Starting from the email and its stylistic facets, chat, in which we focus also on the art of composing spartan shapes and colors in the standard IRC, the author probes the spontaneous, irreverent and relentless personal communication that found between restrictions techniques and tricks of its own random mode. In the following chapters we analyze the digital greetings (greetings, condolences), then moved to a short and intense history of ASCII Art and its roots in RTTY Art, the art of the teletype, with the additional restriction of ASCII to 5 bits (ie only upper case).
The author of this book, Brenda Danet, is now deceased. There are no chances to find her online and ask her about her book. I would have liked to know if she ever tried ASCII or other text art herself.
In 20 years I think there will be a small flood of books about Internet and communications, the history. About there in time will be the 50 year mark for the Internet becoming a part of popular media. The Internet is older than that, but few people knew much about it until ISP's started cropping up and making it fairly easy for anyone with a computer to connect online.
The Internet (beyond the computer itself) has changed communication forever. But, as I see typewriters become obsolete, I wonder what will be next. I would not be surprised if the computer itself eventually went into the obsolete pile. But, I do wonder about screen size. From big screen TVs to the tiniest mobile devices... screen sizes don't get taken into account very often in communication. I don't count making websites mobile-friendly because that's a necessity due to the miniscule size. Do people really prefer a tiny screen? I can't imagine so - I don't!
It doesn't seem mobile is going anywhere though. How will reading everything from tiny screens change communications, more than it has so far? Will people start wearing magnifying glasses? If so, will that just give manufacturers a reason to make things even smaller? Over generations, if this keeps up, will our eyeballs or eye sight adapt to reading this way?
Note: The quoted text above comes from a review of Brenda Danet's book, on Neural.
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