Category Archives: Future

The perils of technology

May 28, 2015 6:48 AM , Leave a Comment ,

I was at a convention recently and the organizers had come out with a downloadable application (app) for people to use in lieu of paper programs.  For the most part the app was a huge success.  The organizers were able to update the information as events required and people got to where they wanted to be.

One slight hitch was that a couple of panels at the convention kept getting switched from room to room or were postponed.  So people had to keep an eye on those panels and some people wound up going to the wrong rooms at the wrong time either cause their app had not updated or they were relying on old information.

A fairly benign glitch to be sure but then again some technological glitches can be more serious.  In other news a car, supposed to be able to avoid collisions, hit several reporters that were there to witness the unveiling.  The car maker claimed that the car was not fitted with pedestrian detection capabilities.  Even though a human was at the wheel he did not brake for the pedestrians because the car did not detect them.

Something fundamentally disturbing about that.  A human operator relying more on the car sensors than his own eyes and not braking.  But I think this is indicative of a trend that I see more and more around me.  People seem to have this innate trust in technology.

We tend to see something new and assume that it is intrinsically good or perfect.  Technology is neither good nor bad, it just is.  What we do with it once it is in our hands gives it context.  Maybe it’s just middle-aged me talking and maybe my parents felt the same way about “new” technologies when I was young.  Maybe it’s been the same story since the beginning of time but I don’t think so.

I think the trend has accelerated in the last ten years.  People, particularly younger people, tend to rely more and more on their technology and less and less on their own judgment and wits.  Hopefully the trend is an aberration and can be reversed.

I would hate to see the day come when we believe more in machines than we do in mankind.

Posted in: activities, computers, future, internet, technology

Living within our means

April 30, 2015 7:04 AM , Leave a Comment ,

I’ve been doing a lot with my personal finances in the last few months.  Included in this was the purchase of a new car.  Something that I undeniably need living in Houston but yet some would argue I could have gotten something more pedestrian, less flashy, and more modest.  Some have asked if it is something that I can afford.

To which the answer is yes.  This was something that I’ve been thinking about for over a year and the numbers do make sense.  Now, I could have gotten something more modest, true but the cost difference really wasn’t going to be that great and I do feel that I got quite a bit for my money.  So I still feel that this was a good bargain for me.

Nevertheless these are valid concerns.  In my lifetime I’ve seen how quickly people can get in trouble with easy credit and overspending.  When I was in school the message boards were crammed with credit card applications for students to fill out and even though most students either didn’t work or worked part-time jobs they got ridiculously high credit lines.  Of course within a month or two these kids got into some real financial problems that took years to clear up.

But that’s just symptomatic of our culture or even our civilization as a whole.  We like to push the limits to the extreme and even break the limits till we get into trouble with not just money but resources, living space, and population size.

Take California for example.  The golden state with promises of endless farmlands carved out of the desert, green suburbs without end, and abundant, cheap water hauled from hundreds of miles away. What happens when the waters fail to come year after year?  The answer is the tragedy that’s slowly unfolding right now and affects not just millions of Californians but millions of people across the country and the world that depend on the produce grown there.

What will happen to that population?  They won’t just dry up and blow away.  We’ll soon see them in our neighborhoods looking for work and sharing our resources.  Problems that might have been sidestepped if we had not insisted on trying to squeeze every last resource out of a desert that wasn’t ready to take so many people in the first place.

California will heal but it will take a long time.  My question is when it heals and the rain cycle is restored will we go back and make the same mistakes again or will we learn and not try to live past the capacity of the land?

Posted in: consumerism, current events, economy, energy, environment, future, life in general, technology, thought, weather

the convergent world

October 22, 2014 6:25 AM , Leave a Comment ,

I wrote earlier in the year about the reasons why I wasn’t going forward with Google Glass.  Most of those reasons still apply but this week we took a major step forward.  The next level in mobile connectivity speed has been reached.  Trials for a 5G network.  This may one day remove one of the major stumbling blocks to ubiquitous mobile communication.

Devices will be created to take advantage of this and to keep up, most carriers will have to have higher data transmission rates.

Yet even with this major milestone I am still hesitant about devices such as Google Glass.  Privacy issues aside, and believe me that’s not a small thing, I still see Google Glass as a somewhat clunky and perhaps even a dead-end technology.

I believe that ultimately the technology will reach the point of not projecting something over a small screen but directly manipulating a user’s brain waves to augment reality.  Nanotechnology would be introduced into the body and would manipulate the signals from the optic nerve to the brain to introduce “artifacts” into the field of vision.  Basically you would gain the benefits of something like Google Glass but it would exist only in your imagination.

Besides the nanotechnology that would be injected into you or perhaps swallowed in a pill you would have some sort of transmitter/receiver implanted under the skin to handle all the internet traffic.  Such devices do already exist and some have had the operation to have similar devices implanted already.

The nanotechnology could even go further and introduce sensors all around the body to monitor vital functions like heart beat, muscle tone, digestion, even blood chemistry.

Some of the first results in memory manipulation and memory decoding are being done at this moment and it may be possible to manipulate, record, or erase memories like a hard drive.

Now, is this a positive or a negative development?  Like anything made or dreamed up by a human it has potential for both.  We already bristle at the abuse of our privacy online.  Inviting the technology inside of us may lead to even greater abuses.  People releasing our medical records, our location, our thoughts is a seriously scary thing.

Once again the technology is outpacing the ethics.  Really the only one that has even obliquely tackled this idea is William Gibson.  We have some ideas but we don’t have much time.  Technology keeps moving forward.  Should we?

Posted in: future, speculation, technology

The mobile revolution

September 6, 2014 6:42 AM , Leave a Comment ,

We’re getting there. This time it’s not just some wishful thinking or cheerleading on my part. The days that we were bound to a desktop or even a laptop to be productive are coming to an end.

But what will take their place then?  Difficult to say really. If one were to be taking bets back in the late 70s as to what the workplace of the 2010s would look like I would hazard to guess that no one would assume that the office typing pool would have disappeared or that the vast rooms filled with filing cabinets would give way to mainframes that would store magnitudes more data than they ever could. We were simply not ready to imagine this back then.

Will we ever be free of the physical office space?  I rather doubt it. Humans have a need for personal contact that no computer camera or office meeting software can provide.

Certainly the software and hardware aspects will become moot points in the discussion within the next 5 to 10 years. I am in fact typing this out on my smartphone and although it is a bit awkward, the auto-correct works well and the hardware can handle most of the productivity software on the market.  I could, in a pinch, work like this for an extended period of time.  Wouldn’t be the most comfortable thing, but it could be done.

I imagine with speech recognition and advanced touchscreen controls that we could make the experience less cumbersome and much more user friendly.

No, I think that the main argument will center round how can we leverage the producers of content and product. Does increasing a person’s personal comfort equate to higher returns or do producers need to have an overseer or peers to boost their performance.

Will we one day return to the old office model just from a need to bond with others? Who can say for certain.

 

 

 

 

 

Posted in: business, future, speculation

the dream diminished

April 25, 2014 6:36 AM , 3 Comments ,

I was digging through my linen closet the other day, sorting out useful and useless stuff.  In the back of the closet I found some old bath towels that I had not seen in ages.  They were plush and fluffy terry cloth towels and though a little threadbare they were still useful.

My parents had bought these for me way back when I got my first college apartment.  I think they bought them at a Target or Sears or some such place.  What struck me as odd is how good they were.  I mean back in the early 90s when they bought them they were low to middle class bath towels, nothing special.  I compared them to some designer towels from a high-end department store that I bought a couple of years ago and there was no comparison.  These old towels put the new ones to shame.

What was going on?  I looked on the tags and found part of the answer.  The old towels were 100% terry cloth cotton.  The new ones were 40% rayon.

But it’s not just a case of towels.  The more I thought about it over the next few days, the more I realized that the quality of various things had decreased.  The new things were still adequate, still useful, but the quality of the materials, the design, the craftsmanship had deteriorated.  Over the long haul we have grown slowly accustomed to accepting less and expecting less.

Another unrelated event.  A new apartment building went up in flames during construction recently.  On a local radio station a fire fighter commented that older buildings usually took between 30 and 40 minutes to be fully engulfed in flames due the materials and building standards used, while new buildings could go up in about 5 minutes.

I wonder how an archaeologist from a thousand years in the future might view these facts.  Would she look at artifacts from the 1950s and compare them to the 2000s and conclude that she had found the dividing line between the rise and fall of our civilization?

It’s not just physical artifacts that have deteriorated over time but services as well.  I vaguely remember my first ride on an airplane back in the 70s.  I think we were going to see my grandparents in North Carolina and I recall that the airport was a giant open and well-lit mall-like area.  The passengers were well dressed and we had no security to worry about in those days.  The plane seemed huge and the seats were over sized and plush.  The flight crew was happy and eager to help.  If I had to summarize the experience in one word it would be luxurious.

These days the airports are crowded, dingy, moodily lit bus stations.  The passengers dress any which way they want, they are forced into lines to wait and be searched like common criminals and are then forced into tiny hard plastic and metal seats in the plane.  The flight crews are overworked and surly and I would summarize the experience as dilapidated.

What has improved (arguably) is the entertainment available to the populace.  The quantity of distractions accessible to the average citizen has skyrocketed not only in the amount but in the variety available.  Anyone, regardless of income can now purchase music players, video players, game consoles, or portable computers and access entertainment choices ranging from sports, to music, to shows and movies, to games that will serve to distract them at home or even on the subway ride home.

For those that can look past the entertainments there is an avalanche of information inundating the senses.  Pundits sort through it all and tell us what to make of it and blame “the other side” for our problems.

Have we become so satiated and numbed by pop culture and media that we don’t notice the concrete decline in our living standards or am I being overly harsh and critical about the way that the world works these days?

Have I finally succumbed to the “old man’s disease” of comparing things to the good old days?

Posted in: consumerism, culture, future, life in general, thought

changing the world

April 1, 2014 6:52 AM , Leave a Comment ,

Literally.

Back in school, engineering students would sometimes gather late at night and discuss their pet projects.  Pipe dreams, flights of fancy, or just whimsical notions.  Aerospace engineers dream of new planes, mechanical engineers of new contraptions and civil engineers of reshaping the land.  Most of these projects never come to anything.  We outgrow these ideas and turn to more practical matters.

But sometimes, some engineers keep these dreams going and sometimes these dreams are picked up by artists and writers and get expanded upon.  The prime example of this was Atlantropa, a plan to stretch a hydroelectric dam across the straits of Gibraltar.  Blocking off the Atlantic would lower the Mediterranean sea.  Thousands of square miles of new land would be ‘created’ along the coastlines.  A massive lake would spring into existence in the middle of the Sahara desert by diverting a couple of rivers and a new prosperous land would appear in north Africa.  This plan persisted from the twenties till well into the fifties.  Even though today it is the considered opinion that this would have been a huge environmental disaster if it had been implemented, the idea of changing the world in such a literal and drastic way is popular among some writers and engineers.

I also considered several of these type of projects but my speculation turned more towards space and specifically to terraforming, the deliberate use of engineering and science to turn a planet into something resembling earth.  One night in a study carrel some friends and  I hatched a mad idea that I would later expand upon on my own.

Professional engineers and scientists have seriously pondered terraforming, making computations and proposing solutions.  Mars has been judged as having the best chance of being terraformed.  Mars has the most conditions that are judged as favorable for becoming a second home to humanity.  Venus is another contender but has more grave problems.

The problem with most terraforming scenarios is that they don’t work on human time scales.  The most ambitious of these plans nudges and lightly prods at Mars and produces marginal results in about 100,000 years.  Future humans could expect to walk on the surface of Mars without respirators and wearing full parkas in the freezing and dim perpetual twilight of a distant midday sun.   Most of their lives would be spent in underground tunnels and future Martian generations could never return to Earth due to the difference in gravity.

Could you imagine all of humanity fixed on a single goal for a hundred thousand years with such a dubious prize at the end?  Me neither.

A more radical, some might say dangerous or even mad approach is required.

Cataclysm Induced terraforming.  Using what would normally be considered mega scale disasters to induce carefully regulated changes and alter the environment to suit humanity’s needs.

First we define the problems.

Mars is:

  • cold
  • has virtually no atmosphere
  • has no magnetic field
  • has a limited amount of water

on the other hand Venus is:

  • hot
  • has a literally crushing and toxic atmosphere
  • has no magnetic field

In general terms these neighbors of ours fall into the edges of the “Goldilocks zone”  The distance away from the sun that can sustain life as we know it.  Most of their problems stem from their general position with relation to the Sun.

Mars, at the cold end of the zone, lost its internal heat and the geothermal power to help keep it warm.  Possibly this also ended its magnetic field.  Without this magnetic protection solar winds then ravaged the atmosphere and surface and have been slowly ripping bits of atmosphere away for millions of years.

Venus, at the hot end of the zone, saw its liquid water evaporate into the atmosphere and mix with airborne sulfur to create dense and impenetrable clouds of sulfuric acid in its upper atmosphere.

At first blush it would seem that the solution would be to swap these planet’s positions.  But that would not work.  Mars would become a blasted hot rock like Mercury and Venus would slowly grow cold and resemble some of the Jovian moons.

Rather both planets need to come closer to Earth’s orbit.  Mars a little closer in than Earth is and Venus a little farther out than its current position.  In essence we would become the fourth planet out from the Sun.

Planetary orbits are fairly easy to calculate.  Mostly they involve the planet’s mass, speed, and the Sun’s pull upon these bodies.  Altering these orbits would involve the use of some errant mass (such as a large asteroid or comet) or a massive thermonuclear device applied in the correct location and time.

Altering the path of a large comet to strike Mars would also have the benefit of introducing water and organic materials into the planet.  Altering a comet’s path isn’t as hard as it sounds.  Satellites have already orbited asteroids and comets and have even landed on an asteroid.  Guiding a satellite with a small nuclear charge to the proximity of a comet and then detonating it would serve to alter its path.

Venus has some bigger problems.  The atmosphere has to be thinned out.  Moving the planet back from its current position will help solve some of that.  With less energy entering the system some of the particles in the atmosphere will begin to settle over time.

We could speed the process up by constructing giant tanker ships to siphon the upper atmosphere sulfuric acid clouds and then transport them to Mars.  Once there the tankers would be deliberately crashed onto Mars.  The resultant combination of the iron oxide on the planet surface with the sulfuric acid would yield Iron Sulfate salt and water and of course the crash would inject massive amounts of energy into the atmosphere helping to warm the planet and release sub-surface water and carbon dioxide locked in the planet’s soil.

As conditions improve on both planets we could introduce living agents to speed up the terraforming process.  Extremophiles are microorganisms that thrive in extreme environments.  They have been found living underground at great depth and pressure, in acidic pools near volcanic vents, in Antarctica enduring extreme cold, at high elevations in the atmosphere and even in nuclear reactors.

Mars would benefit from blue-green algae (actually a bacteria) that thrives in cold areas and only needs water and carbon dioxide to grow.  This would begin changing the atmosphere to Oxygen.  Oxygen itself is a very transformative element (see the great oxygenation event in Earth’s history).

Venus would benefit from bacteria that dine on sulfur compounds and re-release them as solid waste.  This would help thin the atmosphere more and set the stage for future waves of microorganisms to step in.

The most serious problem that these planets share is the lack of a magnetic field.  Cosmic radiation is a deadly killer and our magnetic field has shielded us from this.

One suggestion for Venus is that if the planet’s slow rotation could be sped up then a magnetic field could be induced.  This would be done by guiding large asteroids into close orbit.  The “drag” from these would pull on the planet and make the rotation speed up.

For Mars the solution would be more direct.   Mars lost its magnetic field when its internal heat diminished and all geothermal power failed.  This would have to be restarted by direct intervention.  Deep drilling projects are already feasible and advanced planning could come up with a design for a deep drilling self piloted vehicle that would make its way to the planet’s core to deposit and explode a large nuclear charge deep inside the planet to re-liquify the core.  This would also provide the planet with radioactive materials for its core to continue the geothermal process.  This would have the side benefit of emptying out all our nuclear arsenals and help dispose of nuclear waste materials on Earth.

Now does this sound like the craziest thing you’ve ever heard?  Well consider the Dyson sphere.  A plan by a British physicist to create an impossibly gigantic metal sphere around the Sun and basically live on the inside of the sphere.  Or plans to “ignite” Jupiter and create a second Sun in our solar system with the purpose of turning all of Jupiter’s moons into livable planets.

If we sit down and consider the fact that the current planet we live on has increasingly limited resources and that our population just keeps growing and expects a higher living standard then the need to have a second or even a third home becomes if not apparent at least something worth considering.

We need to do something if not here on Earth then some place else.

 

 

 

 

 

Posted in: future, ideas, science, thought

A rough start

March 16, 2014 7:18 AM , 2 Comments ,

A couple of weeks ago I posted about my 20th anniversary out of school.  It brought back memories of that December graduation in 1993 and the events thereafter.  It also made me think how that time frame went a long way towards shaping the next 20 years of my life.

My last semester in college and you’d think I could just cruise through it on auto-pilot.  Not hardly!  If anything it was the most challenging of all my semesters.  I was taking the most advanced research and computer classes I could before graduating.  I knew that my financial situation would not be great after school even if I landed a job immediately so I wanted to be current as possible before I got out into the big bad world.  On top of that I was taking elective courses like civil engineering surveying and environmental sciences to cross train as much as possible and have a wide range of knowledge.

I wanted to be a rabid football fan but I just couldn’t spare the time that fall.  I spent as much time as possible buried in books and classes that I had to give up much of my social life too.

Besides all of that I was worried about what all college kids worry about.  Finding a job.

I was in Colorado the previous Summer at a field camp doing some geology classes.  We were all sitting around in a beer garden one night after class when I had the realization that this was it for me as far as formal school.  That final vestige of childhood was being stripped away from me and for better or worse I was going to be fully on my own.

I took advantage of the school’s placement resources when I got back to campus that Summer and all through the Fall.  I wrote up a resume as best as I could and taking all the counselor’s advice and used the school’s print center to run off as many copies as I could.  Among other disadvantages, I would be without a computer or a printer.  I wouldn’t have a personal computer again till 1995.

So we skip ahead to finals week.  I had my classes well in hand and I was boxing up my apartment.  My lease was also ending so I had to be packed and ready to leave.  I had applied to get a refund for my utility and rent deposits.  The resumes I had sent out so far had yielded no results yet.

The registrar verified I had no outstanding loans or library books and cleared me to graduate.  I stepped out of the office and sneezed.  That was a sign of things to come.

I made my goodbyes to my friends.  I was much more socially awkward back then and really didn’t know how to handle such things.  In particular I bid goodbye to one young lady I really liked.  She still had a year to go in school.  We promised we’d write and we did for a while but I think we both knew we’d never see each other ever again.

The night before graduation and I’m deep into packing up.  I’ve got a raging headache, it’s unusually cold for early December.  I’m feeling even more miserable.

My parents show up.  They want to take me to dinner but I beg off and go to bed.  The next morning I can barely get out of bed.  My sinuses are pounding and graduation is an hour off.  My parents and other family members are waiting for me.  I take some cold medicine to keep me going an somehow I stagger to the graduation.  I’m dizzy, nauseous, coughing, and miserable.

Michel Halbouty, a legend in the Texas oil industry, hands me my diploma and shakes my hand.  I barely notice him.  It’s all I can do to keep from falling over.

After graduation my parents realize just how sick I am.  They pack up the rest of my stuff and drive me back to Houston.  I spend the next 2 weeks in bed with the flu from hell.

So I started my adult life after college in a sick-bed with a couple hundred bucks from deposit refunds, a car that was on its last legs, no girlfriend, and no job.

It would in fact take me six months to land my first job.  I had several false starts with recruiting agencies and want ads in the paper but I finally landed the job I would have for the next 8 years.  I got the job by walking in and asking for it.  And it wasn’t due to my degree or my work experience but by trading on my “computer expertise” and working for a small consulting company whose execs knew even less than I did about computers.

I started at 6 dollars an hour and felt like the biggest failure ever.  This is what I went to college for?  Over time of course that improved and my job skills would expand and my responsibilities would make me a more valued asset at the company but it was difficult to see the upside back then.

Posted in: career, decisions, future, illness, jobs, life in general, school

clothes sorting

March 14, 2014 6:02 AM , 2 Comments ,

So, inspired by my recent post on ensembles I decided to clean out of my closet and dresser.

I’ve lost a bit of weight and I have to supplement my clothes to tide me over till I reach what I think is going to be my stable and sustainable weight for the next few decades.

Before I spend any money on new clothes I realized that I needed to make an assessment of what I need and what I had.  I also needed to get rid of what was worn out or no longer fit.  So I cleared out my closet and my dresser and piled everything on the bed and started sorting things into piles.

In some ways it feels like I’m moving.  I suppose I am in a way.  I’m moving away from the person that I was and moving to the person that I want to be.  Just as in any move some old things have to stay behind and some new things have to be acquired.

The old stuff that isn’t too badly worn is going to charity and the rest will go into the waste bin.

Some things are easy.  Winter clothes can be bulky and oversized so they’re not hard to sort and it’s time they went into storage anyways.

Suits and sports coats.  They fit remarkably well but need a good cleaning and pressing and maybe an alteration here and there.

Shirts.  My old office clothes.  Some frayed and worn out, some oversized.  A few still useful.

Pants.  I didn’t realize how large I got.  A couple of size 46 pants.  I’m tempted to keep a pair to compare my old waist size to my new but that’s so cliche.

t-shirts.  Most of these I keep.  They’re such handy clothes.

socks.  I have way too many and most of my time is spent sorting them.  I look at two nearly identical ones and try to determine if they’re both navy blue or black.  Most of my white tube socks end up in the charity pile.

handkerchiefs.  How did I end up with so many?

Some things still have stickers and tags on them.  Most of them gifts I would guess as some of them I would never wear.

I’ve filled two giant trash bags full of charity clothes and another bag for the garbage.  My closet seems empty now but I have a good idea of what I need to buy.

I feel good about this in different ways.  I’ve cleared out some of the clutter in my living space and made room for the new.  More importantly I’ve made a clean break with the old me.  Those old oversized clothes were a sort of safety line to my old self.  As long as they existed I could lean on them; see them as a place to retreat to, even if just unconsciously.  By doing this I commit myself to a new life and don’t have any choice but to move forward.

Posted in: charity, fashion, future, goals, life in general

youtube, facebook, twitter and the rise of the new media model

February 16, 2014 7:01 AM , 2 Comments ,

Entertainment, communications, and advertising have been changing in the last 15 years as never before.  They are set to change even more radically in the next five to ten years.

The tried and true models of yesteryear; TV networks, movies, radio, sports, and the music industry have all been shaken to their foundations by the rise of the internet.  Some have adapted better than others and some are on the edge of extinction.

The power of a single internet event to reach out to millions and even tens of millions of people at a time is now undeniable.  How people, companies, and even governments harness that power is what is being debated and shaped at the moment.  The one’s that figure out how to utilize and monetize this force will be the winners in this bonanza.  The losers will fade into history and become little more than Wikipedia entries.

Facebook and Twitter have been publicly battling it out for the last few years.  Both are scrambling to add more and more people to their rolls and trying to capture people’s attention. YouTube also is also adding more people to their rolls but in a much quieter fashion.

All three are depending more and more on the mobile market.  The mobile versions of these sites all have advertising in one form or another.  Ads come in the form of static and unobtrusive side ads or full screen ads played before the featured content comes on.

In Facebook and Twitter you actually have to pay to promote your posts to appear to a wider audience but you don’t have the guarantee that people will actually click on your ad to see what you sell or do.

In YouTube the ads come in the form of the television ads that we all are familiar with.  These ads are either a minutes long ad that can be bypassed after 5 seconds or an ad that is 30 seconds or less that can’t be bypassed.  In order to catch the viewer’s attention, the advertisers have become very creative.  They take ads that on TV would be 1 to 2 minutes long and shrink them down to make their case in seconds and keep the person engaged.  The static ads in Twitter and Facebook don’t do this.

Another thing I have had pointed out to me is that in Facebook and Twitter the users take on the role of bait for advertising by creating content for others to come in and see or they’re potential targets for that advertising.  Other than getting access to the site they are not compensated for their content.

YouTube actively engages with the public in a different way.  YouTube of course wants people to click on ads, but content creators can be incentivized to create content.  YouTuber’s can monetize their content.  With persistence and creative content you could actually make YouTube into a full time job.  Further if you get a sponsor then you’ve really got it made.

Another thing I have been admiring lately about YouTube has been their attempts to organize their main content providers (channels) and get them to create new content, cooperate, and exchange ideas with each other.  In particular I have been amazed by 3 YouTubers.

Hannah Hart, Mamrie Hart, and Grace Helbig are three twenty somethings that each have followings in the hundreds of thousands.  They regularly appear in each others videos, they film each other, support each other, and just recently they parlayed their success into a feature-length film sold on their channels and only available online.

Recently one of them, Grace Helbig, left her old YouTube channel (owned by another group) to work on her own channel.  She basically left the  channel with 2.4 million subscribers to start from scratch.  As of mid February 2014 she is back up to 1.5 million subscribers and adding people all the time.  This at a time when conventional TV viewership is dropping.

It’s not only YouTube that is creating original content.  Other online powerhouses are creating content for online customers.  NetFlix, Hulu, and Amazon are also getting into the game by creating original online content and shows.  Some of it supported by advertising dollars and some by subscription fees.

Are Facebook and Twitter taking note?  Sort of.  Twitter has Vine and Facebook has Instagram. Both have short video formats that will be perfect for the mobile market advertising formats.  If advertisers are clever enough then they should be able to make use of these short formats to sell their goods.

But I am really liking what I am seeing out of YouTube.  The idea that talented people who were previously just viewers and unappreciated content creators can now monetize their content and become a part of the process is really appealing to me.  It’s not all sunshine of course.  YouTube still takes about 45% of the advertising revenue stream (which some content creators consider extremely high) but it’s something that can be adjusted over time.

As we move more and more into this digital age where ideas and thought are becoming more and more important, I think we need to rethink the old media models and start to consider that entertainment and information are no longer flowing down from central sources from on high but flowing freely up, down, left, and right across this world.  Those that realize this will successfully adapt and be able to reap the benefits of this new age.

Posted in: entertainment, future, internet, social media, television

Withdrawing or engaging life

December 10, 2013 7:50 AM , Leave a Comment ,

It’s easy to get disheartened these days.  We hear so much bad news coming at us from every angle that I don’t wonder when people tell me that they’re distressed or depressed.

It seems that we can’t trust our government or big business.  They seem to be out to spy on you or “get you” and many of the institutions that we have come to rely upon seem to be turning against us in every conceivable way.  If they’re not turning against us they seem to be failing and disappointing us.

One solution is of course to pull into ourselves like turtles and try to block out the world as much as possible.  We can throw up our arms in despair and say that there’s nothing to be done and we have no choice in the matter.  We might as well just go along with whatever life has in store for us.  It’s a very seductive path in that you don’t have to expend any effort to follow this path and you get a moderate reward for following along dutifully.  Not everything that you want but at least enough or almost enough.

The other path is much harder of course.  You can choose to engage life and try to shape it in the ways that you want it to go.  You can look at the inequities of life and try to redress the balance in your favor.  You can plan and work towards that economic status that you want by seizing every opportunity and not squandering your resources on petty things.  You can affect change by supporting those causes that you believe in.  You can talk and try to persuade people to your point of view.

It’s a much tougher path to follow and it doesn’t always lead to success.  Indeed you stand a decent chance of failing if you follow that course.  But let me ask you, even if you fail don’t you think that this is going to be a more interesting path to follow?

Would you rather be bored out of your mind waiting for something to be handed to you, waiting for life to happen to you at its own pace or would you rather go out and make life happen?  Find out how things work, how those people who you read about in newspapers, magazines, and on websites make their lives into what they want them to be.

Which type of life would you rather have?

Posted in: future, ideas, life in general, motivation, thought