The Future Of Entertainment Is In The Past

With the advent of instant digitization products like the Zoom H2 and the Flip Mino, it continues to become apparent that the lifestream of humanity is transitioning to an accessible format...

As we see YouTube videos of the show last night - and the Cab Calloway show in the 40s, the whole of human endeavor is almost instantly accessible by anyone with the appropriate technology. This sum total of available content continues to expand with the dual drivers of the just passed moment (last night's show) and the ongoing digitization of everyday assets (photographs to Flikr, video to YouTube).

The nature of this content swings from the highly personal (family photos) to the obscure but amazing (multi-track versions of Bohemian Rhapsody). The time used to transduce these assets (from analog to digital) is only spent once per asset, but the asset is thereafter generally available.

At the dawn of the current information age, to touch the net was similar to using a ten foot pole - I remember my excitement in 1989 when I could within a couple of minutes log on to a server in Europe, then a server in Japan. This was big news... With the advent of faster modems and the evolving world wide web, the experience transformed into something closer to Braille - you could feel it but not see it. DSL and the continuing WWW evolution brought the fragmentarily digitized world even closer to the senses - with the world apparently getting even smaller.

Now, having Web 2.0 and cloud computing collide with the science of social networking, we come to a state of being close to a global consciousness. At our fingertips we can "recall" a large number of "thoughts" and "memories" (blogs, photos and videos). Each individual is an intelligent agent, determining by their preferences and the input from others what outputs to generate, in near neuronal synchronization... I read recently that Twitter is a form of telepathy - the instant knowledge of the general state of another at a distance. This is a sensorium that is now a step beyond the mundane, and may lead to a richer decision space to work in.

The most important decision to make is the next one. This is (hopefully) consciously determined by following the process of 1. Accepting Reality, 2. Choosing Independence and 3. Taking Action.

With a greater number of inputs (if we can mentally evolve beyond the total distraction factor) we have the potential to make better decisions. We stand at the forefront of an increasing wave of recorded human activity which is becoming increasingly accessible to more and more people...

Many of us strive to gain a closer connectedness with those in our lives. The advent of Facebook and other online applications provide clear avenues for that. This, to me, is the definition of entertainment - and it is unfolding behind us with high availability...