Elon University

Archives: Expert Predictions

The Medium is the Message and the Message is Voyeurism

Maybe there’s some evolutionary force pushing us toward a complete exteriorization of our individual psychic landscapes, a mutual exposure. Clearly, we are wiring ourselves in, each to the other. We seem to be creating, through media and communications technology, what some have called a species-wide nervous system.

The Medium is the Message and the Message is Voyeurism

One of the great ironies of information economics is that while information can be trivially copied and the information bandwidth continues to widen, the individual’s attention bandwidth is as narrow as ever. In information economics, post-scarcity reaches its reduction ad absurdum.

In the Kingdom of Mao Bell: A Billion Chinese Are Using New Technology to Create the Fastest-Growing Economy on the Planet. But While the Information Wants to be Free, Do They?

If anyone’s going to be the informational mogul of South China, it’s probably Cheung … Cheung wants to extend the Net into China, and a lot of Chinese badly want him to do it … because they want to network their offices together, in China and other parts of Asia, without having to lease lines … It’s going to be a long time before the Net reaches the Chinese masses. So Cheung doesn’t think that electronic communications will cause any political changes in China except insofar as the free flow of information tends, over a long period, to make the economy more productive and lead to the development of a middle class.

In the Kingdom of Mao Bell: A Billion Chinese Are Using New Technology to Create the Fastest-Growing Economy on the Planet. But While the Information Wants to be Free, Do They?

The Network is spreading across China … We’d like to think of it as the grassroots of democracy, but the Chinese are just as apt to think of it as a finely engineered snare for tying the whole country together even more firmly than its predecessor, the human Net of the Red Guards … Sometime within the next couple of decades, I’m expecting to turn on CNN (or BBC if I can get it) and see a jittery home videotape smuggled out of South China, showing a heap of smashed and burning cellphones, satellite dishes, and television sets piled up in a public square in Shenzhen, and, as backdrop, a giant mural portraying a vigorous new leader in Beijing.