You reminded me of an interesting thought. The industrial revolution involved advances in information only incrementally; we went from letter-writing to (eventually) phone and television. The new mediums were very unambiguously new platforms each time.
But now we have a set of platforms(computers themselves, the operating systems, the networks, etc.) for all digitally encodable forms of information. We keep building new platforms on top of these systems; and the rate at which the platforms appear is increasing; 10 years ago you could not do the kinds of trivially focused apps that have become today's cliche.
This is a point of fundamental difference from productivity advancements in the industrial era; better machines meant more resources mined, more goods finished and delivered. And communication remained expensive throughout that period; I can recall long-distance calls still being relatively costly in my childhood(80s, early 90s).
In contrast, better information implies doing more with less, in the physical sense of time and effort. Taken to its literal extreme we have Twitter as an example - a broadcasting medium without the formality and overhead of TV or radio.
And if our advancements from here on out are mostly based on doing "less" and not "more" physically, the whole way in which our economy is measured today is going to become increasingly wrong.
But now we have a set of platforms(computers themselves, the operating systems, the networks, etc.) for all digitally encodable forms of information. We keep building new platforms on top of these systems; and the rate at which the platforms appear is increasing; 10 years ago you could not do the kinds of trivially focused apps that have become today's cliche.
This is a point of fundamental difference from productivity advancements in the industrial era; better machines meant more resources mined, more goods finished and delivered. And communication remained expensive throughout that period; I can recall long-distance calls still being relatively costly in my childhood(80s, early 90s).
In contrast, better information implies doing more with less, in the physical sense of time and effort. Taken to its literal extreme we have Twitter as an example - a broadcasting medium without the formality and overhead of TV or radio.
And if our advancements from here on out are mostly based on doing "less" and not "more" physically, the whole way in which our economy is measured today is going to become increasingly wrong.