Information Age
I first wrote this in the early 80's. The idea is the competing realities of infinite storage vs infinite bandwidth.
~ Aristotle Sabouni
Created: 1987-01-09 |
When I put on my prognostication hat (which looks surprisingly like a beanie, or dunce-cap, depending on your view), I start thinking about technology and the ramifications of innovations. After a few minutes my head hurts... and the propeller starts going around from the heat coming off my overtaxed brain, and all the pain is worth it for glimses into potential futures. And the futures are bright.
| 🗒️ Note: |
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| There is an ancient Chinese curse -- "May you live in interesting times". Basically, it means, "may you have instability, uncertainty, and rapid change".
It is a curse, because most people don't like change. But for those of us who do, or tolerate it more, technology certainly keeps things interesting. |
History[edit | edit source]
- I thought of this article when I was using my first hard personal hard drive, and getting on modem's in the early 80's, which way might the storage vs. network wars play out?
- Then I wrote the first version of this in the early 90's as we shifted from private networks (BBS's) to the Internet.
- Then I rewrote it in 1998 when the first iMac came out, without a floppy disk I remember plug-in storage that you carried around with you (pre-Flash Memory sticks) and relying on the network (the 'i' in iMac stood for Internet).
- Then, the minor edits below were in early 2002, just after the first iPod started taking off (and all your data/songs could be in your pocket).
- I had published a variant of this and it was seen as "insightful" back then, but the article was already 20 years old, and based on concepts a decade older than that.
During most of the time, local storage seemed to be winning. But in the last few years, it seems like the cloud (virtual storage and network) is starting to take off again. (Early computing was often remote terminals with all the storage/data across the nettwork, and somewhere else).
People are getting over their fear of unreliable networks, and just having faith in the virtual, and not needing the physical as much. So now days, a Smart Phone has both: more data in my pocket than ever before, and a faster network to the cloud and when we're out of cell-service, it feels like we're in a disoriented alter-world and we fell backwards 100 years in time: and it's only been less than a decade (2007) since the iPhone was first created, and 2008 since there was an App Store. It doesn't look like a clear winner is happening any time soon.
The future has been sneaking up on us, in slow motion, for as long as I've been alive. And I suspect it will continue to do so, long after I'm gone. But they have been "interesting times".
Information Age/Copyrights[edit source]
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Information Age/Media Democratized[edit source]
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Information Age: Dueling Futures[edit source]
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Information Age: History Repeating[edit source]
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So technology has made the Chinese curse a reality -- we live certainly live in interesting times!
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Tags: Tech General Tech
