https://cosmographia.substack.com/p/network-of-rage
"One could simplify the history of information technology into a flowchart that
looks something like this:
Oral traditions → Writing → Postal networks → Printing press → Telegraph →
Telephone → Radio → Television → Internet
To some extent, we’ve been charting this progression in our Cartography of
Networks series. We’ve seen how social technology spread across Africa 50,000
years ago, how philosophy and science was shared during the Middle Ages, how
Buddhism spread through Asia, and how the Enlightenment was enabled by a
‘network of letters’.
The implicit assumption in this story has been that the effectiveness of
information networks was directly proportional to their density. The more nodes
(people) in a network, and the more edges (information) between them, the
faster the exchange of ideas, and thus the faster the pace of human progress.
For most of human history, this premise seemed to hold. But there’s a case to
be made that somewhere around the turn of the 21st century, our information
networks became too dense. The rise of 24/7 cable news, the explosion of
‘independent media’ outlets (whether blogs, video channels, or podcasts), and
the emergence of social media has created a veritable firehose of information
streaming at us from all directions. The New York Times alone publishes 200
articles a day. 2.2 million new books are released every year. It would take
one person over 18,000 years to watch every video on Youtube.
Where a mediaeval monk would be lucky to get access to a few new texts a year,
we are washed away by a deluge of new information on a daily basis. The primary
cognitive task in this media environment is not the consumption of information,
but in sifting through the muck. Can I trust this source? Is this claim true?
Are they presenting this story fairly, or are they deliberately trying to make
me angry? It’s a never-ending job, so perhaps it’s no surprise we have
outsourced much of it to algorithms."
Via
What Could Go Right? Four Cents Closer to Parity
https://theprogressnetwork.org/us-gender-pay-gap/
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
