Two recent posts by 'The Onion' caught my eye today, as a friend and I had just been talking about how ridiculous and out-of-hand all of our technological gadgetry and social networking has gotten...
Police Slog through 40,000 photos to determine cause of dorm fire
Report: 90% Of Waking Hours Spent Staring At Glowing Rectangles
As funny as they are (and the dorm one is hilarious) I feel like I have to laugh because otherwise I'd cry. It's pretty close to home for me and just about everyone else out there living in the modern world. It's amazing to think that, up to a point (and more recently than you'd imagine), the entire wealth of collective human knowledge could be condensed and stored in less space than, say, the space used for the photos taken at just such a ridiculous college dorm party.
I remember always hearing that "a weekday of any major newspaper has more information than the average person living in the 17th century would have come across in a lifetime" and being amazed by that statement. That was before facebook, twitter, digg, reddit, google reader, etc etc... I can't even imagine how many multiples we can apply to that now. As someone deep in the thick of it (just created a Twitter account yesterday...) I almost feel obliged to investigate the potential of all this innovation, and yet simultaneously feel so bogged down by it.
Without going into the philosophy of whether or not this is all good for humanity (and I think despite its downsides, it ultimately is -- just look at how twitter is helping mobilize democracy in Iran) it's obvious that we're beginning to bang up against some ceilings in terms of human interactions with these technologies. iPhones still have to contend with the size of human thumbs, people get bogged down keeping up with too many accounts, and accessing the wealth of information in 'the cloud' is still mostly impractical for quick, on-the-spot decision making.
I suspect we'll see more and more aggregating 'dashboards' being developed in the immediate future (think iGoogle & Reader), in an attempt to make all of the above more quick, accessible, and consumable. These, however, will look crude compared to what's to come. The MIT Media Lab's new Fluid Interfaces Group recently demoed Pattie Maes brainchild, Sixth Sense, a "wearable device that enables new interactions between the real world and the world of data." Ahh... Now you're beginning to understand what's coming. She laughs as she makes a quip at the end about brain implants, but it's quite obvious that's where we're headed.
The question is... will yours be made by Apple? IBM? Google? The US Gov't? Who will control it?
...and what color would you like it in?
/eh
Police Slog through 40,000 photos to determine cause of dorm fire
Report: 90% Of Waking Hours Spent Staring At Glowing Rectangles
As funny as they are (and the dorm one is hilarious) I feel like I have to laugh because otherwise I'd cry. It's pretty close to home for me and just about everyone else out there living in the modern world. It's amazing to think that, up to a point (and more recently than you'd imagine), the entire wealth of collective human knowledge could be condensed and stored in less space than, say, the space used for the photos taken at just such a ridiculous college dorm party.
I remember always hearing that "a weekday of any major newspaper has more information than the average person living in the 17th century would have come across in a lifetime" and being amazed by that statement. That was before facebook, twitter, digg, reddit, google reader, etc etc... I can't even imagine how many multiples we can apply to that now. As someone deep in the thick of it (just created a Twitter account yesterday...) I almost feel obliged to investigate the potential of all this innovation, and yet simultaneously feel so bogged down by it.
Without going into the philosophy of whether or not this is all good for humanity (and I think despite its downsides, it ultimately is -- just look at how twitter is helping mobilize democracy in Iran) it's obvious that we're beginning to bang up against some ceilings in terms of human interactions with these technologies. iPhones still have to contend with the size of human thumbs, people get bogged down keeping up with too many accounts, and accessing the wealth of information in 'the cloud' is still mostly impractical for quick, on-the-spot decision making.
I suspect we'll see more and more aggregating 'dashboards' being developed in the immediate future (think iGoogle & Reader), in an attempt to make all of the above more quick, accessible, and consumable. These, however, will look crude compared to what's to come. The MIT Media Lab's new Fluid Interfaces Group recently demoed Pattie Maes brainchild, Sixth Sense, a "wearable device that enables new interactions between the real world and the world of data." Ahh... Now you're beginning to understand what's coming. She laughs as she makes a quip at the end about brain implants, but it's quite obvious that's where we're headed.
The question is... will yours be made by Apple? IBM? Google? The US Gov't? Who will control it?
...and what color would you like it in?
/eh