Telegraph – Telegram / Twitter
Magazines – Blogs
Radio – Podcasts
Gossip – Forums
Reviews – Comment Sections
Telephone – WhatsApp
Yellow Pages – Google / Amazon
TV, Home Videos – Youtube
Cinema – Netflix
News – Newsletters
Post – Email
Academic Journals – arxiv
Printing press – Documents
Telephone Orders – E-commerce
Phone networking – Crowd Funding, Event Management
Training Videos – Coursera
Applications – Web forms
Communication requires a medium – oral, book, cinema, radio, tv, newspaper and magazines. Computers provide poor dpi, resolution, bitrates compared to analog. While previous mediums are 1-1 and 1-n, computers with internet enable m-n with sync and async modes. Bad quality content happens for large m and large n. When m is small and n is large, it resembles TV with all its faults of propagating uncritical mythos. Cost for consumption increases as m increases. Cost for creation increases as n increases.
Internet is an unregulated medium and it is content agnostic – text, images, video, sound. Like Pirate Radio, m and n can be small – this is the most unique possibility with the internet. Now internet is a new medium but academic publishing is old, they have an important connection though. It’s the hyperlink or the reference. Unlike all else, the property of this medium is permanent memory. All other mediums rely on people forgetting stuff, after the communication is over. In the internet not so much! You are expected to google and dig deep into the hyperlinks. In an academic journal, you are expected to read the footnotes. This makes internet communication one way to record and to preserve cat pictures, truth, facts and arguments although they can be easily distorted if we are not careful.
For consumers and creators the easy way to use internet is to treat it like an extension to tv, news, magazines, yellow pages and find niche communities. While there is negative employment for middlemen, computers provide new forms of employment – designers, programmers, hosting companies, crooks. For knowledge workers it provides new ways of dissemination – marketers, teachers, journalists, scientists and finally computers provide new venues and collaboration spaces for entertainers, hobbyists.
Magazines – Blogs
Radio – Podcasts
Gossip – Forums
Reviews – Comment Sections
Telephone – WhatsApp
Yellow Pages – Google / Amazon
TV, Home Videos – Youtube
Cinema – Netflix
News – Newsletters
Post – Email
Academic Journals – arxiv
Printing press – Documents
Telephone Orders – E-commerce
Phone networking – Crowd Funding, Event Management
Training Videos – Coursera
Applications – Web forms
Communication requires a medium – oral, book, cinema, radio, tv, newspaper and magazines. Computers provide poor dpi, resolution, bitrates compared to analog. While previous mediums are 1-1 and 1-n, computers with internet enable m-n with sync and async modes. Bad quality content happens for large m and large n. When m is small and n is large, it resembles TV with all its faults of propagating uncritical mythos. Cost for consumption increases as m increases. Cost for creation increases as n increases.
Internet is an unregulated medium and it is content agnostic – text, images, video, sound. Like Pirate Radio, m and n can be small – this is the most unique possibility with the internet. Now internet is a new medium but academic publishing is old, they have an important connection though. It’s the hyperlink or the reference. Unlike all else, the property of this medium is permanent memory. All other mediums rely on people forgetting stuff, after the communication is over. In the internet not so much! You are expected to google and dig deep into the hyperlinks. In an academic journal, you are expected to read the footnotes. This makes internet communication one way to record and to preserve cat pictures, truth, facts and arguments although they can be easily distorted if we are not careful.
For consumers and creators the easy way to use internet is to treat it like an extension to tv, news, magazines, yellow pages and find niche communities. While there is negative employment for middlemen, computers provide new forms of employment – designers, programmers, hosting companies, crooks. For knowledge workers it provides new ways of dissemination – marketers, teachers, journalists, scientists and finally computers provide new venues and collaboration spaces for entertainers, hobbyists.
Mechanical work – transportation, garbage picking, construction, manufacturing, service, mining, assembly seems to be the last dominion of automation. Curiously this leads to a recursive structure, where a computer in order to build itself must do all the above.
In some sense at a deep enough layer computers are replicating the chemical and electrical pathways via things like message passing and this monadic (philosophy) and recursive structure is also apparent in programming.