[ExI] it's better than it used to be

[spike]

>... On Behalf Of Stefano Vaj
Subject: Re: [ExI] it's better than it used to be

2011/4/27 spike <spike66 at att.net>:
>> But look what we did get: a new technology for getting information 
> into the home which is so good and so effective, many of us don't want 
> to go chasing off somewhere else, even if we could fly out of our own 
> driveway.

>Internet has been a big societal change, both intrinsically and in how we
have ended up using it. But what exactly is so revolutionary in comparison
with what could be envisioned in the Marconi's era?... -- Stefano Vaj


What could be envisioned is so fundamentally different from having it.  In
Marconi's era, we could envision something analogous to a chat group and
even web pages, but the storage medium would be primarily paper.  That would
be so expensive and messy, no one would bother with it.  No one did back in
the old days.

Consider something as simple as eBay, in the following thought experiment.

Imagine your grandmother's house, when she passed.  The family had to go in
and sort through all the junk.  Some of it was actually valuable to someone
somewhere, but there was no practical means of finding it, so the stuff was
likely hauled to the dump, most of it.  A lifetime spent collecting various
odds and ends is represented by that pile of stuff.  Plenty of it had
intrinsic value, nice old books for instance as the best example, collector
stuff that grandma understood but no one else did.  Non-little-old-ladies
considered it all junk, so off it went.

But with eBay, everyone's personal effects can in theory be sold.
Everyone's house suddenly became a little oddball store of sorts.  So it
could be legitimately argued that eBay dramatically increased the value of
everything everywhere.

spike