From: Regular Expression (xeger@xeger.net)
Date: Thu Aug 01 2002 - 16:55:56 MDT
When you sit at your computer it's tempting to think of yourself as a
recepticle for the information flowing from the Internet, but this is a
half truth. In fact, your computer is the recepticle, and all it sees is
so much binary data. the computer chooses how to interpret the data,
transforming them into more convenient forms and using output devices to
let you interpret the data as audio, text, graphics, etc.
If more bandwidth is available to your computer, it will be able to
receive information (media) with greater information density. The
high-density media, while conveying essentially the same information as
its low-density equivalent, could in many cases be easier for the
average Internet user's brain to assimilate.
For instance, would you rather:
1) Go to "tv://cnn.com" and be presented instantaneously with a
fullscreen HDTV-quality pointcast of the night's headlines, as
personalized for your interests;
2) Hear the morning news on your way to work while chatting with a
speech-based information processing agent; or
3) Sit down in front of a computer terminal and click monotonously on
hyperlinks, squinting at pages of advert-filled fluff, applying crude
visual data-mining techniques trying to glean the information you're
interested in?
In other words--greater bandwidth for our computer networks may equate
to greater effective throughput for our wetware networks (our brains, or
minds, or whatever we're calling them today))
Robert J. Bradbury wrote:
>I fail to see how the high bandwidth final mile will significantly
>advance society, culture, or humanity as they currently exist.
>Only when the end recepticles have a much higher bandwidth
>than those currently in place (i.e. we have posthumanist
>entities) does it seem to me that higher bandwidths will
>be useful.
>
>
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sat Nov 02 2002 - 09:15:50 MST