The Online Publishers Association (OPA) released the results of a Nielsen/NetRatings study yesterday that claims Internet users spend nearly half their time on the web viewing content. (Press release here.)
Viewing content accounted for 47% of the time spent online from January through May 2007, up from only 34% for the corresponding time frame in 2003. The web activity that took the biggest hit was “communications,” namely email, message groups and IM, which dropped from 46% of web time to 36% of web time. (But the group said that the increased use of IM probably reduces the amount of time spent on communicating because IM is more time-efficient than email.)
Higher speed Internet connections, proliferation of video content — and the proliferation of content in general — and improved search functions all contributed to the increased consumption of content, OPA said.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 8:56 AM | Print | Comments (0)As if it weren’t already hard enough to get up in the morning, the New York Times’ John Tierney has this article today about an Oxford philosopher who believes it is “almost a mathematical certainty that we are living in someone else’s computer simulation.” That’s right. Dr. Nick Bostrom thinks our brains exist only as a network of computer circuits devised by “posthumans” who run “ancestor simulations” by creating “virtual worlds inhabited by virtual people with fully developed virtual nervous systems” and we are those virtual people.
Or at least the odds are very high that we are virtual people because the posthumans in some future society are running so many simulations that mathematically the virtual people running around today outnumber the real people. Bostrom spells out his computer simulation argument here and he proves it using all kinds of formulas.
I’m really freaked out by this because Bostrom’s theory means that some future posthuman has written a sub-routine that is forcing me at this very moment to write this blog post.
I’m also a little concerned that all the good editors at the New York Times must be vacationing in the Hamptons or something, the proof of which is the fact that John Tierney actually got this article published. What kind of claptrap is this to push on an unsuspecting reader first thing in the morning?
Actually, Bostrom is merely advancing a post-modern, high-tech version of a body of philosophy called the watchmaker analogy, which uses a teleological argument that assumes because something is sooo complex, it must therefore have been designed by superior beings. (This is the fundamental philosophy of people who advanced the intelligent design theory of humanity to discredit evolution.)
In Bostrom’s world, however, the watchmakers are “advanced descendants of an original race” and they’re busy right now writing code that make all of us function.
Two other recent philosophers, moreover, beat Bostrom to the punch, although in a low-tech kind of way. Rod Serling and Earl Hamner, Jr. wrote a teleplay in 1964 that presages the idea that we’re just playthings of some bigger, more powerful being.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 7:56 AM | Print | Comments (0)
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