Connected? Has the Net been Darwinian in its brief evolution, and are the characteristics of a networked society akin to different genus/ nationalities, seemingly different people within a network sharing common characteristics or ideals?
Connectedness and Technology – Evolutionary Siblings?
I ask this with regard to the tell tale signs that may be staring at us and what will probably emerge ( c.f ¬†Florian Brody’s post : Should we wait for a random start-up?), whether that’s through Darwin/Dyson’s eyes, trend extrapolation or modelling.
So far we seem to have been confounded by the successes whether its blogs, RSS, wikis, but some may hint, academia for example, to the genesis of these tools and how far they were right for their time within their communities but ahead of the curve for us. A typical example being email. What else lurks within the in-tray marked: “To do at some point”.
We are certain of one thing, to paraphrase Robert X Cringley, that the Net is like the universe a few seconds after the big bang. What may come has me pondering The Outernet, the Net’s inevitable telelevisual state and the richness of hyperlinked video.
The Outernet would be an elevated state of the Net, emerging from the home, office or classroom to become a unifying unit of all public-facing visual /auditory/text information. Your local council, school, street, high street shop would show its own programming on jumbo screens ( see above) combined with all manner of data, that simultaneously could be accessed.
At 8mb plus, the Net assumes TV transmission qualities and how far away are we from this with Gilders Law. And then just as we have linked data through text, video links allow us to drill information, perhaps even construct on-the-fly our own news items.
Incidently if this means anything to you, good to see a prosumer camera on the market from Panasonic offering real HD video. All this perhaps may add to a further level of connectedness.
The mind of the fanciful thinker perhaps, but I’m taking my chances.
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