A network of things

KEVIN KELLY ON THE FUTURE OF THE INTERNET

I think this talk is significant for everyone but there are a few concepts I'd like to address specifically in terms of "the media." For the purposes of this post I am going to specifically address newspapers.

Newspapers have been slow to adapt to the Internet. One inherent problem is profitability. The Internet provides information at no charge; Newspapers profit by selling information. Old business models will not work in this environment.

There were a few attempts to continue a subscription based service online, most notably by the New York Times, but they didn't last long.

Local and national publications are creating more sophisticated websites and looking for profit from advertising, but they are organisms in an environment hostile to their physiology.

In the past, local papers reported national and international news by themselves subscribing to the AP wire. A story that broke elsewhere went on the wire and became the shared property of all participating newspapers, each repackaging the information and selling it to specific markets.

I submit that what was once the function of the AP service, is now the function of any Internet search engine. I no longer read a local reproduction of a story on the AP wire, I merely go to the original story which can easily be located on the Internet.

Knowing what to look for is certainly a service I appreciate; but I don't need a local reporter to trouble him or herself with re-writing what is already written.

I think this is where the concept of linking data with data to which Mr. Kelly refers comes into play. Newspapers are trying to profit by enticing people to view their "pages" but the network of pages is already an old paradigm. I have no need to visit your page to get data when the data itself is available to the network.

How will Newspapers sell me this data in the future?

There is certainly a need for local reporting and news; otherwise there would be no original data on the Internet to search; but the re-selling of data is going to be a thing of the past.

If the network of things truly becomes a reality, then I wonder what form reporting will take. Imagine that an airliner, when crashing, essentially reported the story itself to the network it was a part of. All of the newsworthy information would be immediately online; who, what, when, where and potentially why.

It may be that this last question will be the sole realm of the journalist: a data detective in a future where most information is freely available. His or her purpose: to find missing pieces of data and add them to the network.

But who employs such a person? A free market economy suggests the answer is simply: the people who want the data. But it might not be the realm of a specific person to add all missing data; instead it would fall on those concerned with specific data. In the case of the airliner, a company engineer who wants to prevent further catastrophe.

I don't know the answer to all of these questions but I will say this about newspapers:

They will innovate or they will die; but people will always need the news.

-Robot Crusoe

EDIT: The embeded video would not play so I have replaced it with a link.

Social Singularity

Much has been said about the so called "technological singularity."

The term, coined by mathematician and science fiction author Vernor Vinge, refers to a proposed point in the future when intelligent machines will be able to make themselves more intelligent; setting off a cycle of recursive augmentation resulting in intelligences beyond human comprehension.

While there is healthy debate about the validity of this theory, I think there is something to be said for the obvious and accelerating changes in our day to day lives; especially on the social level.

For instance, I find my frequent personal interaction to be less and less defined by proxemics.

This was painfully obvious to me recently when my neighbors upstairs threw a rowdy rendez-vous. I won't go into too many details, but I did end up chasing a nascent fraternity slob out of the building when he urinated on my door. I ran upstairs to demand satisfaction from my neighbors, and confronted with a hedonistic mob, could not identify who actually lived in the apartment and who had just dropped in for debauchery.

I regularly correspond with friends half a world away and I had never spoken with the people living on the other side of my ceiling.

I must not be the only person to observe this phenomena; now there's a website for people who want to meet their neighbors on-line instead of meeting them in real life.

Meettheneighbors.org provides a free homepage for neighbors to communicate, organize, and (hopefully) avoid unfortunate urination.

This blog will address the more human aspect of accelerating returns, specifically in terms of social networking and how it is changing and will change human interaction through the next century.

I am interested not only in websites that categorize themselves as "social networks," Facebook , Myspace and the like; but any aspect of electronic communication that is changing or could change the way we interact with each other.

Before I regularly used a text messaging service on my cell phone, I was appalled to see people one-thumbing as they barrelled down the highway.

Now I admit I've occasionally squeezed off a, "Be there in two minutes!" while merging. (My obstinate refusal to use text message abbreviations probably makes this even more dangerous.)

Wherever all of this technology is leading us, we're heading there quickly and getting faster.

Many of my posts will come from personal observation and I in no way intend to represent myself as an expert on anything; I am merely an observer embedded in this rapidly unfolding and increasingly complex social fabric.

When possible I will link to reputable research and scientific inquiry; unless cited or linked, I'm pulling it all out of my blog.

-Robot Crusoe