Interview with Alan Kay

The Father of mobile computing is not impressed

An interview with Alan Kay caught my attention this weekend. There are many things worth noting and I invite you to read the entire article, but a few of them are particularly interesting.

And by the way, chat and tweeting? Remove that, because the utterances are so small, they’re basically transliterations of oral. And that has been studied in Africa by some of Jerome Bruner’s students.

Putting a writing system into an oral society doesn’t actually do it, doesn’t change them. It requires something more, because the thing that’s important about writing and how it changes the thinking of the civilization is the literate aspects of it, the structure and the thought, in various ways. Anyway, so this is all stuff that’s water over the dam, but most people don’t understand it. Most people in media don’t understand it.

In fact, mobile computers, he says, have turned out to be mind-numbing consumption devices—sophisticated televisions—rather than the wheels for the mind that Steve Jobs envisioned.