Chapter 13 The third part of digital survival 1. I am me in the post-information age

For so long, everyone has been so enthusiastic about discussing the transition from the industrial age to the post-industrial age or the information age that we have not noticed that we have entered the post-information age. The industrial age can be said to be the age of the atom, which brought us the concept of mechanized mass production and the economic form of repeated production in a unified and standardized way at any given time and place.The information age, that is, the computer age, exhibits the same economies of scale, but with less time and space relative to the economy.People can make bits whenever and wherever, for example, we can transfer bits between the stock markets in New York, London and Tokyo as if they were three machine tools close at hand.

In the information age, the coverage of mass media has become larger and larger on the one hand, and smaller and smaller on the other hand. New forms of communication media such as CNN and USA Today have a wider audience and readers, and the radiating surface of their communication has become wider.Magazines targeted at specific readerships, videotape sales, and cable TV services are examples of narrowcasting, catering to the tastes of specific, smaller segments of the population.So mass media became both big and small during this time. In the post-information age, the audience of mass communication is often just a single person.Everything can be ordered and information becomes extremely personal.It is generally accepted that personalization is an extension of narrowcasting, from the general public to smaller and smaller groups, and finally to the individual.When the media has my address, marital status, age, income, make of car I drive, shopping habits, drinking habits, and tax status, it also has "me"—a unit of demographics.

This reasoning completely ignores the difference between narrowcasting and digitization.In the case of digital existence, I am "me", not a "subset" of a demographic. "I" includes information and events that are demographically or statistically meaningless.You can't find correlations or statistical correlations between where my mother-in-law lives, who I had dinner with last night, and what time I'm leaving for Richmond, Virginia, this afternoon. significance, and develop appropriate narrowcast services from it. However, the information about me determines that the news service I want may be related to some unknown town or some unknown person, and I also want to know what the weather in Virginia is like (today).Classical demography does not focus on the digital individual. If you look at the post-information age as ultra-microdemography or highly centralized narrowcasting, then this personalization and the "Burger King" advertising slogan advertised "HaveltYourWay" is no different.

The era of true personalization has arrived.This time we are not just talking about the simple choice of hamburger condiments. In the post-information age, machines and people are just like people getting acquainted with each other over the years: the degree of machine understanding of people is the same as the relationship between people. The tacit understanding is equal, and it can even understand some of your eccentricities (such as always wearing a blue striped shirt) and the accidents of life. For example, your computer could alert you to a sale on a certain wine or beer, based on information from a hotel agent, that your friends who are visiting tomorrow night liked that drink the last time they were here .The computer will also remind you that when you go out, stop by the garage, because the car's signal system indicates that it is time to change the tires.

The computer also clips a review for you about a new restaurant because you're going to the city in 10 days and you seem to agree with the food critic who wrote the story in the past.The basis for all these actions of the computer is to treat you as an "individual" and not as part of a group of people who might buy a certain brand of body wash or toothpaste.Where there is no space The post-information age will remove the limits of geography, just as "hypertext" has freed itself from the limits of printed space.Digital life will be less and less dependent on a specific time and place, and now it is even possible to transmit "places".

If I can see the Alps (A1ps), hear cow bells, and smell (digital) summer cow dung from the electronic window (computer screen) of my Boston living room, then in some way In a sense I was almost in Switzerland already.If instead of driving atoms (the cars that make it up) into the city to work, I go directly from home to the computer in the office and work electronically, where exactly is my office?In the future, doctors in Houston (Houston) will be able to perform delicate operations on patients in Alaska (Alaska) through the technology of telecommunications and virtual reality.Although in the near future, brain surgery still requires doctors and patients to be in the same place at the same time; however, many activities of brain workers will be able to transcend geographical restrictions more quickly due to less time-space attachment.

Today, many writers and financial experts find it both feasible and attractive to travel to a small island in the South Pacific or the Caribbean to write or manage their money.However, some countries, like Japan, have taken longer to wean themselves off their dependence on time and space because the local culture resists the trend.For example, one of the main reasons why Japan refuses to implement daylight saving time is that the office workers there must go home after "dark", and ordinary staff have to come to work earlier than the boss when they leave The boss is leaving late. In the post-information age, since work and life can be in one or more locations, the concept of "address" has a new meaning.

When you opened an account with AOL, Computer Services, or Miracle, you knew what your email address was, but not where it was actually located.If you have AOL service, your Internet address is your identifier (in) plus knowing exactly where you are right now.The address is less like a street coordinate and more like a social security number.It is a virtual address. In my case, I happen to know my e-mail address. I have a 10-year-old HP Unix machine in a small room not far from my office.But when people send me messages, they write to me and not to that room.They might assume I'm in Boston (which usually isn't the case).In fact, I am often not in the same time zone as them, so not only the space changes, but also the time.Asynchronous communication A face-to-face conversation or a conversation between two people on the phone is real-time synchronous communication.We do "phone hide and seek"

(telephonetag) game is also about finding opportunities for simultaneous communication.The irony is that we often do this to exchange opinions with each other, but in fact the exchange of opinions does not need to be synchronized at all, and the effect of non-real-time information transmission is no less effective.Historically, asynchronous forms of communication, such as letter writing, tended to take on a more formal form that could not be improvised.However, with the advent of voice mail (v-oicemail) and answering machines, things have changed dramatically. Some claim that they simply cannot imagine that they (and all of us) used to have an answering machine in their home.What was life like when there was no voicemail in the office either.The benefit of answering machines and voice mail lies not in the recording, but in the time-shifting of offline message processing.You can leave a message instead of having to have an online conversation.In fact, the design of the answering machine is a bit outdated. It should not only function when you are not at home or when you don't want to answer the call, but should be able to answer the call at any time, so that the caller can choose to stay. Oral messages without having to speak directly.

One of the reasons e-mail has such a huge appeal is that it's less intrusive than a phone call.You can handle e-mail at your leisure, so you may now be handling information yourself that would never have passed a secretary in a phone-based company. Electronic mail has never been more popular because it is both asynchronous and understandable to computers.The latter is especially important because interface agents can use these bits to prioritize messages and send them differently.Who sent the messages and what they said will determine the order in which you see them, just like a secretary at a company who screens your phone messages will let your 6-year-old daughter call you directly, and someone The CEO of the company is waiting on the phone line.Even when you're busy at work, personal emails can still be high on the list of pending emails.

Much of our day-to-day communication does not need to happen synchronously or in real time.We are constantly interrupted, or forced to be on time for things that are not really that urgent.We follow a regular rhythm of life, not because we always finish dinner at 8:59, but because the TV show is just another : minute away.In the future, our great-grandchildren will understand why we go to the theater to enjoy the collective performance of actors at a certain time, but they will not understand our experience of watching the TV signal at the same time in our own homes, unless they can see through this. The quirky economic model behind the experience.A World of On-Demand Information In our digitalized life, real-time broadcasts will become rare.When television and radio also go digital, not only can we easily shift the timing of bits, but we no longer need to receive bits in the order and rate at which we consume them. For example, we can use optical fiber to transmit 1 hour of video signals in less than 1 second (some experiments have shown that it may only take 1% of a second to transmit 1 hour of vHS-quality video signals).Put another way, if we used thin wires or narrowband radios, it might take us six hours to transmit a 10-minute personalized news program.The former fires bits into your computer in one swoop, the latter a trickle. With perhaps a few exceptions such as sports games and elections, the direction of technology development is that the future of television and radio signals will be transmitted asynchronously, either on demand or by "wide capture". "Wide Catch" The term was coined in 1987 by Stewart Brand in his book on media labs. "Wide capture" refers to the distribution of bitstreams.Usually, a string of bits carrying a huge amount of information is broadcast into the air or sent into an optical fiber.The computer on the receiving end captures the bits, examines them, and discards most of them except the few that it thinks you might need later. The digital life in the future will be dominated by "information on demand".When we need information, we can ask for it directly, or suggest it implicitly; so advertising-supported television production requires a whole new kind of thinking. When we started the Media Lab at MIT in 1983, people felt that "media" was a derogatory term, a one-way street leading to the lowest levels of American mass culture.If the word media is capitalized, it is almost synonymous with mass media.Having a large audience will bring in a large amount of advertising revenue, which will be used to pay for the huge program production costs.The over-the-air broadcast television medium further establishes the legitimacy of advertising, because the spectrum is a public property, and information and entertainment should be "free" for viewers to enjoy.Say goodbye to advertising Magazines, on the other hand, use private distribution networks where the cost is shared between advertisers and readers.As a decidedly asynchronous delivery medium, magazines offer a much wider range of economic and demographic patterns, and may in fact play a leading role in the future of television.Prospering in a market with a narrow readership doesn't necessarily hurt content, and magazines pass some of the cost burden on to readers.Some specialty magazines have no ads at all. In the future, digital media will more often adopt the billing method, rather than just building on everything. On a nothing-or-nothing basis, it would be more like newspapers and magazines, with consumers and advertisers sharing the cost. In some cases, consumers can choose to receive advertising-free material, at a premium.In other cases, advertising has become so personal that we can hardly tell what is news from what is advertising. At this time, we can say that advertising is news. Today, the economic model of the media is almost all about "pushing" information and entertainment to the public, but tomorrow's media will focus on "pull" as much or more. Like a library or video rental place, find the material we want.We can make the request directly, or have an interface agent make it for us. This ad-free on-demand model will make the production of programming content like a Hollywood movie with rich sound and picture effects, with greater risks and richer rewards, often with ups and downs.If you are successful, the money will roll in.If the money comes in, great;So tomorrow's media companies will bet bigger than today, while smaller companies will bet smaller, taking a share of the audience. The primetime of the future will no longer be dominated by representing a demographic group of potential luxury car or washing machine buyers.Whether it is prime time or not depends entirely on the quality of what we see.