Tag Archives: Early Net Culture

The State, the Press and Hyperdemocracy

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“Information flow is corrosive to institutions, whether that’s a record label or a state ministry. To function in a hyperconnected world, states must hyperconnect, but every point of connection becomes a gap through which the state’s power leaks away.”

“Script kiddies everywhere now have a role model. Like it or not, they will create these systems, they will share what they’ve learned, they will build the apparatus that makes the state as we have known it increasingly ineffectual and irrelevant. Nothing can be done about that. This has already happened.”

Mark Pesce is one of the early pioneers in Virtual Reality and works as a writer, researcher and teacher. You can read the full article here.

The “human cloud” and the future of work

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I’ve been working almost 40 years (more if you count high school and college jobs) and a lot has changed in how I work; where I work; and –obviously– the work itself. Smarter folk than I are thinking about this, too:

“In the same way that high-speed Internet access disrupted the corporate IT market, creating a “cloud” of web-enabled infrastructure, the human cloud is shorthand for how the web has disrupted the way we work. Companies rely on dispersed teams to get the best talent available regardless of location (or price) and many are using crowdsourcing and other innovative means to achieve their goals.

Meanwhile, many people who work in this new cloud have lives that look nothing like they would have even10 years ago: they may have contracts with a variety of clients, outsource themselves and their skills through a third-party service like Elance or ODesk or collaborate with coworkers in opposing time zones. The companies they work for, and with, may not even know what they look like, or where they live. This is the reality of the human cloud and it is changing us (and the companies we work for) in ways we may not fully realize yet.”

Given the “webby” nature of my work, I have a good bit of contact with the “human cloud” and find myself wondering how I would function there.

Radio’s Future

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The American Youth Study 2010 “surveys the the media and technology habits of America’s 12-24 year-olds, and represents a sequel to a study originally conducted by Edison in 2000.” Among the findings:

  • Young people spend twice as much time on the Internet now as they do listening to radio.
  • Radio continues to be the medium most often used for music discovery, with 51% of 12-24 year-olds reporting that they “frequently” find out about new music by listening to the radio. Other significant sources include friends (46%), YouTube (31%) and social networking sites (16%).
  • 3 times as many young people are listening to Pandora radio as listen to traditional radio broadcasts via the Internet.
  • More than four in five 12-24s own a mobile phone in 2010 (up from only 29% in 2000), and these young Americans are using these phones as media convergence devices.

“A radical pessimist’s guide to the next 10 years”

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(October 10, 2010) There are no shortage of scary predictions on the net. But Douglas Coupland’s “45 tips for survival” give me a shiver. Here are a few of my least-favorites from his list:

6) The middle class is over. It’s not coming back – Remember travel agents? Remember how they just kind of vanished one day? That’s where all the other jobs that once made us middle-class are going – to that same, magical, class-killing, job-sucking wormhole into which travel-agency jobs vanished, never to return. However, this won’t stop people from self-identifying as middle-class, and as the years pass we’ll be entering a replay of the antebellum South, when people defined themselves by the social status of their ancestors three generations back. Enjoy the new monoclass!

13) Enjoy lettuce while you still can – And anything else that arrives in your life from a truck, for that matter. For vegetables, get used to whatever it is they served in railway hotels in the 1890s. Jams. Preserves. Pickled everything.

17) You may well burn out on the effort of being an individual – You’ve become a notch in the Internet’s belt. Don’t try to delude yourself that you’re a romantic lone individual. To the new order, you’re just a node. There is no escape

20) North America can easily fragment quickly as did the Eastern Bloc in 1989 – Quebec will decide to quietly and quite pleasantly leave Canada. California contemplates splitting into two states, fiscal and non-fiscal. Cuba becomes a Club Med with weapons. The Hate States will form a coalition.

41) The future of politics is the careful and effective implanting into the minds of voters images that can never be removed

43) Getting to work will provide vibrant and fun new challenges – Gravel roads, potholes, outhouses, overcrowded buses, short-term hired bodyguards, highwaymen, kidnapping, overnight camping in fields, snaggle-toothed crazy ladies casting spells on you, frightened villagers, organ thieves, exhibitionists and lots of healthy fresh air.

45) We will accept the obvious truth that we brought this upon ourselves

Scott Adams: “Editors are the chefs of the Internet.”

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Scott Adams points to Newser to illustrate what he sees as the future of the Internet:

“Newser works, I believe, because somewhere in their back kitchen is an editor who has an uncommon feel for what stories to highlight, how to summarize them in a folksy voice, and in what order and combination they should appear. There’s some genius happening there. When I read news from other places, I often come away feeling deflated. When I read Newser, I always leave in a good mood. That’s why I return so often. It’s a mood enhancer masquerading as some sort of news site.

And that’s your future of the Internet. The cost of content, such as this blog, and my comic strip, will continue to approach zero. The art will happen with the editing. Others have made the obvious point that editing will be important for the future of the Internet. All I’m adding is the notion that most editors have skill, but few are artists. The world of print publishing is driven by editors who are exceptionally skilled. But they aren’t artists. Newser is edited by an artist. He or she isn’t giving me information; he’s adjusting my mood. That’s art. That’s the future.”

I don’t think I’ve ever visited Newser but I’m headed there now. Like thousands of others.

I’m back. And I wasn’t impressed by Newser but Mr. Adam’s point is a good one, nonetheless.