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by gumby
2344 days ago
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Sorry, “the institute” is MIT slang for MIT. The media lab is called the media lab and indeed many people at the institute view it with scorn and/or envy. The document under discussion was about the institute. Several interesting things came out of the media lab including mindstorms OTOH. Not in proportion perhaps to the amount of press, but the media lab was not funded from government grants by and large. Media lab emphasized demos, true, but in some ways I admired it, as the rest of the institute (a part from Architecture, wher the ML sits) but you know, everywhere else was good at burying things or assuming the technical detail was all that mattered. |
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I ask because media labs often annoyed me with the twee "look at the future" stuff that never really panned out. The "food computer" thing mentioned above being a particularly ridiculous recent example.
I think it mostly annoys present day me in that I was taken in by this in the early 90s, when I was an avid reader of Mondo2k, Wired and the other kinds of publications Negroponte used to shill in. If the best thing that came out of the place since it was founded back in 85 is ... lego extensions... well, maybe people should stop funding them. I mean, Seymour Papert was pretty cool for his day, but he's dead.