Gustible - under the rubric of [$_SELF]

The promise of the “new media” seems unfulfilled. Here we are, in the future, and the realisation of high-tech’s potential hardly lives up to my expectations – where are the flying wings, where are the holidays on the Moon ? Our flagship innovations are tools for the marketeers. The web has become a channel for targeting advertising directly at me. Technology seems to function as infrastructure for creating sales channels. Is this really as good as it gets ?

There is a common belief that new web technology often finds it proving grounds in the pornographic industry. I am inclined to attach some value to this belief – porn sites attract very high volumes of traffic, and typically place high demands on content delivery, in the sense that high quality (technically high quality, that is) images and high performance video streaming are what differentiates sites – the content is pretty standard, after all.  Because of the mixture of high traffic, demand for high quality, yet without a concomitant pressure to maintain a social reputation (compared for example to the New York Times or BBC), it is possible to use these sites as a laboratory for exploring the application of new technology.

The technology that is proven to be successful in the darker underbelly of the web, eventually finds it way into the common web. I believe this to be the case for techniques hackers use as well – the attempt to solve CAPTCHA is delivering an impetus to both hackers and “legitimate” computer scientists to find better OCR (optical character recognition) algorithms, and to utilise human cognition in parallel with computer processing.

So I want to extend the analogy somewhat – the technology that the marketeers are exploiting to aim advertisements at you and me, are also leading (have also led) to a great many innovations that are of direct and real benefit to each and every technology (read web) user out there. It is simple to find examples: Google being the most obvious one. Yes – possibly they are doing evil, but I am not sure that the evil is as great as we suppose – the technology that underpins their ability to deliver the search results you ask for, is very strongly related to the technology that makes the ads appear on your page.

There seems to be a progression in the manner in which technology reaches the masses. Innovation (the hard work done by the technologists), exploitation (spammers, hackers and their kin), adaptation and commoditisation – this latter stage is where the technology starts to benefit us, and may actually improve our lives.

So no – this is not as good as it gets – it gets better. Technology is often exploited and shaped to add a business model to the tech, but ultimately this is just a small price to pay for maturing the technology until it can add general value to all users.