So lately I’ve been considering whether there is some organization to better understand some milestones of (Western) art history, which get period labels like:

premodern, classicist, medieval, renaissance, baroque, rationalist, romantic, modern, and postmodern.

And I thought, without prejudice to those who do this for a living (by this I mean I could be totally wrong), that I would group these in the following way:

I. classicist -> renaissance -> rationalist
II. medieval -> baroque -> romantic
III. premodern -> modern -> postmodern

I conjecture that the human condition has always embraced two competing threads of philosophical inquiry, and the aesthetic experience surely parallels this: one is rational, the other emotional. This split shows up in various pseudoscientific personality inventories and left-brain right-brain claims, so whatever the validity, altogether many people believe there are these two traits. Rationality requires thinking, emotion requires feeling. As time went on, people got better at accessing and expressing both. That makes the first two chains. Classicism and renaissance art are sort of a crude version of the more polished later rationalism, emphasizing rules of regularity rather than the essence of logical rigor. Similarly, medievalism and baroque emphasize the ornate or religious form, a particular representation, rather than the underlying emotional content that is abstractly expressed in late romanticism. Rationalism is not easy, it requires political organization, order, and an optimistic view of progress. Perhaps when things are going well, people gravitate toward the rational, and when things are not going well, in times of turmoil and chaos we fall back on our innate emotions that link us more to our primeval past.

The third chain is a recurring attempt at synthesis. The premodern form is sort of a backdated attempt at describing what must have existed in an uninspired form of synthesis — that is, whatever existed naturally by dint of our existence, which naturally has elements of both rationality and emotion: this is what defines us as humans. But following the (for now) pinnacle achievements of the rational and emotional movements — “pinnacle” only because they have delivered to us our current state of the world — we’ve been in a state of modern synthesis perhaps to try something different or to come to terms with the duality. It’s hard to classify the likes of impressionism and expressionism, which I see as sort of the rational-slanted and emotional-slanted precursors, respectively, of full-blown modernist abstraction. Impressionism uses rational language, but an intentionally imprecise one that somehow recalls emotional content. On the other hand, expressionism uses emotional language, but an intentionally distorted one that tends to evoke rational retrospection. Modernism in general creates, by abstraction, a distance from the human, and in this way, synthesizes the rational and emotional from the vantage point of a duality better observed. Nevertheless, modernism still gives the human element a place among equals, perhaps a slightly privileged one, still. Postmodernism, on the other hand, is more adversarial, which in its deconstructionist drive, removes the natural place that the human occupies in artistic expression. One would believe that ultimately, postmodernism would fail for this reason, but one can’t be sure… For there is a long road to synthesis yet, especially as it is set up for a future where artificial intelligence may join us. And from the papers on aesthetics in the opening, there may be a shorter distance between the rational and the emotional, and between the human and the algorithmic, than we think.

The nice thing about these input devices is that they don’t require anything special in terms of hardware — maybe a duplicity of some parts, but not expensive ones — all the smarts are in software. This can only mean two things: the devices will get smarter and smarter as time goes on, and, they will (soon) become standard parts of computers (and indeed, all devices), enabling a new field of naturally human-interactive applications. Definitely something to look forward to.

At first, I thought it was the CD version that was being shut down, but no, it’s the online version; apparently the former, along with many Microsoft Home products (some were classics), had long been discontinued. Incidentally, I’ve used the CD product, but never the online product — I’ve been aware of it because it comes up in searches, but since it’s just the CD version put online, I’m not surprised it is meeting the same fate. It just goes to show that whatever process is driving traditional publishing into the ground is rather far along.

I, for one, still remember paper encyclopedias. For that matter, I still remember when libraries used card catalogues (you pull them out of a small drawer to find the Dewey decimal), but these became extinct at about the same time as the 5.25″ floppy disk. As for encyclopedias, they sat as multivolume collections in the reference section — maybe they still do? Haven’t been to a public library in a long time…

The first CD encyclopedia I remember was Grolier’s. Its selling point was some animations in articles. For a time these encyclopedias were useful for school projects, but by high school they seemed pretty useless — the articles just had too low a signal-to-noise ratio. Maybe they did not provide enough depth, or the short list of references were not adequate, or there was too much fluff that simple queries could not be answered in a well matched way. Often the writers were totally full of themselves, too (reminds me of about.com). The end result was these references could neither be used directly (plagiarism aside), nor were the raw data in them easily extractable. I think that’s one reason why I stopped using them, whatever the media encyclopedias came in. The other reason was that such generalist information was not difficult to find on the internet, even without a Wikipedia.

So while the comparison to Wikipedia is appealing as a foil, these products really failed on their own merits: they were generally inadequate and inferior products and they were not even free for being so.* The economic realities of that are only catching up now. And if newspapers follow them there, it would be because newspapers have long become wire service repeaters, not because of the existence of Google News. Interestingly, I haven’t had the interest to subscribe to these newspapers for a long time, either.

* Inferior compared to what, you say. Isn’t it the existence of a “better” alternative that lies at the crux of the matter? Actually, no. The inferiority is measured from the amount of nagging feeling of not having learned much. The reality is, without an alternative, one would just know less and unless effort be expended, be resigned to that… (Economically, of course the existence of an alternative matters, but that’s a separate issue.)