Semana passada tive a oportunidade de dar uma aula para os alunos do curso de Comunicação Digital da ESPM a convite do Gil Giardelli, um dos organizadores do curso. Foi bem gostoso preparar uma apresentação bem conceitual sobre algumas coisas que acredito sobre a Internet e poder falar disto para outras pessoas interessadas no tema. No final conversamos um pouco sobre o BlogBlogs, o Brasigo e a vida de empreendedor digital.
Take a close on the movie below, click play and try to figure out what is going on.
This movie represents the amount of queries containing the word felix on a big search engine from August, 12 to September, 9 last year. Each yellow dot raising from the globe’s surface represents a query realized by an Internet user on Yahoo’s search engine. The brighter the dot (or the closest to magenta) the bigger the amount of queries realized on that hour (each movie frame represents 1 or 2 hours).
It could be just a fancy visualization rendering of some nonsense statistical web dataset, but it shows much more than that. It actually shows how the society reacted on the web during the manifestation of a massive natural disaster, the Hurricane Felix (2007). Yes, it is big, but still a single representation of a very ephemeral phenomena on the living web. That makes me think and wonder about the complexity and beauty of that. Somehow the web is probably one of the most representative environments of the modern society and its behavior. Its actually a real extension of ourselves on the network. More and more we can’t explore the world without touching the web and that way it looks like, to me, that the society is pulsing on the web. Every single event that touches our lives is immediately manifested on the web.
Yes, this is just the tip of the iceberg. Internet penetration and usage is getting higher, but that is nothing if compared to the potential of mobile applications under the same point of view. If today it take us some minutes (or hours) to reach a computer after witnessing an event on the streets and then sending the stimulus to the living web, it will take seconds for dozens, hundreds or thousands of people to beam the stimuli from their mobile phones to the net.
And then its time to go crazy and wonder even further. What if those stimuli sent from us to the web could also be relayed back to us? What if the net be sufficiently intelligent to handle all that information to, immediately, give us the feedback from what it is felling? What if we start to mix our real lives to the digital live with augmented reality tools? What if?
But those are ideas for another day. It is time to go to bed and try to sleep.
