today

I'm working at my computer and i'm thinking that I would like to listen to some symphony music, maybe Dvorak, which i don't have, handy. So pandora* fires up and I make a New World Symphony channel. After a second, the opening bars of Star Wars are blaring forth and i'm thinking, somedays it's nice to live in the future. :)

[pandora is a music server that streams content to me based on what it learns about my particular suggestions. It bears no resemblance whatsoever to the sony walkman player and Queen Greatest Hits cassette that I bought at Walgreens and wore out in the 80s when I first started listening to music. I wonder how much further I could have developed my tastes and knowledge of music if I'd started with this back then.

I also think it provides a good way to reference the potential effect technologies have on the people who grow up with them. Start with a baseline figure to represent Current Knowledge and model any learning curve for Knowledge Increase which presumes a positive relationship to Information Access. It is staggering to think about what, over time, the resulting data look like when you factor the different levels of Information Access. I think the potential effect from a conservative projection is still too mammoth not to exert evolutionary pressure on the human brain; re-ordering pathway construction and changing the way information is stored and processed in the brain. If it literally changes the way [0-100%] people think/perceive, what effect will it have on the stability of the social structures and institutions which were built up over centuries and are based on a quickly evaporating model describing human interaction?

Of course, Knowledge Increase is not directly correlated to Information Access, not only because some of that increase is eaten up trying to keep up with the steady increase in the amount of information as time passes and something new gets thrown on the pile of accumulated human content production; and there is also a significant amount of information inflation which is a byproduct of the wider access itself (more to see is more to talk about).

I am also not assuming that all people will engage these new technologies to expand their access to information. I expect that there are many people who choose not to engage in this new technical economy. What I assume is that these will be the people manning the defenses of the system as it teeters.]

maxim

property is a poor substitute for value

Glancing Off the Edges

Do they still call it re-entry if come into the atmosphere of a planet you've never been before?

jibberish

media studies is anthropology, not scientific psychology. When someone asks whether the modern webscape is a problem for society misunderstands the mission is not to pronounce good or bad but is and, then, what can be done. Maybe i am trying to say they are not what i am when actually if i'm not what i think i am but they are, then maybe i'm a cultural anthropologist, not a mass comm