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'An aphorism, properly stamped and molded, has not been "deciphered" when it has simply been read; rather one has then to begin its interpretation, for which is required an art of interpretation.' -- Nietzsche, 'On the Genealogy of Morals'

a digital world « Previous | |Next »
October 30, 2013

In 1995 the Internet was often seen as a playground suitable for youthful cavorting, not a place for serious grownups, especially not serious grownups with business aspirations.

Paul Krugman observed in 1998:

The growth of the Internet will slow drastically [as it] becomes apparent [that] most people have nothing to say to each other. By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine’s…. Ten years from now the phrase information economy will sound silly.

Krugman was dead wrong. What has emerged is a new information economy, a digital world. Internet activities, which now include online banking, social media, web browsing, shopping, e-mailing, and music and movie streaming, generate tremendous amounts of data, while the Internet itself, through digitization and cloud computing, enables the storage and manipulation of complex and extensive data sets.

This data is a new kind of raw material that can be extracted by data analysis and data mining. Diagnosis is one thing, correlation something else, prediction yet another order of magnitude. So while we are having fun with our online connectivity we are happily and willingly helped to create the greatest surveillance system ever imagined, a web whose strings give governments and businesses countless threads to pull, which makes us…targets for spooks and advertisers.

| Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 10:33 AM |