Joys of interactive media

An article in 21C Magazine by Jaron Lanier on the movie Minority Report including his role in talking it over with Speilberg. I think the futurology of the movie was flawed, but I like this last comment by Jaron:

… movie people as a whole have trouble understanding the joys of interactive media. It’s just a different culture. A dystopian movie about virtual worlds, like The Matrix, can make its way through Hollywood and be distributed, but a utopian movie about an interactive future seemingly cannot. Movie people are subliminally terrified by interactivity. It spells not only a loss of creative control, which movie people would miss more than you can imagine, but also a loss of business model. Napster lurks implicitly inside every shared virtual world that’s under the control of its users. The world that seems utopian to me is dystopian to Hollywood.

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