THE GUIDE (1995)

The Guide can be accessed by clicking on the image of an old TV set; choosing a channel (by clicking on numbers) leads visitors to clippings from a TV guide; the attempt to provide two sentence summaries of movies is in itself humorous, and the fact that these decontextualized excerpts have no functionality for the medium they are presented in makesthem even funnier. Contributions by previous visitors provide the characteristic mix of anonymous Web postings -- "a disease"... "babysitter"... "The Symbol of My Generation"..."an emptiness filled with emptiness" ..."the hardware of our macroconsciousness"..."A place on which to set my stereo." -- but, at best, stimulate reflection on the characteristics of the two media, Web and TV. One comment dismisses the TV as a played-out medium, a waste of mindspace and replacement for community, another one longs for the combination of TV and computer, so that "we can choose what we watch." Christiane Paul Intelligent Agent, Fall 1997, volume 1, number 10

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