[ndespres]

>>It's hard to describe but it almost feels to me like media today - this applies to games and films and everything - is often created at a meta level, a simulacrum of the real thing.

Miyazaki had a line in a documentary I watched a couple years ago which is now only a vague echo in my mind and I am struggling to search for it, but the gist of it was that early animators had an appreciation and an eye for people, the world, real movement of real bodies, whether reflected in cinema or just in everyday life, while later, he said, were raised on animation, so the product is a second-order imitation.

The same must be true with software. Early painting/desktop publishing/presentation software retains a link to how those things were done with your hands and scissors and paint brushes, trying to fit them into the screen for the first time, to be used by someone who might not have used a computer before. Now it’s a foregone conclusion that you’ll be working on the computer, and nobody involved had ever flipped through a literal book of clip art or made a slideshow on transparent paper.