Posts tagged with internet
“ Everything we put on the Web is both ephemeral and archival — ephemeral in the sense that so much of what we post is only fleetingly relevant, archival in the sense that the things we post tend to stay where we put them so we can find them years later.”
Scott Rosenberg: Why trust Facebook with the future’s past?
He goes on to compare the way that older sites - like Flickr - expose an archive, whereas newer ones - like Facebook - don’t, despite the fact that some of the promotional commentary for the Places feature has been about looking back in twenty years. In other words: “Facebook could be such a repository today, if it actually cared about history. It has given no evidence of such concern.”
“”The Internet is a gigantic version of what they faced in the 1920s, when the first widely distributed pamphlets about “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” came out. They were cheap and easily available. It was an age of increasing literacy. It prefigured what we have on a much bigger scale now. It was hard in these circumstances to distinguish the authoritative from the quack. It’s like medicine in the Wild West: There are some doctors around, but there are a lot of people on strange wagons saying they can cure your blindness.
We always had this problem to a degree, but what the Internet has done is revolutionized the amount of information. We know that Google operates on an algorithm that tells you what’s popular, but it seems to be telling you what’s authoritative.
“ The Chans aren’t the freak sideshow of the Internet. They are the heart and soul of the Internet. And they are the ones furthest ahead of the pack, leading us. At this point there should be little doubt that the Internet is mutating the human species into something completely different. Therefore it’s instructive to look at the most extreme, freebased forms of the Internet to see where we’re going — and 4chan is that freebased version of mankind’s new drug of choice.”
“ The first thing she found is that young people today write far more than any generation before them. … It’s almost hard to remember how big a paradigm shift this is. Before the Internet came along, most Americans never wrote anything, ever, that wasn’t a school assignment. Unless they got a job that required producing text (like in law, advertising, or media), they’d leave school and virtually never construct a paragraph again.”
- everything that’s already in the world when you’re born is just normal;
- anything that gets invented between then and before you turn thirty is incredibly exciting and creative and with any luck you can make a career out of it;
- anything that gets invented after you’re thirty is against the natural order of things and the beginning of the end of civilisation as we know it until it’s been around for about ten years when it gradually turns out to be alright really.
“ In other words, companies that focus on traditional measures of quality—fidelity, resolution, features—can become myopic and fail to address other, now essential attributes like convenience and shareability.”
“ The virtual world we studied appears to behave in the way a real economy does. The people there are as rational (or irrational) as we are offline. As a result, there are price indexes, an inflation rate, etc. This suggests some at least rough mapping is taking place for the world’s economics, and that maybe, just maybe, these worlds might serve as testbeds for economic research and policy tests.”
“ As search engines begin to incorporate more and more opinion data into their results, the distinction between fact and opinion may start blurring to the point where, as David Byrne once put it, “facts all come with points of view.”
“ It’s the deep, attentive engagement that the Web is draining away, as we fill our iTunes library with tens of thousands of “tracks” at little or no cost. What the Web tells us, over and over again, is that breadth destroys depth. Just hit Shuffle.”
“My biggest fear is that people are overloaded with information and have no idea what is relevant and what is irrelevant”
Neil Postman on Cyberspace, 1995 (via tranquileye)
