An audacious attempt to reshape blogging, to see where it can go next!
Podcasts and video have really taken over - to the extent that it feels like reading may be falling behind. Can we enhance text and imagery on the Web? Try to give blogging new life?
My take is that the web could feel warmer and more lively than it is. Visiting a webpage could feel a little more like visiting a park and watching the world go by. Visiting my homepage could feel just a tiny bit like stopping by my home.
In the absence of the cultural spaces my work usually occupies, I’ve found myself chasing the social rituals they evoke and the reverence they embody through abstract digital recreations and pastiche. In these spaces, familiar feelings and experiences reverberate and mix with new ones.
They are events that all at once feel both practical and absurd.
In a time of such flux and uncertainty, maybe that is as good a place as any to be.
How do we know what’s the right direction [for computers to take]?
Ultimately it comes down to taste. It comes down to trying to expose yourself to the best things that humans have done, and then trying to bring those things in to what you’re doing.
Picasso had a saying: “Good artists copy, great artists steal.” And we (at Apple) have always been shameless about stealing great ideas. And I think part of what made Macintosh great was that the people working on it were musicians and poets and artists and zoologists and historians who also happened to have been the best computer scientists in the world. But if it hasn’t been for computer science, these people would all be doing amazing things in life in other fields. And they brought with them — we all brought to this effort — a very liberal arts air, a very liberal arts attitude, that we wanted to pull in the best we saw in these other fields into ours.