Tuesday, July 24, 2018

Abundance, scarcity, and search...

From Josh Wolfe's latest (and excellent) interview on Real Vision (subscription required):
Any time that something is abundant, you want to ask: What's scarce? And any time that something's scarce, you want to say: OK, what's abundant? 
Throughout the 90s, the thing that became abundant because of the democratization of the tools of producing content, was text. Text everywhere. And so articles were published and blogs were published and Twitter and Facebook posts and all this kind of stuff. And the scarce thing became search. Whether it was within Twitter, or within Facebook, or, of course, Google, that became one of the most valuable things. Being able to search through the abundance of content and text. And of course, that turned also to photos and images and sound files and all that. 
Today, with the ability to produce, of questionable veracity, an enormous amount of content, again I think the valuable thing is search. But the search is for truth. Is that picture undoctored? Is that video undoctored?