O tamanho do problema

…inclusive porque já estamos na situação em que a torrente de informação gerada por pessoas e sistemas, informatizados e conectados, já não tem nem mais onde ser guardada, como mostra o gráfico ao lado. e isso há tempos: desde 2007, se cria bem mais informação do que os sistemas de arquivos podem armazenar. mas não é só a criação que importa, é o fluxo de informação também: segundo a CISCO, o tráfego global na internet cresceu 45% em um ano [entre 2009 e 2010], chegando a 15 exabytes por mês. e os sinais são de que tal fluxo será quatro vezes maior em 2014, chegando a 767 exabytes no ano. leve em conta que um exabyte é um quintilhão de bytes, algo com nada menos que 18 zeros depois do 1… e pense no volume de dados indo de um ponto a outro na rede mundial.

…lembrando que os últimos dados consolidados que a empresa tem são de 2009, 2010 estando para sair. mas pense: dados móveis, a parte roxa do histograma, que ficava escondida em 2009, será quase 40 vezes maior em meros cinco anos. isso tem a ver com você, eu e todo mundo que a gente conhece usando a rede de dados móveis ou querendo usá-la assim que pintar na sua localidade ou tiver como pagar por ela.

resultado ? uma pesquisa [limitada, é verdade] da magnify, especialista em “curadoria de informação”, descobriu que…

Via Sílvio Meira

NYT.com, 15 anos

Impressionante como a homepage de 2005 soa tão retrô.

Via Tiago Dória

Raio-x da internet brasileira

Thanks, ComScore!

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“It was Marx, not Steve Jobs, who said that the character of modern life is that everything falls apart”

Um dos textos mais fodas que eu já li sobre a internet. Adam Gopnik, da New Yorker, simplesmente juntu tudo o que foi escrito de relevante sobre a internet, dividiu em três correntes e criticou divinamente:

All three kinds appear among the new books about the Internet: call them the Never-Betters, the Better-Nevers, and the Ever-Wasers. The Never-Betters believe that we’re on the brink of a new utopia, where information will be free and democratic, news will be made from the bottom up, love will reign, and cookies will bake themselves. The Better-Nevers think that we would have been better off if the whole thing had never happened, that the world that is coming to an end is superior to the one that is taking its place, and that, at a minimum, books and magazines create private space for minds in ways that twenty-second bursts of information don’t. The Ever-Wasers insist that at any moment in modernity something like this is going on, and that a new way of organizing data and connecting users is always thrilling to some and chilling to others—that something like this is going on is exactly what makes it a modern moment. One’s hopes rest with the Never-Betters; one’s head with the Ever-Wasers; and one’s heart? Well, twenty or so books in, one’s heart tends to move toward the Better-Nevers, and then bounce back toward someplace that looks more like home.

Essa parte aqui é uma pedrada:

It is the wraparound presence, not the specific evils, of the machine that oppresses us. Simply reducing the machine’s presence will go a long way toward alleviating the disorder. Which points, in turn, to a dog-not-barking-in-the-nighttime detail that may be significant. In the Better-Never books, television isn’t scanted or ignored; it’s celebrated. When William Powers, in “Hamlet’s BlackBerry,” describes the deal his family makes to have an Unplugged Sunday, he tells us that the No Screens agreement doesn’t include television: “For us, television had always been a mostly communal experience, a way of coming together rather than pulling apart.” (“Can you please turn off your damn computer and come watch television with the rest of the family,” the dad now cries to the teen-ager.)

Vale muito a leitura.

“The Net makes what was always implicitly virtual explicitly virtual”

O título do post é baseado em uma observação do fodástico Nick Carr sobre um texto de Justin E. H. Smith

If then there is a certain respect in which it makes sense to say that the Internet does not change everything, it is that human social reality was always virtual anyway. I do not mean this in some obfuscating Baudrillardian sense, but rather as a corollary to a thoroughgoing naturalism: human institutions only exist because they appear to humans to exist; nature is entirely indifferent to them. And tools and vehicles only are what they are because people make the uses of them that they do.

Consider the institution of friendship. Every time I hear someone say that Facebook ‘friendship’ should be understood in scare quotes, or that Facebook interaction is not real social interaction, I feel like asking in reply: What makes you think real-world friendships are real? Have you not often felt some sort of amical rapport with a person with whom you interact face-to-face, only to find that in the long run it comes to nothing? How exactly was that fleeting sensation any more real than the discovery and exploration of shared interests and sensibilities with a ‘friend’ one knows only through the mediation of a social-networking site? …

One would do better to trace [the Net] back far further, to holy scripture, to runes and oracle bones, to the discovery of the possibility of reproducing the world through manipulation of signs.

 

Retro-Digital Movement

We’re experiencing a retro-digital (or is post-digital?) movement in the tech world: just today, I read about a gaming company (Discovery Bay Games) that has figured out to convert your bright, shiny Apple iPad into the type of tabletop board game that you played decades ago.

That’s not all: think yellowed-out Hipstamatic photos that look like they were taken with a Polaroid rather than a 6-megapixel digital camera; aggressively anachronistic smart phone ring tones that sound like old telephones; iPad and Twitter apps that duplicate the look and feel of newspapers (newspapers!); and modern videogames that re-create the look and feel of 8-bit games like Pac-Man or Asteroids. And, of course, my favorite – an iPad carrying case that looks like a big, dusty, smelly book. So what gives?

The final explanation is perhaps the most logical — that the retro-digital movement is actually a sign that the digital and analog worlds, so long separated, are now becoming one. The Internet is no longer something that divides generations, or something that is somehow separate from our everyday life. When 80-year-old grandmothers are on Facebook and young kids are toting around Wi-Fi enabled iPads instead of backpacks you know that the Internet is almost as ubiquitous as electricity. There are no longer “online campaigns” or “offline campaigns,” there are just campaigns.

Via Future Lab

“The internet changes nothing”

We knew the revolution wouldn’t be televised, but many of us really hoped it might be on the Internet. Now we know these hopes were false. There was no Internet Revolution and there will be no Internet Revolution. We will stumble on in more or less exactly the way we did before massive computer networks infiltrated our daily lives …

Before the Web we were already used to sitting in front of electronic boxes for hour upon hour. The boxes have now changed, but they are still boxes. Of course the things we do on the Internet are different from those we did (and do) in front of the TV. But it’s important to remember that they are only different; they are not new. Think for a moment about what you do on the Internet. Not what you could do, but what you actually do. You email people you know. In an effort to broaden your horizons, you could send email to strangers in, say, China, but you don’t. You read the news. You could read newspapers from distant lands so as to broaden your horizons, but you usually don’t. You watch videos. There are a lot of high-minded educational videos available, but you probably prefer the ones featuring, say, snoring cats. You buy things. Every store in the world has a website, so you could buy all manner of exotic goods. As a rule, however, you buy the things you have always bought from the people who have always sold them. You play games. There are many kinds of games on the Internet, but those we seem to like best all fall into two categories: the ones where we can kill things and the ones where we can cast spells. You look things up. The Web is like a bottomless well of information. You can find the answer to almost any question if you’re willing to look. But you generally don’t like to look, so you get your answers from Wikipedia. Last, you do things you know you shouldn’t. The Internet is great for indulging bad habits. It offers endless opportunities to steal electronic goods, look at dirty pictures, and lose your money playing poker. Moreover, it’s anonymous. On the Web, you can get what you want and be pretty sure you won’t get caught getting it. That’s terrifically useful.

But what exactly is new here? Not very much. Email is still mail. Online newspapers are still newspapers. YouTube videos are still videos. Virtual stores are still stores. MMORPGs are still variations on D&D. A user-built encyclopedia is still a reference book. Stealing mp3s is still theft. Cyber-porn is still porn. Internet poker is still gambling. In terms of content, the Internet gives us almost nothing that the much maligned “traditional media” did not. It’s not much of an exaggeration to say that the Internet is a post office, newsstand, video store, shopping mall, game arcade, reference room, record outlet, adult book shop and casino rolled into one. Let’s be honest: that’s amazing. But it’s amazing in the same way a dishwasher is amazing—it enables you to do something you have always done a little easier than before.

Esse texto é de Marshall Poe, tirado de um puta post do Nick Carr, que embora não concorde com a conclusão do título, também compartilha dessa visão crítica sobre a internet. De quebra, ainda encontrei isso aqui em um dos comentários lá no site do Nick Carr:

This is an old debate, new vs.old.Revolutionary vs.evolutionary. I tend to agree with Poe’s point up to one, important, degree: the net has changed our lives drastically not because of most of the substance (he is right on most “substance” points) but because of the change of the nature of our access to this “substance” i.e. what I call the Einstein formula E=mc2.

Indeed the energy (E) found on the web, whatever the substance, is a new beast because the masses (m) have never been so big, millions at a time; the speed (c as in celerity) has never been so fast, everything within a fraction of second; the transparency (c as in clarity), everything so visible to so many that we are deeply troubled (in all senses of that word).

Internet e o “princípio da separação”

Esse trecho aí de baixo é do Tiago Dória, comentando o livro do Tim Wu, The Master Switch.

Wu propõe a criação do “Princípio da Separação”, uma forma de autorregulação do mercado de telecomunicações nos EUA. Empresas de conteúdo não poderiam entrar nos negócios de infraestrutura nem de dispositivos. Integrações verticais seriam proibidas. Nunca as três camadas poderiam se misturar na mesma empresa – conteúdo, infraestrutura de rede e dispositivos.

É justamente nessa capacidade de reunir vários formatos de comunicação e pessoas em uma única rede, em uma única plataforma, que está o maior perigo da internet – “com todo mundo em uma única rede, o potencial de poder para controlar tudo isso é muito maior”.

A internet traz diversidade de conteúdo, mas não de plataforma. E quem domina a infraestrutura dessa plataforma tem um grande poder em mãos.

Chupa MicrosoftOffice!

 

450 Page Google Docs Presentation contou com 3 animadores, 3 dias e 450 frames produzidos. Esses são os números dessa impressionante animação feita utilizando somente com o google docs como suporte. Fuckingawesome.

 

“How to make money on the internet”