Thursday, June 18, 2009

The Big Pond

Picture this - the biggest collective memory of ideas, actions, thoughts and feelings. Web 2.0 is soon becoming the best realization of a collective memory of human history and endeavor. Of course, that's overstating it a bit, but let the data speak - a Terabyte used to be big until recently - well, YouTube contains 530 Terabytes of videos as of end 2008. Hold the press! - We have the Peta Byte? That’s the amount of data that is processed by Google servers every 72 minutes! The English Wikipedia is 25 times bigger than the next largest English-language encyclopedia. As the July edition of Wired termed it - “The quest for knowledge used to begin with Grand Theories. Now it begins with massive amounts of data. Welcome, to the Petabyte Age!"

In this age of information overload; the basic flow of information - top-down since time immemorial with gatekeepers managing the flow of information - is changing, and fast! In whichever field you look at - science, art, literature, commerce, and entertainment, the browser has changed the dynamics. Imagine a million minds with a billion ideas able to express, connect, collaborate and then create.

In the book "The End Of Science: Facing The Limits Of Knowledge In The Twilight Of The Scientific Age-John Horgan ", spoke to top living scientists who surmised about their dilemma of grappling with the reality of a slow down in discovery and inventions. So when the fundamental source of empirically derived knowledge looks like drying up, where do you go?

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