My friend Stan James has a great post on his blog about the inverse correlation between certainty and existential importance, and he extends this theory to some current internet / tech themes in what he calls "The rise of subjectivity on the web." Excerpt:
Paris is the capital of France. Your friends care about you.
Both statements are probably true, right? But one statement is more objective, more verifiable. The other statement is more important to you, more meaningful to your life.
You can find evidence for one statement in Wikipedia. You can find evidence for the other in Facebook.
This interesting observation has quite an obvious explanation: The more people use something, more ‘humanness’ quality is attached to the same, and that is finally reflected.
If we look at any technological development in the last century, we’ll observe the same pattern. And every usage withholds its own pattern, art and psychology and interaction behavior. See this report for more.
@Ashish: I think you are right that technology gets “humanized” as it infiltrates our lives. I’ve read that in the early days of telephones they were seen as exotic “for emergency use only” devices. But it was the teenagers that viewed them as pure tools, and started using them for day to day smalltalk.
Given this trend, tho, I’m curious what this means for the future and what meta-tools will be needed. (E.g. as Google was a meta-tool over all the objective data.) These are exciting times!
Ya these are exciting time indeed. One more thing…in case of technologies we have observed, say Google for example as u mentioned, the necessity has trickled down from objective nature to subjective.
There are cases where tools desgined for ‘human’ usage have moved to more machine consuetude….Fine example will be psychologists intervention for AI investigation on robotic systems, Biotech field as a whole, Neural Network theory, Usability Research for application etc…
Aren’t we seeing a sort of miscellany then.
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