Friction and the Internet

Friction: a word with negative connotations. Associated with strife, fights and reduced fuel efficiency. Of course, it has its positive effects too: try walking on ice to see what I mean. Or imagine a world where meteors and asteroids didn’t burn up in the atmosphere.

But did you know of the positives of friction in the fields of economics or privacy? Huh? Consider what Brett Scott meant when he wrote:
“We’re used to thinking that absence of friction must be a virtue in any transaction, but a local economy thrives on inconvenience.”
ATM’s made it possible to access your money anytime, anywhere. Guess what it did to the bank teller’s job? Or consider how the Internet, by making communication so fast and cheap, played a role in speeding up outsourcing.

Ben Thomson wrote something similar in his blog:
“Friction was the foundation of sustainability, and now friction is gone.”
In the pre-Internet world, it was extremely hard for a new guy/company to make themselves known. Today, that’s so easy. That makes even the most established player a lot more vulnerable. Think of what Facebook did to MySpace or what Google did to Yahoo!

Thomson on privacy and friction:
“One could argue that friction was the foundation of our privacy, and now friction is gone.”
Even communists couldn’t tap into information about everybody. Today your e-mails, tweets, Facebook posts and Google queries can all be accessed by governments so easily.

Thomson goes on to say that “the Internet is on par with the industrial revolution, the full impact of which stretched over centuries”. And like the Industrial Revolution, not every consequence of the Internet will be positive:
“Change is guaranteed, but the type of change is not…We are creating the future, and “better” does not win by default.”
True, but the genie is out of the bottle. And there are just too many areas it impacts, both directly and in extremely complicated ways (the smartphone was built for the Internet and went on to wipe out Nokia). So it isn’t even possible to try and “control” the Internet genie: one can only try and adapt to whatever it brings next.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Student of the Year

Image
As a toddler, my daughter loved Alia Bhatt’s songs, esp. the ones from Student of the Year . (That movie did have many good songs and well-choreographed dances). Fast forward to present day, when she is 12 yo. She rarely watches Hindi movies now, but one of the few ones she likes of late, Raja aur Rani ki Prem Kahani has, yes, Alia Bhatt.   If I had any hopes that there was anything to be read in the name of her toddler-time favorite ( Student of the Year ), they have been dashed. Our conversations come exam time are perfectly captured by this photo and its caption: In fact, the pic below captures how she and I look at her answer sheets – me intently, she with an expression of “It’s over, so why are you even looking at it?”   Of late, we pull her leg and tell her that she isn’t showing any signs of academic prowess, she’d better find a rich guy to marry. Some time later, she showed us this meme on the Internet: “Me No Study, Me No Care Me Go Marry Millionaire If He Die
Read more

The Retort of the "Luxury Person"

Image
Coming up with biting and witty retorts. It’s something we dream of, but rarely manage to pull off. Worse, the more we stew over the offending remark, the more likely we are to come up with that dream retort, as Calvin ruefully points out: During our last holiday at the Taj Resort, seeing my wife carrying towels to our poolside chairs, one of the kids there mistook her for a member of the staff and asked for a towel. When my wife narrated this to us, I did not imagine that my 8 yo daughter would come up with her own retort. But a day later, my daughter recapped the incident, an incident that didn’t even involve her in the first place , and said, “You know what I’d have told that kid who asked for the towel?”. And without waiting for an answer, she told us anyway: “I don’t work here. I too am a luxury person who is living at this resort. Go get your own towel.” We were highly amused by the phrase she had coined: “luxury person”. It certainly captures the kind of holid
Read more

Animal Senses #7: Touch and Remote Touch

Instinctively, we think touch is based on contact. Not entirely true, explains Ed Yong in Immense World – there’s a more important aspect than contact: “These incredible feats are possible through movement. If you rest a fingertip upon a surface, you can get only a limited idea of its features. But as soon you’re allowed to move, everything changes. Hardness becomes apparent with a press. Textures resolve at a stroke.” As you run your fingers over a surface, they hit the tiny peaks and troughs and set off vibrations in the mechanoreceptors at their tips.   At the tip of its snout, the star-nosed mole has many pairs of hairless appendages. It uses them to touch things around itself. Alive or dead? Food or ignore? It does these movements at an insane speed. In the time it takes to blink our eyes, the star-nosed mole can probe, identify and swallow its food. “Light may be the fastest thing in the universe, but light sensors have their limits, and the star-nosed mole’s sense of
Read more