Time -and Effort- is TikTok

FOMO… omniknowledge…call it what you like.

But do we really need to know everything?

Of course, if you- like me — are posting on Medium, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, ARXIV and so on- you are doing your best to create a demand for your thoughts, opinions, research and -occasionally slightly original- ideas. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn’t.

And while back in 2008 David Crystal wrote that:

“If I had a pound for every time, I have heard of someone predicting a language disaster because of a new technological development, I should be a very rich man. My bank balance would have started to grow with the arrival in the Middle Ages of printing, thought by many to be the invention of the devil because it would put all kinds of false opinions into people’s minds. It would have increase with the arrival of the telegraph, telephone, and broadcasting, each of which generated short-lived fears that the fabric of society was under threat”

We can see that all these technologies create winners and losers.

The winners in the case of printing were the publishers and the authors who threatened -and replaced- the losers- the priests and wise men- and women- who formerly had been the only ‘source’ of canonical knowledge. And- no disrespect to David Crystal- these changes have taken place over only half a millennia, And expanded exponentially over the last half century.

And whilst I literally could not care less about TikTok, Messenger, Wechat, Whatsapp, Pipt and all the wannabe and actual rulers of web communications and ‘new’ social media platforms, I am -selfishly-concerned about my wellbeing.

But the explosive increase in data creation by any -and every- individual with a smartphone or other ‘Net access device supporting the growth of social media platforms means that we are drowning in posts and messages.

New platforms and new data products seem to seed, blossom and die with frightening regularity. But each of these new access modes arrives at a cost — in time, effort, attention, reliance, and so on. Not to mention the cost of errors within the data.

And, okay, free speech and all that.

But what is the real cost of contradictory, trivial, repetitive data floods that basically reinforce the slowly growing idea that the web is no longer worth paying attention to?

So, who are going to be the winners and losers in the largest boom in human communications in the whole of human history?

Or will we all be losers if demographics plus advertising is the only revenue model we have?