11–20 of 65 posts
It's quite hard to know who to listen to, and who is telling something objectively true in this environment, since everyone's voice has the same weight. And there are too many of them to sift through, so many probably end up listening to people who pander to them.
Fascinating how the analysis gets wrong what becomes possible or doesn't (online shopping,...), but hits the nail on the head concerning the psychological and social aspects. > The Usenet, a worldwide bulletin board, allows anyone to post messages across the nation. Your word gets out, leapfrogging editors and publishers. Every voice can be heard cheaply and instantly. The result? Every voice is heard. The cacophony…
Imagine you are in the mid 90' and you say to someone that in the next decade we will have a camera, a video camera, a radio, a music and video player, a voice recorder and much more in just one pocket. Saying it like this make it look insane.
On the other hand psychological and social aspects are linked to our brains that didn't change much in the course of the human recorded history.
Fascinating how the analysis gets wrong what becomes possible or doesn't (online shopping,...), but hits the nail on the head concerning the psychological and social aspects. > The Usenet, a worldwide bulletin board, allows anyone to post messages across the nation. Your word gets out, leapfrogging editors and publishers. Every voice can be heard cheaply and instantly. The result? Every voice is heard. The cacophony…
He clearly saw the wider limits of technology in relation to society. Liquid and online democracy has failed, we are in an age of autocrats that have weaponized online propaganda and misinformation to directly reach their voters. The freedom of the press increased online but it's quality dropped markedly, the cacophony effect is real. Alienation and engineering addiction are the name of the game for tech giants and their bottom line. Online self teaching is great for adults, but a very poor substitute and at most a complement to competent teachers in schools.
Fascinating how the analysis gets wrong what becomes possible or doesn't (online shopping,...), but hits the nail on the head concerning the psychological and social aspects. > The Usenet, a worldwide bulletin board, allows anyone to post messages across the nation. Your word gets out, leapfrogging editors and publishers. Every voice can be heard cheaply and instantly. The result? Every voice is heard. The cacophony…
Any predictions that pertains to the technological aspect of our lives is utterly futile. Imagine you are in the mid 90' and you say to someone that in the next decade we will have a camera, a video camera, a radio, a music and video player, a voice recorder and much more in just one pocket. Saying it like this make it look insane. On the other hand psychological and social aspects are linked to our brains that didn'…
"Try reading a book on disc. At best, it's an unpleasant chore: the myopic glow of a clunky computer replaces the friendly pages of a book. And you can't tote that laptop to the beach. Yet Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, predicts that we'll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Intenet. Uh, sure." Beautiful example of article where the author was skeptical based on the wild west of the c…
"Try reading a book on disc. At best, it's an unpleasant chore: the myopic glow of a clunky computer replaces the friendly pages of a book. And you can't tote that laptop to the beach. Yet Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, predicts that we'll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Intenet. Uh, sure." Beautiful example of article where the author was skeptical based on the wild west of the c…
It requires quite a lot of work though, and unlike the web, it probably can’t be done by one person in a basement. Which I think is important to it’s impact, because google probably wouldn’t have existed if it couldn’t have started small and gradually build its way up.
"Try reading a book on disc. At best, it's an unpleasant chore: the myopic glow of a clunky computer replaces the friendly pages of a book. And you can't tote that laptop to the beach. Yet Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, predicts that we'll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Intenet. Uh, sure." Beautiful example of article where the author was skeptical based on the wild west of the c…
Blockchain and cryptocurrency comes to mind - especially given HN’s frequent dismissals and distaste of the two.
>So how come my local mall does more business in an afternoon than the entire Internet handles in a month?
IOW, “It hasn’t displaced some other market already, so it never will.” It’s only a few steps away from “it has the volatility associated with being a small market, so it’s inherently flawed”.
With that said, I’m skeptical about whether it will find any large scale use myself, but it’s unfair to criticize it for the above reason.
The main thing that he's right about is that it's a mess. There's so much noice and little authority. When I was a kid in the 90s news and information was curated. If you read an opinion in the paper it was some guy who'd been writing for a long time, who'd done the background reading, and who normally presented things in a balanced way, whatever his leaning was. Nowadays you can find just about any extreme view, bad…
On reddit this somehow doesn't happen. Every comment stands on its own and half the time what looks like a threaded conversation is various different users replying to each other.
I think something very important is lost there. Much as I'd like to believe so, I think the way my brain works is that no comment stands on its own and communication is heavily mediated by the knowledge and reputation of the other in relation to myself. Without that, so much that is valuable in the exchange of information, whether facts or opionion, or nuance, is lost.
Also, the fact that there's a typo directly above the phrase "Lacking editors, reviewers or critics" made me chuckle.
This is so hilariously, specifically wrong, you'd think someone wrote it now and travelled back in time for giggles. Great find! And I'm amazed they still have the article online, the only one by Clifford Stoll, funnily enough. Still, a good lesson: It remains too easy to miss the forest for the trees. We never wanted salesmen or paper, what we actually wanted were products and information. In other words, it's easy…