Week Thirteen: Kelly, Lurie, and Tripp

Where does it go from here?

A refreshing bout of optimism in this week's readings made for a nice change of pace. It hasn't all been doom-and-gloom so far, but for the most part I feel that the stuff we've read has tended towards bleak. Lurie and Tripp both presented some basic overviews on the web and its relations to politics. The whole feeling I got from them was along the lines of "here's this wonderful new tool that is hardly being utilized to its full potential. We can do wonderful things with this!" 

And we're seeing those wonderful things happen. Traditional means of media are all on the decline, either dying out or adapting themselves for integration with the internet. Not only that, but we're finding the internet to be wonderfully democratic, participatory, open, and accessible. The perfect storm of new media is upon us.

But the best thing from this week's readings was Kelly's "The Web Runs on Love, not Greed." He put it in great perspective in his discussion about the billions of pages and sites on the internet, and how its inventors would have thought those numbers quite impossible to attain in such a short time.

Yet here we are, moving closer and closer to the digital divide every day as the web becomes more and more useful and powerful. But what does it lead to?

I can't help but imagine that with anything but optimism. 5 years ago we were content to wait hours for a song to download, and now we're streaming entire films in high definition on connections that are "average." It's fascinating, and it's only going to improve. I saw a graph the other day of the projected storage capacity of SD cards over the next few years, and it was staggering. They've grown from a few megabytes to several gigabytes in a short time, but projections show that if they continue to develop at their current pace, we'll have SD card capable of holding several terrabytes.

Terrabytes, on something the size of a postage stamp. That's insane.

I believe it was Arthur C. Clarke who said something like, "Any prediction about the future that sounds reasonable in anyway is assuredly incorrect." That's the feeling I got from Kelly's piece, and it's an exciting feeling to have. Wherever media and the internet goes from here, as long as people like Kelly, Lurie, and Tripp are at the helm, it will be good.