Emergence of the New Web or Web 3.0 | Jimboland Jots

Given the bare-bones text-based services and slow data transfers of 25 years ago, the comparison with today’s emergent social web is an interesting one. Originally, BBS and internet services offered text and minimal graphics exchanges by email. Companies later offered instant messaging or IM services, with text messaging via mobile cellular services. Real world social events were organized with these services and group chat rooms served as technological precursors for social websites.

We are experiencing the rapid opening up and interconnecting of social web services, communities, and applications: the fill-in-the-blank Connect phenomenon. Emergence is bringing open source higher education, shared peer sciences, and the knowledge that we are challenged in how we interface and use the vast amounts of data available to more humans than ever. We are stretching our understanding of how learning proceeds and in figuring out how to track and manage large amounts of information, data, and contacts. The creative potential apparent in simultaneously providing the multimedia recording, editing, and publishing capabilities to literally hundreds of millions of educated people is evident and not yet fully appreciated. Also known as the “semantic web”, this web deals with the meaning of objects,  connectedness, and personalization.

THOUGHT VALUE and THOUGHT STREAMS

Writing and creative thinking are mighty friends. Although they can be solitary endeavors, it is the sharing of ideas and dialogue that consistently produces better inquiry and outcomes. Syndicated columnists, bloggers, and microbloggers generate thought content for others to share, to ponder, to consider, to incorporate and use. In such, they make their creations of value and valuable.

For instance, it was blogging chatter about Twitter that brought it to prominence, as well as countless early adopters. Twitter is now moving rapidly beyond stream of consciousness chatter into novel applications for researching, socializing, and connecting. In this way, small strategies like hashtags or terms with a hash mark in front of them – # – enable extensive searches across the blogosphere and social web services and communities. The web produces rich thought streams that fuel inquiry, creative, and synthesis. So, tweeters learn to identify and use hashtags to either discover or promote a topic or interest, which has spawned up to 200 and more applications that use the Twitter API in an interconnected way.

Jimboland Jots on Twitter

Therefore, to make content matter, primary consideration must be given to its envisioned value to the recipients or participants in the creative content or tech.

TOUCH, TELEPRESENCE, and SOCIAL CONNECTEDNESS

Interfacing with our data with a small pointing device manipulated by one’s dominant hand has been passe for a very long time. Using a keyboard for alphanumeric data entry has similarly been outmoded and is a highly restrictive form of intelligent interfacing with hardware, software, and data. Data manipulation with standard input devices is quite limited and fails to exploit the expansive spectrum of human manual dexterity. However, the human propensity for touch is rising in appreciation as touchscreen technologies are beginning to transform our user interface experience. Smartphones with touchscreen tech have led the way to touchscreen network devices and computers. Touchscreen tech has been used in a limited fashion at movie and airline ticketing kiosks. Touch tech is emerging that will permit multi-touch capabilities and creative possibilities. The keyboard, trackball, and mouse will earn their well-earned retirement, finally, in a short time.

Distance telesurgeries are being performed with telemetry and robotic assistance. Video conferencing services are common in workplaces. Given that countries are building broadband infrastructures and the rapid deployment of higher speed data transfers, video telephony is replacing audio telephony services.

As well, people are buying, reading, talking, collaborating, and playing massive role-playing games online, supporting a planetary social sphere previously unseen in human development. Along with SEO: search engine optimization, we now have SMO: social media optimization. Check out this rapidly emerging innovation at Ecoconsultancy.

What will our computer experiences be like when our multimedia role playing games involve sensors and receptors that transmit the touch, sound, and dynamic images of another person from across the planet?

Star Trek's Universal Translator

UNIVERSAL TRANSLATION

Google Translator and Babelfish are moderately useful language translation services, but lacking. Real-time translation services would diminish fallacious assumptions about other cultures, leading to constructive and cooperative dialogue and diminished conflicts. Imagine what the global response to climate change would now be if we could actually talk with and understand each other better? Although these technologies are in their late early development, they will likely rapidly emerge and integrate with emergent robotic hardware, opening up great potential for human communication and culture.

DISCOVERY and EVOLUTION

Given the confluence of emergent technologies, the enhanced dialogue they generate, and the global adoption of universal high-speed data services, we are experiencing an amazing explosion of art, learning, science, and creativity. Can we choose to use this emergent tech to improve the quality of life for all beings on this planet, discover new ways to cope with climate change, perhaps even cure HIV/AIDS or cancer? 

The power of tech is in our hands. May we choose to use it to help, to heal, to enlighten, and to create.

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