Prometeus, futurology in media convergence
Discovered via the world famous blog Techcrunch, here is a very interesting video about media evolution.
I’m not buying everything but superbly well done.
69 comments June 17th, 2007
Posts filed under 'philosophy'
The Google price
The Google offer is absolutely blasting:
- Beside the many services and tools available at Google, which are enabling structuration, indexing and access for content and information in many domains: web pages, documents, images, location, books, news… over the internet or on your desktop.
They are offering today the bases of remote web applications such as word processor, spreadsheets, calendars, and emails. This available for FREE!!!
As everything has a price, what could be the one for such great free services?
Is Google totally neutral?
Will they never use information for their own benefits ?
Of course they will!
But beside that, will they never decide to pass these info to some governments. Did you read the disclaimers? Personnaly I didn’t. I’m playing the game unconsciously because it’s too easy and disclaimers are too long anyway.
But do you really know what information (the digital footprints) you are putting a little bit everywhere? If someone is able to recup them what are they able to know about you? You do not want to know, for sure. By googling my nickname I found more than 20 pages of results. Impressive at my own personal opinion for such an anonym person like me. And I am as far as I know the only one to use such a nick.
Digital age will force us to rethink a lots of things as said in a previous post, privacy is definitely a concept that already evolved radicaly. It is certainly a begining.
A major argument is that if you have nothin to hide you shoud have nothing to fear.
Indeed, but what about tomorrow? Like in the “enemy of the state” movie, you can start having enemies without even knowing it. You can start being a threat for someone else’s business or project a long time before start being aware of it.
And then in the harsh competition field or in a totalitarian state you are not fully supporting, what kind of information can be used against you?
Those services have one huge weakness, they are storing your private and confidential information on their server. The AOL case (post in french) already showed us that the amount of information is largely beyond what a normal user can easily imagine. Against that their are currently nothing stating any rules or laws and information is generally conserved during a long period of time.
For what duration? For what use? What is the limit? We just don’t know.
79 comments February 22nd, 2007
Big Brotherhood vs Open Model Utopy
Technology is as always a tool and just a tool.
What is impressive with it, is the cultural influence it has on us.
It is a leverage that has a strong and radical impact on the way we live, the way we think as well as the way we apprehend reality, interactions with people, business and so on.
Communication age has already changed our everyday world in a so intence and deep maneer. When we are looking at what is coming shortly, it is obvious that this trend is only a small and soft begining, what Moore states it for computers is also valid for any fields impacted by technology: EVERYTHING!
Internet and digital tools are clearly opposing two visions:
Their is of course no waranty at all that one day a malicious goverment access these datas and decide to compile them, intersect them and finally use them to maintain power, manipulate the masses and to finally impose a servitude and dominating regime so well discribed in novels such as 1984 and the Brave New World (in a communist form as even for those visionars the threat was supposed to come from the outside).
So then, what will impose one option or the other? How this will be evolve? Finally what are the parameters influencing a way or another?
My personnal opinion would logically align with what I believe for models in general. If two models are opposing themselves, the open one will always win. In business, the close model is frequently a short term winner, and this can be sufficient for creating empires, but at then end open model always drive the change and impose itself.
So in theory yes the open anarchic & utopian model is unavodaible.
But there are so many other factors like climate changes, petrol remaining stocks and fossile energies dependancy, can also create an unseen massive crissis. This could be unfortunately a strong leverage for the closed model theory.
We’ll see… 
13 comments February 9th, 2007
What is Web?
Made by Michael Wesch, Cultural Anthropology teacher assistant at the Kansas University, this video became in few days one of the most popular of the internet.
This video is throwing some fundamental questions and this gives a quite fresh vision of what the web could become.
67 comments February 6th, 2007
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