There is no spoon ...
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The 1999 Warner Brothers' film, The Matrix, was about an artificial reality created by sentient machines, the artificial world seemed real, but was in fact just data! Sound like the internet? Well the film was heavily inspired by cyberspace and the computer hacker subcultures of the 1990s. In essence, the line 'there is no spoon' was to teach the principal character that the spoon was 'data' not a physical object and that he should modify both his perceptions and actions.
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Lets analyze some of the differences between web publishing and traditional publishing ...
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We have centuries of cultural experience in print-based publishing and much of that learning is relevant to the web, unfortunately much of it is also manifestly incorrect when applied to the internet. The nature of web publishing as data, the behavior of audiences and even the effects of a back-lit, variable size computer screen mean that 'what works for print' often fails to deliver on the web. Now that we know 'there is no spoon', or should I say, that web publishing is creating data and not by itself a manifest physical object, the rules of behavior are different. So in this different publishing environment, how do we go about bending the spoon.
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