this post was submitted on 23 Dec 2024
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Showerthoughts
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First there were newspapers. Radio made it so that you didn’t have to read the newspaper yourself; someone would read it to you. And music! And drama! And line reporting on location! Radio encompassed everything that newspapers were, and added more.
Television added sight to sound. The visual layer increased the value of broadcast exponentially, while doing everything that radio and newspapers did.
The internet showed up. Now you could choose between all kinds of text, audio, video, interactive games, instant communication worldwide.
Then it became mobile. The portability of newspapers and transistor radios is widely available, but also for video and global communication.
There’s already been some hints at what might be the next step. Self driving cars build a digital representation of the world around them. Mapping software will give you arrow overlays as you walk, just from your having showed your phone the buildings around you. Google tried to put this on your face with Google Glass, but it was too early, not developed enough, maybe too interactive for its time.
The next thing is going to be an immersive digital representation of real things, created from sensors on the fly and also stored to be available to everyone. This will bring newspapers and radio and television and the mobile internet together, and add all real world objects, about which additional information can be easily accessed in real time.
And it will be exploitative as fuck.
Hyper-reality
That's terrifying. But not just because of how dystopian it was, but because I could envision a world with that same technology being so incredibly amazing, bordering on utopian.
As are newspapers, radio, television, and the mobile internet. As were chiseled stones and scribe-copied manuscripts. There is no means of communication that is immune from propaganda and exploitation.