Internet, the Next Generation

Some talk about the Internet as being as revolutionary as electricity. Whether or not you agree with that, the Internet evolves at a speed unheard of for something, er, that revolutionary. You get used to how it works; next thing you know, it’s evolved. Or mutated, depending on your point of view.

John Herrmann calls what we have now as the third Internet. Though he doesn’t describe the three explicitly, this is what I thought he meant:
1)      First one, aka Before Google: You had to know the name of the site to go to because, well, search engines sucked.
2)     Second one, the Google Era: nobody knew any site, they just searched for whatever they wanted and Google pointed them to the articles to look at.
3)     Third one, the smartphone/app version.

The third one is what Hermmann does talk about in detail. Since typing is (still) not exactly convenient on the phone, most people surf by clicking links on their apps. And guess which apps people spend most of their time on? Facebook and other social networking apps. And so, Hermann points out:
“The new sources of readership, the apps and sites people check every day and which lead people to new posts and stories, make up a majority of total readership, and they're utterly unpredictable.”

And this new reality means that:
“If Facebook changes how Newsfeed works, or how its app works, a large fraction of total traffic could appear or disappear very quickly.”
And so Hermmann concludes:
“A site that doesn't care about Facebook will nonetheless come to depend on Facebook.”
And that leads him to wonder:
“When did the best sites on the internet, giant and small alike, become anonymous subcontractors to tech companies that operate on entirely different scales?”
Entirely different scale indeed. What Google’s ex-CEO, Eric Schmidt described as:
“Almost nothing, short of a biological virus, can scale as quickly, efficiently or aggressively as these technology platforms (from Google, Facebook, Amazon and Apple).”

Comments

  1. KumarJune 6, 2014 at 5:06 PM

    It all sounds fascinating, bewitching etc.

    I am waiting to see what effect this kind of "press the buttons for information" along with "press the buttons for socializing" on mankind on the whole on a long term basis. Kind of the long-term influence of these on mankind's biological evolution, I mean.

    I know a technologically savvy person's cliche answer: "we are evolving so fast that we are going to be super-duper intelligent within a century or less". I suppose our glee should be along these lines: More or less mankind's evolutionary process has shortened so greatly that we are going to be our own aliens in no time at all! How lovely! :-)

    I am older, though (with due humility) I am not sure if I am wiser. But I cannot help asking, "Are we all stuffing ourselves with data and information, with very little time and inclination left for sharpening our innate, marvelous tool that evolution has led us to - the ability for digging meaning out of abundant data? At the end of the technological revolution of internet and infinite (said in exaggeration of course) data flow, in about 100 years from now, are we going to have so many people who are like Newton and Einstein, Darwin and Bohr, Guass and Ramanujan, Michelangelo and Shakespeare etc. etc. they will be such commoners that awards, prizes and adulation would only be reserved for the 100 times brighter newer human beings who have dwarfed all known giants of mankind? Really?

    Or, will we have humankind reduced its ability to mind's ability for keen insights, failing to appropriately sharpening our grand mind potential? In crude terms, will mankind have only increased its ability and time to keep on reading from the screens for anything and everything, including the question "human intelligence - where is it?"!

    There is an innate tendency within us "to seek, to struggle, to find answers to the most subtle and the most intricate questions". This is ably assisted by the gift from Nature, thanks to evolution: "inspiration that flashes, not produced by any known routine or consciously-controlled process". That is why we call some among us as "geniuses". Will this continue, after all the tools of technology, fascinating and bewitching, levitating in front of us - including the time when we sleep!

    I summarize my point with this question: "How going on sitting in front of external screens gobbling up truck-loads of data, while continuously activating sensors in suitable ways in order to give commands to the machine would marvelously increase the rate of humanity's ability for inspiration?"

    This question will probably also get explained within a century or less, by the new generation geniuses of the future, who would have outclassed our Einsteins and Darwins in abundant measure. I am unable to see the logic of that at the moment; naturally, I am not even a genius now! :-)

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