Sunday Posts

As I wrote about technology and online learning earlier, this pandemic is condensing the Hype Cycle and, within a few short weeks, establishing what technology may or may not do for us. Observations that would have taken a full career cycle otherwise - from the claim that everybody will soon be doing online learning to the admission that the server can only take a thousand people at a time to the realisation that there are too many operating system versions out there in the world - are all happening right in front of us.  But this is not just for online learning. Our claims and assumptions about technology ecosystem have been tested quickly and thoroughly as the pandemic brought the world to a sudden stop. In many ways, this is quite a predictable pandemic: A respiratory virus, with similarities with the ones we have seen before, following an infection route mirroring the pattern of global commerce. But Big Tech could do little in anticipating, tracing or responding to th...

We consume a torrent of data as we live, and we produce the same too. However, the more we produce details of each little step we take to live, we obscure the little data more and more, such as feelings and pleasures of human exchanges. The Big Data, the faster, bigger and more complex stream of data, does not so much chronicle our life as much as it changes it. While the technologists and marketers of various descriptions celebrate its arrival, it is time to pause and reflect how it changes us, our lives and institutions, and further, what it means to be human in the age of big data. One would wonder why big data is any big deal, as data gets bigger with every passing generation. As our networks grow, we know more; our storage technologies get cheaper and better, and we store more. Having lived in the age of floppy drives and 4kb memories, the big leap into megabytes was as significant as moving from cheap gigabytes to plausible petabytes. While the rhetoric is that the torrent o...