As a musician and programmer, I get to meet a lot of people who use their computers for producing original and interesting stuff, so my idea of it all might not be very representative of the whole.
Well, like I said, the
capability for creation is definitely still there (even if my theoretical "muse" is missing and that makes it harder to focus.) But I think we are seeing a shift in
emphasis.The technological shift towards consumption I think of mostly as an adaption to the market, but if you get into the cybernetics of the thing, it's also very much the consumers approaching technology in the way they were taught to approach it.
Precisely. That's the primary difference between my family in the early '90s and Family
X getting their first computer today - not that we were part of some creative elite, oh-so-much-better-suited to these pursuits (well, my mom was a pretty good pianist, but other than that,) but that Family
X lives in a culture where they have been taught for years that they exist primarily to be consumers of product distributed by media conglomerates.
That was much more true for Apple than C64/Atari 800 and later ST/A500. When I was a kid (C64 era) computer gaming was already huge, "productivity" was the line we gave our folks to justify buying us the things. Console gaming was for the peasants. :-)
Well, yes and no. There was definitely a thriving gaming scene, and computers-as-entertainment as an idea goes all the way back to the '60s and the PDP-1. That said, you'll note that you still
had to convince your folks that it was for something useful or creative. The
expectation was still there, even though you were shirking it
And I've rescued multiple C64s that came with as much productivity software as they did games, so people
were using them for doing stuff in addition to gaming.
