Yesterday, while clearing my RSS reads, I came across two very interesting and completely opposite perspectives about the information age that we’re in. Well, they both say a lot of stuff and not all of it relates to each other, but these are kinda the main points I came away with…
“Where is Everyone?” is about how people will connect to each other in future, and has a beautiful graph showing how information has spread since 1800… :
Social news, as described previously, is going to be the most important way that people communicate. The traditional journalistic reporting is by now completely replaced getting information directly from the source. Everyone is a potential reporter, but new advances in targeting will eliminate most of the noise. The journalists will turn into editors who, instead of reporting the news, bring it together to give us a bigger picture.
… while “The End of the Information Age” says that the Internet is ecologically un-sustainable and we’ll need to return to a more analogue society:
Very few people realize just how extravagant the intake of resources to maintain the information economy actually is. The energy cost to run a home computer is modest enough that it’s easy to forget, for example, that the two big server farms that keep Yahoo’s family of web services online use more electricity between them than all the televisions on Earth put together. Multiply that out by the tens of thousands of server farms that keep today’s online economy going, and the hundreds of other energy-intensive activities that go into the internet, and it may start to become clear how much energy goes into putting these words onto the screen where you’re reading them.
The writer also predicts that the Internet will become regulated and owned/monopolised by huge media conglomerates that exist for newspaper and TV.
Personally, I don’t have such insight into these things to take a stand and say, “Yes, I think this is going to be the way it is.” or anything like that. In fact, the only thing I’m ever sure of is that our world is in one big mess. Talk about stating the obvious.
I do wonder about the true benefits of technology sometimes though. It often seems like the bad outweighs the good where information/technology is concerned. I wonder if it’s possible to live a no-tech life in this world today. Just now, I briefly considered making it my dream to live out of a suitcase – AXED (for now at least… though in actuality, with a little streamlining, I may not be that far off…) Anyway, both scenarios seem a little extreme to me, but in case we move to a completely digital world at some point, I’m considering collecting books properly, so that I can open an underground library when it’s illegal to own books one day. (But then there goes my suitcase-d life… hmm)
In regular life news, I decided to make use of this waxing moon phase to pick up 2 new daily habits:
- 5 minutes of meditation. Why 5 minutes? Seems so pointless, but it’s a starting point. My mind is just too noisy sometimes and I need to get started somewhere. Maybe one day I’ll be able to levitate :P Today: DONE.
- Lights out after 12. This one is good cos it kills two birds with one stone. First, I need to sleep and wake up early. Secondly, it’s eco-friendly! Let’s see if my electricity bills and other things will change. Today: FAIL (probably by 30 minutes). LOL.
I’m going to track this new habit thing, so I apologise in advance for boringness in future posts.