(Steven Johnson🙂 …the kind of door-opening exploration that Google offers is in fact much more powerful and unpredictable than previous modes of exploration. It’s a lot easier to stumble across something totally unexpected—but still relevant and interesting—using Google than it is walking through a physical library or a bookstore. A card catalogue is a terrible vehicle for serendipity. But hypertext can be a wonderful one. You just have to use it the right way.
(Marvin Minsky:) I don’t see any basic change; there always was too much information. Fifty years ago, if you went into any big library, you would have been overwhelmed by the amounts contained in the books therein. Furthermore, that “touch of a button” has improves things in two ways: (1) it has change the time it takes to find a book from perhaps several minutes into several seconds, and (2) in the past date usually took many minutes, or even hours, to find what you want to find inside that book—but now, a Computer can help you can search through the text, and I see this as nothing but good.
(Douglas Rushkoff:) We give up the illusion of our power as deriving from some notion of individual collecting data, and find out that having access to data through our network-enabled communities gives us an entirely more living flow of information that is appropriate to the ever changing circumstances surrounding us. Instead of growing high, we grow wide. We become pancake people.
Lets all be pancake people.
4 comments on “Where We Are and Where We Are Going”
Very good.
Indeed, the world is changing faster than we can conceptualize it; especially with the advent of the information age in all it’s technological splendor. I pride myself by saying: “I was there” before the blog scene started to grow and now, as it becomes more and more popular (a political blogger was in the White House for the first time last week), I continue to speak of it as one of the new and more dynamic sources of becoming informed.
Especially Livejournal, despite it’s young demographic, mainly because of it’s “communities” that allow the flow of information to become more controllable and with the opportunity to have input. Google and AI-based search engines are becoming more friendly and are beginning to make it easier for us.
In five years or so the internet is going to be so ubiquituous, children will look up and ask what it was like before the internet–before they could reach into their pocket and pull out a device with access to more information than all the libraries in the world combined.
Sorry if I was being romantic, it just excites me a lot.
I don’t know that Live Journal is especially important as information distributor. In my experience, the outward, rather than inward (i.e. LJ), facing journals and blogs are the best for information. When it comes to community building LJ and similar community-driven sites have the edge. One of the things I want to work on is enabling community among outward facing sites.
I think that the internet is about to hit growing pains as we wrestle with corporate vs. social interests online. I think your romantic vision may be possible but there is still incredibly valuable and vast information to be found exclusively in print that we somehow need to make accessable online before it’s able to compete fully with a physical library. Copyright laws are going to be our biggest obsticle in that, I believe.
I love Douglas Rushkoff, he’s a great social writer and thinker, however I read one of his novels and wasnt blown awqay
I’ve only read the pancake article but found it quite intereting.