Super Bowl XXXVIII

[kimeunhyun]

American Football is the favorite winter pastime in America. Millions
watch the game every weekend. American Football Conference Champion and
National Football Conference Champion play their hearts out for the Super
Bowl Vince Lombardi Trophy and the bragging right. The stakes are high.
A lot of companies pull out their fancy advertisement at Super Bowl to
catch millions of eyeballs nationwide audience. They pay the network
millions of dollars for 30 second air time. It's a big deal indeed.

In a nail biting close game yesterday AFC Champion New England Patriots
managed to edge out NFC Champion Carolina Panthers. The final score was 32
vs. 29. With a little over 1 minute left the game was still tied to 29
and New England's quarterback Tom Brady engineered the final drive up
to 20 yards in Pathers's territory. With 9 seconds left, New England
kicker who missed two field goals earlier made the game winning field
goal. It was a stunning game. I usually don't watch Football because
the game takes too long and time-wasting but yesterday was an exception
(hey, it's a Super Bowl after all). I started watching the game and
found myself glued to the television set throughout the game and ended
up watching the entire game.

Anyhow I read the following article on local paper San Jose Mercury
yesterday and thought it might be interesting to you all. I mentioned
science, politics, a book earlier, now talking sports. The topic
seems neutral. My wife laboriously typed up the entire article to save
me the time. So if you find any typos, blame her :-) Enjoy.


"Apple ads aside, technology won't bring utopia"

By Theodore Roszak

Who played in the Super Bowl in 1984? Not many
people can remember - fewer, I'll bet, than remember
the woman who came sprinting across the television
screen at halftime to toss a great big hammer at a
glowering Big Brother. Talk about coming on strong.
That was how Apple Computer announced the first
Macintosh: a 60-second Orwellian mini-drama destined
to become perhaps the most famous commercial ever
made.
It's 20 years later, and Apple has "re-purposed"
the ad to help promote iPods. Once again you can see
an insurgent little company advertising itself as the
hope of the human race. Brash as it was, that
commercial embodied the utopian future so many people
saw in the computer just two decades ago.
Of course, Apple got a lot of things wrong.
First, the casting. In 1984, the cognoscenti saw
Big Brother as IBM, which dominated the PC market at
the time. But the future of the computer industry
didn't belong to IBM machines; it belonged to the
"disk-operating system" IBM had franchised to run its
machines. That was something called DOS, created by
a little-known firm called Microsoft. Apple never
saw it coming, but Bill Gates would become the Big
Brother of modern computing.
Nothing did more to ruin the high hopes
represented by Apple's hammer-tossing woman than the
dominance of Microsoft, soon to become the most
ruthless monopoly since Standard Oil. The result has
been inferior technology cleverly contrived to keep
the public buying one mediocre and buggy program after
another.
Given the commercial opportunism of the
industry, it's difficult now to recapture the
ebullience that originally greeted the personal
computer. This was not simply a machine; it was
dream, a cause, an ideal. The hackers who tinkered
the first computers into existence were bringing
humankind the great gift of information - endless
amounts of tree information.
The PC was considered a people's technology, a
guerrilla technology, one of the last gasps of
countercultural rebellion. In a larger sense, Big
Brother in Apple's "1984" TV spot was no just IBM but
the elephantine military-industrial complex. It was
everything big and domineering and slick.
Apple's idealism was marvelous, but how sadly
misplaced. Perhaps we can see that now in the wake
of the dot-com bust. We have watched high tech become
the next wave in big-bucks global industrialism, the
property of the crass and the cunning, who are no more
interested in empowering the people than General
Motors was. The computer is a mixed blessing. Far
from smashing Big Brother, computers have given him
more control over our lives. They have been a
blessing for snoops, con artists and market
manipulators. They have turned global communications
into glitchy, virus-plagued networks. Along with
some highly valuable resources, the World Wide Web has
brought a time-wasting flood of trivia, trash,
pornography and spam.

Thanks to the computer, we have begun to believe
that the mind, the defining feature of human nature,
is a somewhat inferior information-processing machine.

Some would say that it's the sign of a mature
technology to generate as many problems as it solves.
But in the case of the computer, there has been one
peculiarly pernicious result. We have equated a
machine with the mind. We believe computers are
"smart," so smart that we cast ourselves as "dummies"
in their presence. Thanks to the computer, we have
begun to believe that the mind, the defining feature
of human nature, is a somewhat inferior
information-processing machine.
And, of course, the computer-makers agree.
Microsoft is now peddling "eHome" systems to run our
home better than we can. No doubt there will soon be
books to help us out: "eHome Living for Dummies."
Will we ever again be able to see information for what
it really is? Minor; sometimes useful pieces of
mental furniture beyond which lie the higher,
never-to-be-computerized powers of the mind:
imagination, revelation, insight, intuition, wisdom?
Sound judgment, good citizenship, being "smart,"
has never had anything to do with information. The
real irony in Apple's charmingly defiant "1984"
commercial is that it failed to understand that the
Macintosh, too, represented Big Brother. Deifying the
computer and downgrading the human mind are the first
steps toward enslaving ourselves to our own
technology.



Theodore Roszak is professor emeritus of history at
California State University-Hayward. His books
include "The Cult of Information" and the novel "The
Devil and Daniel Silverman." He wrote this article
for the Los Angeles Times.

[금송화]

김승규, 임경찬 등 영어 잘하는 친구들, 미국에서 핀지가 왔으면 바쁜 사람들을 위해서 즉시 동시통역(Re)을 해야지, 당신들 직무태만이야.

[운영자]

갈수록 어려운 영어가 나오네. 영어 선생님들 좀 번역 해 주시요. 미식 축구는 룰을 모르니 한글로 이야기 해도 어렵다. TV에서도 스포츠 중계가 의외로 알아듣기 어려워. 뉴스가 제일 낫고...

[kimeunhyun]

If you read George Owell's science fiction novel 1984, watched the 1984 Apple Computer's Super Bowl AD, know PC industry history and current trend, it would be easier to understand what he is talking about.

[신종찬]

I usually listen to english radio news program in the morning on my way to clinic. I could not understand exactly what they said about american football. But I could uderstand that about accidental happening. Actually male & female singers were singing during ceremony time in that stadium.

[신종찬]

That senery was on air. The female singer,s breast was exposed by male singer by accident. Many people might see that. We are very intrested in that kinds of things. Plaese tell us about that. 아마 열심히 영어공부 할 것이다.

[kimeunhyun]

I knew you would bring it up :-) Unfortunately I have to confess that I got tired after running 8km in the morning and dozed off half time (damn it) and heard about the incident on the radio this morning. I guess I missed the real juicy stuff :-)

[운영자]

미식축구 개회식에서 여성가수의 가슴이 남자 가수에 의해 노출된 장면이 한국 TV에서도 잠깐 방영되었다. 의도적인 것인지, 실수인지 모르겠더라. 미국인은 해프닝을 일부러 만들어 낼려고 하는 것 같애. 가령 염소의 저주 같은 것... 왜 하필이면, 염소를 몰고 보스턴 레드삭스 야구 경기장에 갈려고 했을 까. 60년 전

[서교현]

몸은 먼 곳에 있지만 마음은 항상 우리들 곁에 와 있는 은현이, 반갑고 고맙다.

[서교현]

기계, 기술 문명이 생활의 편리함과 윤택함은 줄 수 있겠지만, 인간의 빈 마음을 채울 순 없겠지?

[큰창호]

에구~ 머리아파 눈도뱅글뱅글하고 차라리직이뿌래라....