Don't Drop the Soap

I really don't enjoy reading articles about marketing schemes and all the hard work that advertising execs go through to sling garbage to teens and "tweens". Whenever something that people use and enjoy comes along, the focus is immediately shifted from "how can this be better" to "how can we sell this". This is not a new phenomenon, and it is not going away any time soon. The rest of the article, "The MySpace Generation" by Jessi Hempel, talks about various companies scrambling for a slice of a commodity that hasn't even begun to finish taking shape. The amounts of money CEO's like "Red Rupert" Murdoch throw around at these web designing twenty-something’s is obscene. Ever since the web flickered onto screens worldwide, it has been like a slippery bar of soap in the hands of men wearing suits. Businessmen try to grab it and squeeze as much money out of it as they can, but it slips. Politicians notice all the commotion and don't like how some people are using the soap, so they try and take hold, but it is hard to get a grip. The reason the web is so slippery is because it is constantly growing, and changing, and covers so much area that the idea of borders and boundaries stretches paper thin. This is why I love the web.
As for the video, "The Machine is Us/ing Us", all I can say is, very cool. For many years, science fiction authors have written about people creating a machine that becomes self-aware. Then it either creates Austrian or Australian (whether it’s the Terminator or Agent Smith) enemies who are going to kill us all. I know this is not what this particular video is saying, but I think that if one uses the metaphor of feeding something it implies that the "something" is some kind of entity that is alive. The web is not alive. I did not watch The Matrix too many times. However, an entity is defined as:

that which is perceived or known or inferred to have its own distinct existence (living or nonliving)

The web is an entity. It is a growing, learning entity that is made up of and sustained by the people existing outside of it. I don’t think that it will somehow learn to hate us and then try to destroy us, but I do think that with the increasing amount of users and information being poured into the space it exists in, that someday, maybe far in the future, we will see elements of the web develop into something else we have never seen before. What that will be I have no idea, it’s just fun to toss around the idea. I bet if I started reading Sci-Fi again, it might provoke some interesting thoughts.