Abstraction
Posted on | January 26, 2010 | No Comments
This is not a complete post. It’s a start for a larger topic I want to cover with several posts, but I want to kick it off.
There are two types of abstraction I am thinking about right now: in things we want and in things we see.
I want to build cars and run a race team. For who knows what reason, I want to believe that that’s my passion because racing is cool and cars are fun but my heart can’t convince my brain that I like those things in and of themselves. They are just things and it is silly to love an inanimate object. What’s not silly is what they represent. Racing is the best combination I’ve found of engineering, competition, dedication, immersion, beauty, emotion, and adrenaline. That’s the reason I love it, not because I love racing itself but because it embodies all of those traits.
When you see something, you see a front. I visualize this best using movies as an example. Movies are comprised of a story, music, technology, performance… What you see is a 2 hour long product and if you enjoy it, it’s not because simply the 2 hours was good but because all of what created the 2 hours was good. A good playwright knows how to work with emotion and psychology to create a great story, but you don’t have to know any of that in order to like it. In this way, everything you see can be abstracted to the skill and knowledge of those who produced it.
I believe this drives Web 2.0. I’ll explain why later.
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