*This is sorta like a beatnik complaining that too many straight people have learned about bongos and marijuana... but there's a lot to what Golan Levin says here. And he's the right guy to say it, too.
http://www.flong.com/blog/2009/new-media-artworks-prequels-to-everyday-life/
New Media Artworks: Prequels to Everyday Life
19 July 2009 / external, reference, thanks
"As an occasional emissary for new-media arts, I increasingly find myself pointing out how some of today’s most commonplace and widely-appreciated technologies were initially conceived and prototyped, years ago, by new-media artists.
"In some instances, we can pick out the unmistakable signature of a single person’s original artistic idea, released into the world decades ahead of its time — perhaps even dismissed, in its day, as useless or impractical — which after complex chains of influence and reinterpretation has become absorbed, generations of computers later, into the culture as an everyday product. (((Not that this ever happens to science fiction writers, or designers, or research scientists, or political activists, or anybody.)))
"This story forms the core argument for including artists in the DNA of any serious technology research laboratory (as was practiced at Xerox PARC, the MIT Media Laboratory, and the Atari Research Lab, to name just a few examples): the artists posed novel questions which wouldn’t have arisen otherwise. To get a jump on the future, in other words, bring in some artists who have made theirs the problem of exploring the social implications and experiential possibilities of technology. What begins as an artistic and speculative experiment materializes, after much cultural digestion, as an inevitable tool or toy.
"In other instances, we detect a whiff of outright theft. This may be difficult to prove, or at least, challenging to litigate, particularly for ideas which have simmered in the stew of the public domain for a few years. We simply pity, or perhaps snicker at, the artist who seeks redress from a behemoth corporation like Microsoft for its callous disregard of his Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license...."
