The Internet Is Taking Over The World

future advances in virtual reality will make it so rather then go 'on' the internets, we will go 'in' the internets

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​According to a recent report from the International Telecommunications Union, which clearly has its modem full, the

number of people who've found out about the World Wide Web will exceed 2 freakin' billionby the end of this year -- "an

increase of 600 million in just the past year and double the number of only five years ago. That's one-third of the

world's population, per UN stats

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The FCC's drive for mobile broadband as a way to boost that deployment becomes clearer with the ITU prediction

that by the end of the year, there will be an estimated 5.3 billion cell phone subscriptions worldwide.

hey thats a great idea, you should make up a word for it - going into the internet - something punky, cos it's bound to be punky. And you've got to have the word cyber in there .... how about ....... punkcyber?

but I jest. The internet is only about 6000 days old, but clearly, yes, it is taking over.

I quite like Kevin Kelly's take on it - the internet is the biggest, most complicated and most stable machine we've ever built ....

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The next stage in human technological evolution is a single thinking/web/computer that is planetary in dimensions. This planetary computer will be the largest, most complex and most dependable machine we have ever built. It will also be the platform that most business and culture will run on. The web is the initial OS of this new global machine, and all the many gadgets we possess are the windows into its core. Future gizmos will be future gateways into the same One Machine. Designing products and services for this new machine require a unique mind-set.

read on ...

edit: some stats from kevin kellys article (based on 2007, I think):

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"the One machine" has:

170 quadrillion transistors

55 trillion links

emails at the rate of 2 megahertz

text messages at the rate of 31 kilohertz

instant messages at the rate of 162 kilohertz

search at the rate of 14 kilohertz

246 exabytes of storage

9 exabytes of RAM

7 terabytes/second bandwidth

800 billion kwh/year power consumption

another statistic I like, is something Clay Shirky wrote about, which is to work out the total man hours it has taken to build wikipedia (one hundred million hours) and compare that to the amount of TV watched every year in the USA (two hundred billion hours per year)

So the effort to make something like Wikipedia is 1/2000th of the annual TV watching of the USA.

from Clay Shirky's "Cognitive Surplus":

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"Imagine treating the free time of the world's educated citizenry as an aggregate, a kind of cognitive surplus. How big would that surplus be? To figure it out, we need a unit of measurement, so lets start with Wikipedia. Suppose we consider the total amount of time people have spent on it as a kind of unit - every edit made to every article, and every argument about those edits, for every language that Wikipedia exists in. That would represent something like one hundred million hours of human thought* ... One hundred million hours of cumulative thought is obviously a lot. How much is it though, compared to the amount of time we spend watching television? Americans watch roughly two hundred billion hours of TV every year.

 

* Martin Wattenberg, an IBM researcher who has spent time studying Wikipedia, helped me arrive at that figure. It's a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but its the right order of magnitude."

I dont think we will go in the internet. More like the internet will be all around us.

mostly likely those of us who can afford it will spend all day in an internet womb powered by ejaculate from our porn surfing

  On 9/26/2011 at 3:23 AM, lumpenprol said:

mostly likely those of us who can afford it will spend all day in an internet womb powered by ejaculate from our porn surfing

Sign me up :)

zazen tell us more

facebook, google and future equivalents will become countries so let's hope watmm survives the end of it's democratic age.

  On 9/26/2011 at 2:35 AM, troon said:

future advances in virtual reality will make it so rather then

stopped reading.

  On 9/26/2011 at 3:16 PM, encey said:

  On 9/26/2011 at 2:35 AM, troon said:

future advances in virtual reality will make it so rather then

stopped reading.

lol

  On 9/26/2011 at 4:06 AM, chenGOD said:

  On 9/26/2011 at 3:23 AM, lumpenprol said:

mostly likely those of us who can afford it will spend all day in an internet womb powered by ejaculate from our porn surfing

 

Sign me up :)

I'm up for it as well

  On 9/26/2011 at 2:50 AM, zazen said:

the internet is the biggest, most complicated and most stable machine we've ever built ....

the internets are eating us alive. heh, little humans think they are so intelligent, they are so stubborn and puffed up.

soon we will all see where we have gone wrong, even the most blind and naive humans will be made to see

that's right troon, some day you will see the light.

I love having troon on ignore so I only see when he says something reaaaaaally retarded in someone else's quotes.

we have lost our way and the path we are on is lined with what we have come to enjoy, what we have come to understand as being life, when in fact it is death.

many of us have lost the ability to be satisfied with the most basic faculties of life. we are now passing this to our young, growing a generation of humanoids

(mutants) who have no real connection to the natural world. they live for technology, for the machine, they have become it's slave. we infect our innocent

offspring with the same disease that has sickened us and each time it becomes stronger, more resilient. this disease is so psychotic, so ravenous that it

eats itself, it slowly consumes itself without fully being aware of the implications of it's actions, caught in it's feeding frenzy, it's insatiable appetite

  On 9/26/2011 at 4:38 PM, troon said:

  On 9/26/2011 at 2:50 AM, zazen said:

the internet is the biggest, most complicated and most stable machine we've ever built ....

 

the internets are eating us alive. heh, little humans think they are so intelligent, they are so stubborn and puffed up.

soon we will all see where we have gone wrong, even the most blind and naive humans will be made to see

Ha, Provided it becomes self-aware. And no it hasn't.

Edit: Oh my bad, you backed up why it doesn't have to be self-aware in the next post. Ha, your thought processes sound like mine when I'm out-of-my-mind stoned.

  On 9/26/2011 at 6:00 PM, troon said:

we have lost our way and the path we are on is lined with what we have come to enjoy, what we have come to understand as being life, when in fact it is death.

many of us have lost the ability to be satisfied with the most basic faculties of life. we are now passing this to our young, growing a generation of humanoids

(mutants) who have no real connection to the natural world. they live for technology, for the machine, they have become it's slave. we infect our innocent

offspring with the same disease that has sickened us and each time it becomes stronger, more resilient. this disease is so psychotic, so ravenous that it

eats itself, it slowly consumes itself without fully being aware of the implications of it's actions, caught in it's feeding frenzy, it's insatiable appetite

We should start a psychedelic punk band (Think 90's Television-fueled anger, but it's the internet now). You'll be the lead singer, troon. Those lyrics are gold.

alright then, we've been wanting to punk out

troon, not everyone appreciates the technology or lets it take over their lives. and it's been a theme for kids and teenagers even before the internet. many people when they get older start to appreciate the natural world and the small things a lot more and it's not unusual for teenagers and under to 'hate' it. i also think that realizing our natural connection to the world and becoming more in touch with our sensibilities isn't necessarily all that positive. for us yeah sure, but in the grand scheme of things we are animals born to appreciate our surroundings simply to survive and propagate the species. if you take that further the acts of killing prey or rabidly following sexual instincts are also a part of that world. all of those manifest themselves now anyway, but maybe not so much in the more primal and unfiltered way that nature does it.

i kind of think of the technological and the natural to lead to two different things, like a dichotomy. the former leads to social and sociological variety and complex minds, while the latter leads to simpler, sense oriented minds. without the internet, the cities and the vast amount of sociological and social evolution there would not be all the diversity we have today, and everyone shares large amounts of the same diversity simply due to being aware of it and exposed to it. we still have to live in the physical world and the aspects of that can be enough for some people. the ones who dont feel the need for more natural experiences, well, so what? it's all chaos and there is no final answer or right path imo. i think as long as people have reasonable doses of happy within the despair then we should be good. when shit turns to Surrogates (the movie with bruce willis) that's when i would be worried. there are negatives to both paths i reckon.

didn't expect to see you in here, Voice of Reason :sup:

  On 9/26/2011 at 6:42 PM, coax said:

it's all chaos and there is no final answer or right path imo.

i say this to troon about once a month

I dunno about nothing, but someone heated up some lunch in the cafeteria that smells like vomit. At least on the net everything will smell like how i want it to.

  On 9/26/2011 at 7:28 PM, troon said:

see how easy it was to break the internet? not much of an opponent if you ask me.

  On 9/26/2011 at 8:17 PM, chenGOD said:

I dunno about nothing, but someone heated up some lunch in the cafeteria that smells like vomit. At least on the net everything will smell like how i want it to.

I dream of a future where everything smells of Chesney Hawkes