It’s early morning, but already I’ve accomplished something. A few moments ago, I deactivated my Twitter account.
Hadn’t much used the account for more than a year. Now, I simply do not want to be associated with Twitter in any way. I don’t want to say anything bad about Twitter. But I can’t think of anything good. Twitter is not making the world a better place. Let’s let it go at that.
Farewell Twitter! You will not be missed.
Will Facebook be next?
— John
How the blogosphere has evolved since 2007! WordPress.com logged 660 million blog posts in 2015, according to the Year In Review report, published this week. However, I often wonder if blogging, which was the big new thing in the first decade of the century, has peaked. Every year brings more online competition. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, podcasts, on and on. Continue reading
If you have 45 minutes and you’d like to know what’s happening in the worldwide technological revolution, I recommend “Sleeping Through A Revolution,” a lecture by Jon Taplin of the Annenberg Innovation Lab. Watch and listen to the lecture here.
The Internet economy is destroying jobs. Taplin cites the ruins of the music, newspaper, book, film, and television industries. The Internet economy has transferred a wealth of income from the “creative class” (the makers of content) to monopolistic Internet platforms, such as Google and Facebook, Taplin says. And Amazon.
But wait! Musicians, editors, printers, authors and workers in the TV and film industries are not the only losers in this Brave New World of technology monopoly. Taplin predicts:
“The technological revolution is about to come for everybody else’s job too.”
Do you doubt it? The number of robots in the world is doubling every 30 months, Taplin reports. The lecture covers a lot of ground. Past, present, future. I’m not going to report the whole lecture. I urge you to watch it for yourself. I plan to listen to the lecture at least one more time.
— John Hayden
“In the United States, the average person under the age of twenty-one now spends almost as much time playing online games as they spend in classrooms from the sixth through twelfth grades. And it’s not just young people: the average online social games player is a woman in her mid-forties”
— Al Gore in his new book, “The Future”
Living Simply And Still On The Grid 