Sunday 2 December 2007

The History of Information Technology.

First there was the Word. This was not too useful on it own, but people played with the idea and developed other words and the idea caught on. The idea spread and the words mutated into different languages. This made some people powerful because they would run around delivering the words and translating them into different languages.

People played with the words idea and developed sophisticated content like song and story. This made content producers powerful too.

Some people invented a way to store the words in pictures and symbols. This made the stores of information powerful as they decided what and how to store the information and who should have access to it.

People evolved the storage of information further into paper and printing which made the information easy to distribute, and reproduce. New methods for storing different information evolved like records and film, and new distribution mechanisms like radio made people distributing and reproducing information even more powerful.

Then computers and networks evolved and suddenly information could be stored, distributed and processed easily. This made content producers powerful again. The distributers used things like copyright and contract law to try to retain their power but it was useless. The content producers where so reliant on their distrabuters for so long it took them a while to play around with the idea and develop new ways to turn their work into power, but it was inevitable that they would eventually succeed.

Then there was so much rich content out there that it was impossible to process it all so people played with the idea and new ways to get computers to process all the information and filter it evolved. The suppliers of quality filtered information then became powerful.

The technology for filtering out the quality information became widespread and then all people had access to exactly the information or rich content they wanted. This became a problem because people were not ready to deal with such accurate information. People we uncomfortable knowing how little money they had, how popular they were and the state of their health.

Then some clever people developed ways to adjust the information to the individual need of its consumer. Now people could watch a football match and their side always won for example.

After a while people got totally bored with life and decided that information technology was not such a good idea after all.

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