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[JimH]

jgreen was talking about dinosaurs this morning and it reminded me of an interview of the founder of Periscope that I heard on NPR on my way to work.

Apparently Periscope is a big enough deal that a little change makes the news at NPR.  This change was to allow users to keep their videos longer than 24 hours.  I thought that was funny, but the next part really made me laugh.

The founder said that people were really taking to live broadcasting of video, and that he, at that very moment was broadcasting himself being interviewed and receiving suggestions from the 315 people watching.

"I can take their suggestions and make them part of the interview, all in 3 or 4 seconds."

Wow.  Just wow.  [/sarcasm]

The discussion in the Competitive Disadvantages thread is often turning around streaming and how young people consume media, mainly without storing it.

Both points of view are valid, but I think we're in danger of becoming a comic book culture, when we could use a little more serious literature.

No offense meant to comic books.  I loved them once and I still read the New Yorker for the cartoons.  But hey, let's aim higher than 3 to 4 second thought exchanges.

[kstuart]

Agree entirely .... but the Competitive Disadvantage thread was about what people are doing, not about whether it's a good thing.

The Internet, by its very nature, encourages shallow communications.  This is because commercial entities have figured out that they can make more money by encouraging people who have little education to participate.  The result is automatically lowest-common-denominator.

This is the opposite of what we anticipated.  Back 30 years ago, I was part of a Silicon Valley lunch group.   The venue for that week was arranged and announced by a weird and unknown system called "email" which was mostly known outside of the Valley and some universities.  One of the guys in the lunch group was the Internet department for Apple.

Back then, it was an unquestioned belief that the Internet would empower people and provide them with information and "raise all boats".

Instead, it has greatly increased the amount of disinformation and false statements.

In retrospect, it turns out that technology serves to increase the gap between the educated elite and everyone else.