One of my summer jobs during University was in computer operations in a large data centre in the early 1980s. Back then hard drives were about 3 ft across, the size of a small refrigerator and held less than 1GB and most information was stored on magnetic tapes in a large library. Part of my job was to get tapes out of the library and mount them on tape readers as the computers needed them. I felt like a mechanical PART OF THE MACHINE.
Now, many of us read online information, digest it, organize it, connect it, curate it using various tools like WordPress “Press This” that I’m using now for this blog, or Pinterest “Pin IT” or Scoop.it. We are now, not just the mechanical, but part of the man-machine post 2.0 Intelligent System PART OF THE MACHINE.