Apr
18
A Zillionical Future
Filed Under Life, The Internet
Here’s another link from Kevin Kelly’s blog - about his thoughts on a term that appears to be of his own creation: zillionics. Basically, the term summarizes Kelly’s thoughts on the qualitative changes that occur in relation to any one scientific or cultural thing or process when the number of parts and pieces that make it up begin increasing exponentially towards the trillions (and on!).
It’s a interesting, if slightly raw in its scientificity, post on the whole…but the little tidbit that caught my eye reads as follows:
The social web runs in the land of zillionics. Artificial intelligence, data mining, and virtual realities all require mastery of zillionics. As we ramp up the number of things we create, especially the ones we create collectively, we are also raising our media and culture into the realm of zillionics. The number of choices we have for music, art, images, words — anything! — is reaching the level of zillionics.
Reminds me a little of The Computerization of Your Human Brain.
Anyway, if you ask me (or if I ask me in your stead), that may be too many choices. Too much of even a good thing too often ends up making that thing bad - or at least less bright. Anyone else have an opinion? How about you, Stinko?
Tags:arts, culture, Kevin Kelley, The Computerization of Your Human Brain, zillionics.Comments
4 Responses to “A Zillionical Future”
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http://youtube.com/watch?v=iV_eGbMFEuM
A Swarthmore professor named Barry Schwartz wrote a good book about this called “The Paradox of Choice: Why Less is More”. You can get an idea of his stuff here (http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9803E7D61339F931A15752C0A9629C8B63), but an even better introduction is here (http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/93).
This Stinko thinks that our society’s huge and increasing risk aversion (don’t do anything wrong) is at fault for the problem, because people become much less concerned with doing something somewhat right than with avoiding the wrong choice at all costs. Probably has to do with the “avoid mistakes” structure of schooling (not necessarily a bad structure IMO, since fear of failure is very motivating), the “fear” business model of media, some other stuff. Same reason why (statistically) kids venture less and less far from home out of the over-hyped fear of pedos, while the pedos themselves have not gotten more prevalent over the years — the downside to making the wrong choice becomes more and more intimidating, even though it may always be remotely impossible. So in this context, I’m thinking people feel the need to compute the downside of every available option (meaning zillionics drive us nuts) rather than looking for a decent upside. In short, agreed that too much choice is overwhelming, but its not just the abundance of choices themselves, its the exaggerated-fear-of-any-suboptimal-outcome motivational model (perfectionism, basically) in our technological/red-tape/capitalist culture.
Varun,
I agree.
-TFR
Thanks, was a crappy post but hopefully I am “getting” what this blog is about.