To catch a glimpse of the accelerating trends that will bring us to the singularity look no further than the web itself. Since the day the internet was born it has been growing like an accelerating weed that only grows faster with each year. In a short 15 minute documentary titled Web 3.0 NYU Journalism/Psychology major Kate Ray explores the future of this information explosion. Ray’s documentary is not an earth shattering piece of work, but it is definitely worth your 15 minutes. Check out the video after the break.
Information overload is a harsh reality for all of us. How do we find what we are looking for amongst the ever growing mass of information? How do we filter out the junk and get to the stuff we really need/want to see. Even if we do at times successfully filter the information around us down to the really important stuff, we still find it to be an overwhelming amount.
In my favorite quote of the documentary, Nova Spivack states that this crushing influx of information is too big for even the great Google to scale up to. We are talking trillions of webpages and many trillions more of connections between these pages. And of course we are talking about more than pages. Tweets, photos, videos, likes, the list goes on, the data flows to no end. Where will this all take us? What is the future of the web of human information and social relationships that continues to accelerate? Don’t look for the answers in this documentary. Indeed, even as the documentary interviews the biggest names in the field, it is clear that the answer is beyond anyone’s reckoning. It is going to be an awesome ride. Heck, isn’t that what this site is all about? The singularity may in fact be more than near – it is the web, it is us!
