Sarah Lacy has been hanging out at TechCrunch this past month of February and while I wouldn’t suggest that she has changed the blog into a softer and gentler version of itself she has written a couple of interesting post during her stint there. One of them I kind of took a round out of over at the Inquisitr but her post today was a rather interesting one in that she questions whether if anything happening on the web is even close to be revolutionary.
As she points out
Already, if you think about Web 2.0, the successful companies are building off the technology that was pioneered before—whether it’s the browser, broadband, or the open source stack. Sites like YouTube and Twitter may be technically hard to scale, but are they really technical leaps in innovation, or more of a creative, cultural leap in how existing technology is being used?
Given how we love nothing better than to toss around words like game changing, paradigm shifting, revolutionary and world changing when the only real difference would be like going from single ply toilet paper to double ply, I have to wonder the same thing.
Sure there have been technological improvements as we move forward but when the desktop PC might have been a revolutionary move up from the mainframe era it doesn’t mean in the same breath that the GUI interface is really that much of a world changer from the commandline.
The same goes pretty much for the Web as well. Sure we might be making changes to the plumbing of how it works but really is Twitter at it’s root really that much different that IRC? Is what Facebook and other social networks doing really that much different than what AOL, CompuServe or Prodigy did in the past?
Is there even any way that the web could go through a revolutionary change considering the simplicity of rules and protocols that it was built on?
If we were to have a real revolutionary change or paradigm shift in computing what do you think it will look like?
it is not a computer any more, it is an informer …
thought of in that way, anything that enables omniscience is game-changing …
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it is not a computer any more, it is an informer …
thought of in that way, anything that enables omniscience is game-changing …
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Yup, I think I agree with the sentiment of what you're conveying.
I think if we are to see any paradigm shift on the web now, it will more likely be with our interface, moving away from a direct device to more subtle interfaces.
As connectivity improves mobility, our connectivity will become more transparent and the services we use will be more integrated.
Good thought provoking post.
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Yup, I think I agree with the sentiment of what you're conveying.
I think if we are to see any paradigm shift on the web now, it will more likely be with our interface, moving away from a direct device to more subtle interfaces.
As connectivity improves mobility, our connectivity will become more transparent and the services we use will be more integrated.
Good thought provoking post.
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I'm thinking that on the same way that you or I are 96% ape, maybe twitter is 96% IRC.
Perhaps on the tech and code level, the distance we travel is not so great, but maybe what the web offers is the 'skeleton' of what could be diverse and enchanting 'organisms'.
So we can consider the internet not as an 'end' in itself, rather a means to an end. Or a platform for that 'end' to be explored – (via collaborative innovation networks) whereby tools like Twitter, and facebook differ from the likes of IRC and AOL in their application because of the greater diversity and volume of the people using them.
I don't know if there is potential for new advances in code where suddenly a new concept is 3% twitter and 97% audacious, however in my mind I think that whilst within the web we've created a virtual world which sort of reflects our own, there's a big difference between me and a .jpg of me, between my profile on facebook and my real world interactions. With that difference comes creative-tension – we CAN go further with the web.
I'm seeing the movement towards 'open source' as the greatest hope for any further leaps we have to make with this field, because what we can do with many-minds seems to be faster and better than what we do alone or in small groups…
There's my two cents – Alice
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I'm thinking that on the same way that you or I are 96% ape, maybe twitter is 96% IRC.
Perhaps on the tech and code level, the distance we travel is not so great, but maybe what the web offers is the 'skeleton' of what could be diverse and enchanting 'organisms'.
So we can consider the internet not as an 'end' in itself, rather a means to an end. Or a platform for that 'end' to be explored – (via collaborative innovation networks) whereby tools like Twitter, and facebook differ from the likes of IRC and AOL in their application because of the greater diversity and volume of the people using them.
I don't know if there is potential for new advances in code where suddenly a new concept is 3% twitter and 97% audacious, however in my mind I think that whilst within the web we've created a virtual world which sort of reflects our own, there's a big difference between me and a .jpg of me, between my profile on facebook and my real world interactions. With that difference comes creative-tension – we CAN go further with the web.
I'm seeing the movement towards 'open source' as the greatest hope for any further leaps we have to make with this field, because what we can do with many-minds seems to be faster and better than what we do alone or in small groups…
There's my two cents – Alice
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