Filtered, focused attention

Food for thought from JP Rangaswami. Commenting on this sentiment:

Don’t worry if you’re too busy in the morning to catch the segment. Someone will upload the Sierra/Locke summit segment to YouTube within an hour of its initial broadcast, and the analyses should appear online shortly afterwards

Rangaswami writes:

For a while now we have had news events being made available on YouTube, in effect time-shifting news on to the Web. In itself this is nothing new. What feels new to me is the expectation that something will be made available on YouTube or its equivalent... like in:

I won’t buy a book until I can Look Inside it. I won’t record something that I expect will appear on YouTube or its equivalent, but I will plan to watch it on YouTube. I won’t buy an album until I have listened to sample tracks via the web, be it iTunes or an equivalent. I won’t meet someone for the first time unless I have Googled them, maybe even Linked them In.

Read the full post here.

Comments

[ashok]

I read his full post, but I'm convinced there's a few/many distinction at play here he's missing. There are a few people that will always want to know ahead of time and search out the relevant information, or who would be interested in something enough to make time to catch it later. Technology makes their lives easier in terms of finding that info or seeing what they want to see.

The question is the many. Technology empowers impulse buyers, certainly - anyone can rack up a huge bill on Amazon in seconds and not use a thing they bought. And technology certainly makes them able to look into things and see what they're about before they buy, but the question is: Are we beyond hype, when information is easier and easier to get?

Yeah right. The uniqueness of the phenomenon is purely located in those few of us who know and care. Among us, we might have prized the value of surprise. Now we need to feel like we need to know beforehand. This is not a new phenomenon, it's part of something that's happening that isn't technological - I think one reason why a lot of people are angry at Bush is because they'd be angry anyone is in charge. We have so much control over our private lives, how dare there be a public sphere where we may be governed, and concerns that are long-term which we cannot immediately see!

Just a thought.

[ashok]

(I get the feeling someone is going to argue passionately and well against that rant of mine above, and it might be me, ironically enough).

[Kristine]

What I think is interesting here is the mentality shift: how technology changes both our expectations to the world and how we gain knowledge from it, process it - our epistemology if you like...