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The one discipline in the university which aspired to be for generalists is Communication Studies. Note that the author and I are both in communication departments despite the fact that we are respectively a sociologist and a psychologist. My own department contained many other "deviates" when I joined it in the 1980s - the faculty included a Jesuit priest, an engineer, a novelist, and one with no advanced degrees at all. As they retired, they have been replaced by people with degrees in Communication Studies. Our "success" within the academy has resulted in Ph. D. programs, whose graduates we hire, making our discipline specialized like all the other departments within the university.
We can thus no longer look to the university for the understanding of issues (such as considered in this book) which transcend department boundaries. We must turn, as did Engelbart, to "'free intellectuals' such as Norbert Weiner, Alfred Korzybski, and Benjamin Lee Whorf" (Page 15). Their freedom permits them to roam across department boundaries, ignoring the "trespassers will be persecuted" signs. It also permits them to roam into that no person's land between the university in one camp (under their banner of rigor) and the practical world of business-government (under their banner of relevance). We all know that rigor times relevance is a constant - that is, as either goes to zero, the product goes to zero. We need people who can raise that constant. Douglas Engelbart is such a "free intellectual" raising the rigor x relevance banner. The author, Thierry Bardini, follows in his large footsteps.
From this book, I learned a great deal about mice and men and how their "schemes gang aft agley". I also unlearned a lot. Simple-minded notions that the qwerty keyboard was designed to slow the typist down (Page 75), that the internet was initially designed to blunt the impact of nuclear attacks (Page 183), and that computers are now modeless (Page 118) are now seen within their more complex historical perspective. I'm no longer fooled by modes disguised as windows and no longer scared of quasimodes (name for modes that are maintained kinesthetically suggested by Jef Raskin in his book, The Humane Interface).
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