The Next Big Web Thing?

David Gelernter did not invent the Web. But he might be the guy who re-invents it. This professor at Yale thinks the Internet is a mess and needs some radical restructuring. In 1991 he published "Mirror Worlds" which envisaged a future where all our activities will be mirrored on the Web. Over the past ten years he has spent in to restructure the Web to mirror this emerging reality. David had nothing to do with either Facebook or Twitter. However social media did give rise to a concept central to his mission -the timeline. David however is not very complimentary about Twitter or Facebook. He believes that both while being important to the evolution of the Web are essentially inelegant and will not exist in a decade. Wall Street better rethink the $100 billion dollar valuations (the moot point, some would say, is that whether Wall Street itself may not exist in 10 years). The news is now that David is now ready to launch his product among students at Yale just as Facebook was first launched among students at Harvard. The product is, as you would expect, shrouded in mystery as of now but David does talk about the Internet of the future becoming a instead of a network of static assets and each person having a Lifestream that feeds the Worldstream and is visible to others in part based on permission settings. Imagining David's product based on the above concepts could be an interesting exercise. Who knows, you might land yourself a complementary product that positions you downstream from David's putative game changer. One more point. David was a victim of the Unabomber. A letter bomb blew up in his face, leaving him severely handicapped. Give a Genius a handicap and the odds are he will flower. Wanna bet on David's idea? You know where to find me.

The Coming of the Emotion Age

Those among us over the age of forty remember the all-pervasive heralding of the Information Age in the late eighties.
Today a new age is creeping in on us unheralded.
It is a sign of the times that great change does not get the world stage it did just a couple of decades ago. Simply because the world stage exists no more. Its disappearance is a counter-intuitive consequence of the Information Age coming, so to speak, fully of age.
News today is millions of rivulets of communication with even an individual with just a computer and an Internet communication capable of broadcast with the potential of reaching a worldwide audience instantly. And of course capable of receiving millions of such communications instantly.
This democratization of information has started exerting a downward pull on the economic value of information just as at the later stages of the Industrial Age began the downward pull on the economic value of manufactured goods and services.
So as the buying and selling of information recedes as the main economic activity of human society, what next?
What's beyond the consumption of material goods and services or the cognitive reception and absorption of information? The affective reception and absorption of bundles of stimulus we call emotions?
From time immemorial human society has traded in emotions. From stories around the campfire to songs on the radios to movies to television shows.
This buying and selling of emotion however currently occupies a small fraction of human economic activity. If we include leisure travel, a rough estimate is that the buying and selling of emotion currently accounts for less than 10% of human economic activity. If we include the currently illegal activity of the provision and consumption of psychotropic drugs the number still remains below 12%.
Is this on the path to swell to over 30%? How?
Growth in the traditional channels of generation and consumption of emotion, viz the printed word, recorded/ live music, radio/TV shows, movies and psychotropic drugs will constitute one part of the emerging dominance.
However like the modern technologies of communication and computation gave an altogether new dimension to the generation and consumption of information, it will be technology breakthroughs that lift the generation and consumption of emotions to the level of being the predominant economic activity.
Perhaps as the science of electrons provided the backbone of modern communication and information technology, the science of the genome will provide the backbone of tomorrow's emotion technology, ET, if I may call it so.
Perhaps what the fab is to IT today the nano-fab will be to ET tomorrow.
And like the theory of communication there will emerge a theory of memes.
Quite likely all parallels in the evolution of new technologies will breakdown as human science moves from the paradigm of predictive models to purely empirically grounded action as postulated by the likes of Stephen Wolfram (" A New Kind of Science").
However as the Emotion Age emerges one thing is clear. There never was a better time to be "creative", if creative is defined as the ability to put together a medley of various kinds of stimuli to generate an emotional response.
Human society is emerging into the epoch where the storyteller, the musician and the painter of colors and light will sit at the pinnacle of human economic activity.
There is of course the possibility that the Emotion Age bypasses technology and consumption and manifests itself in a society that transcends buying and selling into a mode of symbiotic being that resembles the animal world while exploring the higher reaches of human consciousness. An age beyond all labels really but if have to give it a label in today's terms, the Spiritual Age. But that is another story, another blog.