Yup, the information superhighway is 20 years old and humming along just fine TYVM

Wired Declares The Web Is Dead—Don’t Pull Out The Coffin Just Yet was a Tech Crunch article recently about Wired’s RIP proclamation.

So…wow, wasn’t this a great title for an article … just sucked you into the read. The fancy color picture of course just helped. HOOK…LINE…and SINKER. Just in case you missed it, here’s the wow picture.

Really catching. But like with any graphic or worse, powerpoint presentation, it is what lies behind all that glitter. As pointed out by a friend, this is just the US for starters so it was a bit hyperbole by Chris Anderson, Wired’s Editor. On top of that, Nick Bilton in the BITS Blog New York Times, challenges some of the reading of the data.

In short, the old categories are likely not that useful and there’s a lot of convergence of Web traffic. If anything we know that the amount of data traveling over the “information superhighway”, to borrow an old term, has exploded beyond belief – Boing Boing notes:

“Between 1995 and 2006, the total amount of Web traffic went from about 10 terabytes a month to 1,000,000 terabytes.”

How much information is that? If we use the 20Terabyte for the US library of Congress as a benchmark…It just boggles the mind. I can’t compute really. Just for fun, check out Lesk’s “How Much Information is There in the World“.

I think that in many ways, this illustrates how data has become more and more part of the human experience, the human pysche. We might end up being Borg-like in our interconnectedness. Take a look at this description of the Borg. In particular where we might be headed:

Born humanoid, they are almost immediately implanted with bio-chips that link their brains to a collective consciousness via a unique subspace frequency emitted by each drone.

Right now, we got so many “data ports” that our brains can’t keep up with the multi-tasking required in today’s society. We need to “unplug” as they say and recently scientists were looking into this: “YOUR BRAIN ON COMPUTERS: Outdoors and Out of Reach, Studying the Brain“. Look at the NYT Unplugged Challenge about this whole phenomena.

Very “Borg-like-esque” to me. Yes? No? May be so?

Maybe we do need a “coffin” but we just don’t know it yet.

Addendum: Now Playing: Night of the Living Tech in the Aug 21 NYT Week in Review discussing “the proliferation of digital media forms and fast-shifting patterns of consumption”.

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