Response: Janet Murray, Inventing the Medium

“The engineers see the challenge of our time, finding the key to survival in an atomic age, a challenge to our intellects. The world has become more difficult to understand, so we need better ways of thinking about it, more powerful methods of mastering complexity.” This quote is an excellent example of what the medium of digital filmmaking is having issues with. It is impossible to fully comprehend what it takes to create a complex work. The computer is a tool just like any other in which a work is created with. This tool is compared to the printing press that was created 500 years ago and how its power was used for good and bad. The computer is a great example of a subject in which the potential is unlimited. The article also touches on how our current culture’s knowledge is more organized because of the Internet than any other culture before. This statement is a perfect example of what our culture is seeing today because in the last 100 years alone the knowledge that humanity has been able to produce is 100x what it previously was aware of. It was a necessity to be able to organize this information into a dispersible manner. It is a rational way to think about technology as a dangerous tool because of its quickness and ability to adapt. Our culture must just look into its past to consider what it has learned and apply it to our progression. We must always remember that all art is a tool of the collection of knowledge that humanity has been able to gather.