The people at thinkeyetracking have conducted a research on search behavior. They analyzed humans while googling by mapping their eyeball tracks.
They exposed these tracks as heat maps (as seen on the left and middle panels of the figure below, for the years of 2005 and 2008, respectively), and spotted a disturbing trend:
People went from eyeballing search-results throughout several pages in 2005, to eyeball only the top-three results of the list in 2008!
At this pace, we can easily prognose that by 2011, the famous Google-ish Feeling Lucky button that jumps right to the first result by skipping search results page, will be renamed Go To The Result button, as mocked on the figure's right panel. Strangely enough, some experts argue that, around the same time, Google's business model will collapse ... due to a lack of sponsored ad clicks!
Below is a screenshot of the most interesting article of 2013, period. Written by one the most-influentials "good" guys of world, Julian Assange. The article deals about the promiscuity between Google top-notch executives and the White House, and how it affects both institutions policies, at the expense of the people's freedom and will. Below the article I share with you some notes I've taken.
Assange sums it all up to us in two words: "Jared Cohen", and a question "Who is he? ". It's worth it to check him out. I googled him to find out he's a futurist thinker, thinking about the disruptive reach social networks and, now, context networks can attain, world-domination-wise. A megalomaniac thinker surely, with the wits, the will, the intuition, the perception and the goal. He happens to play ball - real hard - both at the White House AND at Google. He's playing with fire though, and it could easily backfire on his employers.
The new Jean-Jacques Rousseau of the XXIst century, a prototypical example of the lacquay that out-wits the masters of the house he serves. This article, and the Edward Snowden case, are a glympse iMHO to a silent-war going on, mostly between the future world-dominating nations (or corporations???), US, China, ..., but also Facebook, Google, Baidu, etc ...
Scenarios outcomes? I would bet on political borders to become obsolete, and on social-network based new nations (or tribes?). Alexander, Julius, Napoleon, Adolf and Benito, they all had big plans, but they just missed the right technology to make the entire world yield into whole "Gaia Pax". Today, technology is almost ripe, almost, to make it a breeze to administrate over 100 billions of citizens, within the blink of a byte. Not only there CAN be only one, but I'd wager, there WILL be only one. It's only a matter of WHEN, and it's definitively not an IF.
For those who fight on good side of the force, I have only one word for advice (or is it three?): "peer-to-peer". Stick with this notion deeply incepted in your mind and we'll be safe enough. NrÂș1 enemies? Anything that qualifies as a "walled-gardens" ;-)
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