Hard Light Productions Forums
Off-Topic Discussion => General Discussion => Topic started by: Rictor on August 25, 2005, 12:13:02 am
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http://www.idorosen.com/mirrors/robinsloan.com/epic/ols-master.html
thats...disturbing. Very disturbing.
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*Is confuzed*
Um "Oh N03z!"
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AHHH! Googlezon is atacking!
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Damn dial-up. It keeps stopping after less than 5 seconds of sound, then after 20 seconds it starts again, and the cycle repeats. Extremely annoying.
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Perfectly true; in a few years, Google will rule the planet...
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Originally posted by Bobboau
AHHH! Googlezon is atacking!
Sounds like a bad Japanese Godzilla rival. :p
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Very good presentation. :yes: Googlezon sounds dumb though.
Not too far from the truth. If something isn't done, there will ultimately be one giant mass media superconglomerate, at least if I don't have anything to say about it. ^_^ It's the allegory of the cave!
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The scary thing is that this is very plausible. Sounds very matrix-like of course without the humans as batteries and stuff.
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Now that was a nasty predication.
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Let's all vow to buy the Times when we are l33t and eldery. :P
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Extrapolating from past events into the future was never very successful.
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glad I'm not the onlyone to think that sounded like something out of a Godzilla movie.
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Dude. that rocked. It didn't mention Google Earth, Google Talk or Google Maps in there though. They could only have strengthened the case.
I like that they talked about EPIC (nice logo btw) in a cautionary tone. already, you can see the seeds of EPIC all around, in the US. There are so many people willing to believe anything, without questioning the motives or honesty of the source. They'd rather accept the thick, tasty curry of advertainment that serves as the lowest commond denominator of media today (Extreme Makeover Home Edition comes to mind).
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That is why it is our duty to take back the media once again. It can't survive without consumption. Who's with me? Together we can balance the scales of power. The Great Media Crash will happen! It is only a matter of time before people are tired of being told what to believe, buy, and how to think, look, dress, and act.
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I wasn't reffering to the mismanagement of global media, I was talking about its existance. Call me a Luddite, but I see in the very near future an ever more serious break with everything (in regards to human civilization) that has come before. Communications being one of the most pronounced the fundamental aspects of this. We grow up surrounded by ads and billboards and stuff, so at some point we just learn to filter it out, and then none of the ads, good or bad, matter anymore. The same is true of culture in general. People listen to CNN and read Plato and respect Picasso not primarily because they are good or bad, but because they are rare, or at least that's the way I see it. Once everyone has something to say, no one will listen to anything anyone has to say. Scarcity is value, and the opposite of scarcity is the opposite of value.
It's not that the message will be a bad one, I really don't care what message is broadcast. It's that the medium will alter human culture and ways of interacting with the world. Think about this way: since TV was invented millions of shows have been broadcast, and none of them have fundamentally changed anything. But the TV itself, simply by existing, has changed much. Right now, there are maybe a few million people on Earth who actively contribute to "culture", which means TV, books, radio, blogs, music, magazine, advertising and all the rest. Notice that all these are mediuns for communication. Now, imagine a world in which every person, literally every single person, contributes to culture. There is no precedent for this, not even remotely. It would be a profound break with the past, and would very seriously change humanity's basic experience of existing.
This shit freaks me out far more than all the nukes and guns and madmen of the world combined. Maybe I'm just wierd.
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I don't think there's a problem. Look at Wikipedia. It's a medium where anyone can add information and it's fairly successful.
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Originally posted by Kamikaze
I don't think there's a problem. Look at Wikipedia. It's a medium where anyone can add information and it's fairly successful.
That's very short sighted. Maybe a few thousand people actively contribute to Wikipedia, out of six and a half billion. That's a small subset of a small subset, the rest either don't care or are busy starving. Well, yeah, but in a few years they won't be starving anymore, and they'll all be online. Even now, it would be a full time job to keep up with even a very limited amount of "culture". Let's say you like punk music, reality TV, political blogs and crime novels. Do you really have time, much less will, for anything else? And that's with a tiny number of people who actually create that which you consume. So looking ahead 25 years, when China's 1.5 billion come online, when India 1.2 billion come online, when another 500 million in the West come online, when camera phone and blogs are universal - and suddenly you're looking at a whole different situation.
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Grrr @ Macromedia.
No flash for me, 'til my file transfer is done.
Support Flash for 64-bit!
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Originally posted by Kamikaze
I don't think there's a problem. Look at Wikipedia. It's a medium where anyone can add information and it's fairly successful.
It can also be full of total bollocks, misguided priorities and out-and-out abuse (just look at the page edit histories for the Rangers/Celtic pages, for example). It's good for giving a balanced view, albeit sometimes I wonder if it's too balanced - i.e. giving the dafter theories sympathetic treatment to avoid someone, somewhere *****ing (or, of course, editing it in).
You do have to wonder a bit about an encyclopedia that has more pages on Klingons than Portugal, after all.
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A quote I submitted to Bash seems relevant:
WMCoolmon: sign that the wikipedia is made by geeks...
WMCoolmon: entryon flirting: one page, no TOC
WMCoolmon: entry on star trek: 10 pages for "general description"
Anaz: haha
Clave: lol
BlackDove: oh my god
BlackDove: roflmao
Anaz: once geeks find their girl, I imagine they don't update wikipedia very much :p
WMCoolmon: that's not counting the pages for movies, series, planets, races, characters, etc
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now Rictor I would think that you would welcome the decimination of power that the media represents from a few eleets and rich to the population in general, this fear of loss of the autocratic rule of a major facet of civiliseation into more of a direct democracy (wich you have on more than one occasion sung the praises of) seems very much in opposition to what I've come to expect from you.
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Originally posted by Bobboau
AHHH! Googlezon is atacking!
:lol:
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If everyone has a voice, that probably will dilute the impact of the media. However, that voice will not only be by the rich and powerful anymore, and believe me, this is something the ones in power fear, just look at the RIAA or Hollywood *****ing about people downloading movies and music or the production companies crying about TV torrents.
Moving away from the aristocracy that is the media to something democratic is a good thing though. Of course you'll have to filter out the crap, but that's just a small price for communication freedom that you will ultimately enjoy from this new model.
The flash says the exact opposite will happen, and what it looks like we're headed for: a mega media superconglomerate will control everything, and that is as scary or more than the deadliest of weapons. Information really is the most powerful weapon of all. If you control information, you control everything. You could say 2+2=5 if you wanted to, and 2+2 would = 5. Whoever controls the media, controls the world.
If we're not vigilant, it will happen. It's everyone's duty to ensure it doesn't.
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Originally posted by aldo_14
It can also be full of total bollocks, misguided priorities and out-and-out abuse (just look at the page edit histories for the Rangers/Celtic pages, for example). It's good for giving a balanced view, albeit sometimes I wonder if it's too balanced - i.e. giving the dafter theories sympathetic treatment to avoid someone, somewhere *****ing (or, of course, editing it in).
You do have to wonder a bit about an encyclopedia that has more pages on Klingons than Portugal, after all.
[color=66ff00]Yeah, I took a look through the edits on both pages, just seems like a handful of idle ****s. The religious topics seem to follow suit with the exception that a good deal of the arguments there centre around an inability to come to the same conclusions.
As for the Klingon/Portugal point: until wikipedia becomes more mainstream the people that are editing it and adding to it are going to be those from a certain demograph.
[/color]
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The thing is that people in general have an inherent distrust of of anything they percieve to be 'externally controlled', particularly in the west where this kind of media would first arrive.
Most people can use the Internet, but not many people understand Bots or Algorhythms and will assume that there is some 'Dark Brotherhood' overseeing it all, we usually do. I'm not saying that won't be the case in a convoluted way, but much of the world is still too distrustful of media and of technology for this to really work in the timeframe suggested. If anything, the next generation is even less trustful of the Internet than mine, mainly thanks to the likes of RIAA and AOL, compaines like these are, ironically enough, a natural anethema to building up the trust required for people to share too much information about themselves on the Net. Together with the paranoia raised about virii and spyware (to a certain degree understandable, but alot of hype was used simply to sell Antivirus programs) I don't see this kind of total immersion coming about as eagerly or easily as the presentation suggests. :)
Edit : Googlezon is a stupid name, though Amagle isn't much of an improvement ;)
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One thing that scares me about the idea of news-story-writing bots is that people can use it, and never have to see any fact or idea that they disagree with.
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They can do that already without intelligent news synthesis agents. They do it themselves already. I wasn't kidding about the rich thick curry of advertainment.
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and what if I like opposieing viewpoints, the news bot will always search out stuff that I disagree with.