Social media platforms, snapchat, instagram, tik-tok, reddit, facebook, slack are changing our lingustical communication as we know it.
Communication changed from in-person, mail, pagers, phone, text, to now our dominant form of communication, social media. At each iteration, there was a gain in two factors. The gain brought us closer to our total adressable market. TAM went from "1..100...1000...1000... 10,000 ... 100,000... so forth for the entire first world. (A side point: The second and the third-world are integrating as we speak.) While our TAM increased, our eco-system also increased. But now for the latter, that is no longer wanting, has overheated, and needs to corrected downward. Our eco-system has gotten too large, and there are too many people in our immediate network. That is to say, our addressable network is optimal... I can reach anyone I want to so long as they agree to mutually share that infromation. But having 500+ in your immediate network is information overload for your processing. Computationally, this is not ideal. So what social media is enabling us to do is... pick-and-choose from a TAM and shrink our ecosytem to very selective communties. One only has to look at Reddit to understand how eco-driven our world is becoming. Moderators, community referrees and policers, regulating what is apropo'. Instagram with "close-friends"... your eco-system was too large so you siloed it to closer friends. But the next step for them will be enabling and entreching communities to thrive on there platform.
Ben Thomas has a chart that shows how the stack involved from a purely technological and computional point of view. His argument is that the tech stack has reached their end-point.. "The implication of this view should at this point be obvious, even if it feels a tad bit heretical: there may not be a significant paradigm shift on the horizon, nor the associated generational change that goes with it.And, to the extent there are evolutions, it really does seem like the incumbents have insurmountable advantages: the hyperscalers in the cloud are best placed to handle the torrent of data from the Internet of Things, while new I/O devices like augmented reality, wearables, or voice are natural extensions of the phone." The techno-stack starts with:
Start with the mainframe: the primary interaction model was punched cards; to execute a program you had to insert your cards into a card reader and wait for the computer to read the program into memory, execute it, and give you the results. Computing was done in batches, because the I/O layer was directly linked to the application and data layer.
This explains why personal computers were so revolutionary: instead of one large shared computer for which you had to wait your turn, a user could access their own computer on their own desk whenever they wanted. Still, the personal computer, particularly in a corporate environment, lived alongside not just mainframes but increasingly servers on an intranet. The I/O layer and application and data layers were being pulled apart, but both were destinations: you had to go to your desk and be on the network to compute.
This last point gets at why the cloud and mobile, which are often thought of as two distinct paradigm shifts, are very much connected: the cloud meant applications and data could be accessed from anywhere; mobile made the I/O layer available anywhere. The combination of the two make computing continuous.
Now that computing is continuous, where cloud-operators can handle large volumes of data and there are devices are physically near as can be -- the end-point -- the medium of online exchange
of information sharing is being cut and chopped and created. Data and infromation have been heriarchial, but now they are being they are networked horizontally swiftyly and precisely. Machine learning takes that infromation and tries to connect nodes of interest. Your community is being engineering. But there has been a resistance, when one selectively can choose. The presidents, ceo's, rulers, boards, comittees will each have different rules for these communties. We are inching toward a 'west-world'... and while VR / AR will advance this paradigm shift, it's already starting to manifest.
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