This is a student-created imagining of the possibilities of the future of the internet/publishing, made in 2005. A lot of our class discussions have reminded me of this video, so I wanted to share it with you.
What do you think?? I don't know much about the possibilities of computer science, but I think the ideas in this are very provocative.
2 comments:
Interesting. One of the questions this left me with was: "If access to information was supposed to broaden our world, will saturation refocus it to a locally-oriented level?" The video's conclusion of a real-time, gps-located broadcast environment that notifies us of social events, traffic conditions, and weather suggests a world in which information is localized; global and national-level events would be reported by eyes-on-the-ground regular folk, at least, in those countries wealthy enough to afford the bandwidth. Still, for the US, the news a subway accident in New York would arrive in California by a chain of person-to-person contacts based on relevancy; our exposure to news would come via a technology supported chain of word of mouth. Events would be made relevant by their impact on your "community" of people -- in this sense, perhaps, everything would become "local" with regard to the community of friends one keeps. This re-localization would reduce information back to its origins: only that which is immediately relevant to ourselves.
Really great questions!
As far as more localized news- I think that what is described simply makes your local newsfeed more accessible and more relevant. I think I have already seen stuff like this happening on sites like twitter, which has teamed up with Google maps on a few projects. Also, I am new to the program, but Google Reader sets up a community newsfeed that of course consists of whomever you choose to belong to your community, regardless of where they live.
I appreciate that you pointed out that this kind of shift in communication carries a lot of assumptions about access to computers (and thereby, money). When I had watched this in the past, for some reason I had never thought of these circumstances outside of America (dumb, I know). If information and the press were actually reorganized in some dramatic way and became almost completely digitized, I wonder what the affect would be on developing countries. The ability to publish would be infinitely greater (a la blogging), yet the PLACE where publishing would be allowed (the web) would be less accessible, as a computer and internet connection would be required.
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