I never imagined that people had thought of making a Pangaea of sorts of artistic media even before the invention of technology able to do so. Before reading this article, electronic multimedia did not even strike me as a form of art; instead, I imagined multimedia and the internet a a kind of museum system that housed art. However, now I see that the very act of combining all media into a single, all-encompassing experience by definition changes that media into a whole new animal.
In addition, it's hard to remember that before the computer, before the internet, ideas that seem commonplace to us now; the ability to communicate wirelessly and speedily via e-mail and IM; the ability to download seemingly from midair music, movies, and other media; the computer as a work tool that could create animations, presentations, and sounds. Even making the jump from the earliest computer, one used only for military calculations, to the idea that a computer could be one's own personal assistant is amazing when you stop to think about it.
I also never thought of the internet as a series of hyperlinks; in fact, when I first read it, I was confused. Like a "choose your own adventure" book, from this page alone I can access at least... fifteen different pages and places on blogger's site. Hyperlinks are our method of navigation on the internet; before reading this article I took them for granted.
It's amazing how many ideas and plans and schemes for an interactive virtual reality people have made over time; even in the early day of the computer, people were planning for a fake world. After reading this article, I suddenly hope that virtual reality is not so far away with the new influx of 3-D systems.
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