I was very sad to hear of the passing of Doug Engelbart. As many of you know, he co-invented many things we now take for granted, including the computer mouse, hypertext, graphical user interfaces, and computer networking.
But more important than any of these individual contributions was his influence in a powerful view of computer technology: That the true betterment of society through technology cannot come from innovations within a handful of companies. Rather, what is required is literacy on a massive scale. The citizenry needs to be fully engaged in using such technology for the creation of original ideas, of new ways of thinking and doing things.
I fully believe in this vision. After all, we already live in a world where millions of citizens are able contribute to our culture of music, literature, theatre and the visual arts. Powerful works in these media emerge from the “long tail” of the citizenry on a regular basis.
And only in the last five years we have seen a transformation in the production of film and video. Thanks to wide adoption of recently developed technologies for digital video production and distribution, young people today have a fluency in creating works for this medium that would have been unthinkable less than a generation ago.
Sometime in the coming decade, this revolution will extend to procedural creation, when a new generation of young people will be able to draw on computer programming to help in the creation of new cultural works and the expression of original ideas.
And when that happens, somewhere the spirit of Doug Engelbart will be smiling.