to "turn off their computer and read a book" is nonsense if they were reading a book on the computer. Both things are books. In this case, there is no additional merit on either side of the ledger; in either case, the affordance is "text" and the interaction is "moving your eyes to absorb it." Likewise, it is nonsense to tell your child to "get off the computer and go play with your friends" when all their friends are stuck at home due to their own overprotective parents, and so the only place they can freely see their friends is on the computer. You're making an assumption based on the medium (that the computer is solitary and real life is social), whereas in the specific case-by-case evaluation at that moment, the opposite is true. Again note how I'm not suggesting the experiences are one-for-one replacements for one-another. Of course they're not. But the degree to which they're not is exactly the same degree that any other instantiation of the same {goals, affordances} tuple—any other instance of the same activity—is not. And one more alternate phrasing, for redundancy's sake: in the set {computer game, board game, card game}, the adjective "computer" doesn't magically make the first element more N-dimensionally distant from the other two than they are to one-another. You should do the same evaluation when comparing the merits of the computer game to the card game, that you would when comparing the merits of the card game to the board game. Don't bias yourself by assuming that anything on a computer is going to have the same merits and the same drawbacks. The medium is not the central cluster to which the activity belongs. It's just a property in the equation.