There’s a huge new report released by the OECD today about the Internet Economy (apologies, I tried to embed it but they’re using an odd system that won’t allow it)
When the centers opened in the 1990s as quaintly termed “Internet hotels,” the tenants paid for space to plug in their servers with a proviso that electricity would be available. As computing power has soared, so has the need for power, turning that relationship on its head: electrical capacity is often the central element of lease agreements, and space is secondary.
A result, an examination shows, is that the industry has evolved from a purveyor of space to an energy broker — making tremendous profits by reselling access to electrical power, and in some cases raising questions of whether the industry has become a kind of wildcat power utility
BBC News: The age of information overload
What happens in just 60 seconds?
- 168 million emails sent
- 694,445 Google searches
- 695,000 Facebook status updates
- 370,000 Skype calls are made
- 98,000 tweets on Twitter
- 20,000 new posts on Tumblr
- 13,000 iPhone apps downloaded
- 6,600 new pictures on Flickr
- 1,500 new blog entries posted
- 600 videos posted totalling over
- 25 hours duration on YouTube
Internet Access Is a Human Right, Says United Nations
Is Internet access and online freedom of expression a basic human right? The United Nations’ Human Rights Council unanimously backed that notion in a resolution passed Thursday.
there are now more pages on the web than there are stars in our galaxy
In its quest to get to know us, the internet is at the stage of the well-meaning auntie who buys you inappropriate presents at Christmas (it’s the algorithmic thought that counts). It kind of knows you, but doesn’t really know you.
Exposure to new people doesn’t automatically produce tolerance. When explorers traversed the earth looking for opportunity, they pillaged and plundered even before they began colonising. Fear ruled the seas. And let’s be honest, exposure to other people during great explorations did not magically produce tolerance. It bred anger, distrust and hatred.
Through networked technologies, the average person is exposed to more things today than ever before in history. People can get a window into the lives of others halfway around the world. Onlookers may not understand what strangers are saying nor may they be sharing that much publicly, but the internet enables more access to more people than even the greatest explorers in history ever had. But what does someone make of this opportunity? Are people really looking around to understand difference? Or are they more committed to finding similarity and avoiding people who aren’t like them?
One of my favourite maxims about the role of technology in society is called Kranzberg’s first law. He argues that “technology is neither good nor bad – nor is it neutral”. It’s irresponsible to assume that the tools being built just wander out into the world with only positive effects. Technology doesn’t determine practice, but how a system is designed does matter. How systems are used also matters, even if those uses aren’t what designers intended
Thanks to technology’s mass appeal and accessibility, on a daily basis we collectively produce 2.5 quintillion bytes of data, and the growth rate is so high that 90% of all information ever created was produced in the last two years alone.
What we can do now has never been possible before: the next IT revolution is happening in the “I” - the information - not the “T”.
We fetch tens to hundreds of billions of pages. When I first got here [in 1999], it was about 50 million pages, and that was the biggest index then. It’s hard to imagine, but it’s three orders of magnitude bigger today.
(via Next Generation Media Quarterly January 2012) another great roundup Dan :-)
In June, citing the uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa, a report by the United Nations’ special rapporteur went so far as to declare that the Internet had “become an indispensable tool for realizing a range of human rights.” Over the past few years, courts and parliaments in countries like France and Estonia have pronounced Internet access a human right.
But that argument, however well meaning, misses a larger point: technology is an enabler of rights, not a right itself.
