Virtual Revolution
I’ve just finished watching the BBC’s Virtual Revolution programmes. These were presented by Aleks Krotoski and shown on 4 consecutive Saturday evenings a month or so ago.
It follows the evolution of the Internet from its humble beginnings as the ARPANET and a collection of academic networks, through the non-commercial era, to the dot-com boom and bust. Finally, it talks about how people like Amazon and Google worked out how to make money from the Internet by exploiting out information in exchange for us using their services for free. We get the benefits of the services and haven’t really had any negative impact, yet, from giving up our personal information to them.
The final programme looks at the whole issue of online social networks such as Facebook and looks at some of the, as yet unknown, future effects on society.
One interesting conclusion, well discussion but looking like a conclusion, is that the web seems to be encouraging more associative brain functions than linear … people prefering short, associated chunks of information rather than large, linear books. This is one reason that many of ‘generation web’ don’t read books!
A very interesting series.
Kevin.
Soothers … (or dummy to you and me)
How about this – see here on Amazon? I saw these quite some time ago, but was reminded of it again recently. Don’t know about you, but I find this actually quite disturbing!
I wonder what this does to a kid’s self-esteem in later life …
Kevin.
Amazon Recommends …
Isn’t the Amazon recommend system interesting? I was looking at what it recommends for me, based on my purchase history, and a very weird collection of things it was too!
I see it tracks what you browse too – then presumably if you buy something it can link your browsing history to your profile too. It also amused me to see the ‘sell back what you’ve bought’ links – very optimistic about the lifetime of your purchases …
Apart from the obvious privacy issues of amazon have a full purchase history, it got me wondering what I would have to do to get it to recommend really bizarre things for me. Could I just browse some funny things or would I actually have to buy them? Maybe if I review and rate something from elsewhere in the site that could go in the mix … an interesting experiment for someone. Sometime. Maybe.
Kevin.
