‘Our Presence in the Church of Technology’ | Herds | Paying for Twitter?

An interesting article here on ‘oiling the digital society’…

We are bootstrapping a new world, one in which information technology and computational systems are as deeply embedded in our society as the scientific method or religious belief seem to be, and the precise names of the gods we worship is less important than our presence in the church of technology.

Bill Thompson’s point is that despite the wrangling between Microsoft and Apple and Google, they are all simply making minor moves on the chess board, and in fact we don’t particular care about them. The herd will move on to whatever interface it finds useful at that time… There will still be evangelicals who will bind themselves religiously to Apple or Windoze or whatever, but increasingly these forms will disappear into the cloud of deeply embedded technology.

(How deep is an interesting point – and for a good discussion of biological enhancement, have a listen to this short podcast from Philosophy Bites)

We will worship, but not any one god. The liberals, the emerging types, will leave the evangelicals dedicated to their particular architectures. The herd will inevitably move on.

Which begs the question: where next? I’m intrigued by Twitter at the moment. It is a free service that most users appear to interact with using widgets and other mini-apps. So the question is, how the hell do they make their money? Rumours are that they are making themselves so embedded into people’s way of working that when they turn round in the next year and demand subscriptions, people will have to pay.

I’m not sure they will, though part of me would like think we ought. Why? Because the oxygen in this nebulous, increasingly embedded technological atmosphere is advertising. Which is a way of getting us to consume things we don’t need in order that we can use that which we do need for free. An absurd situation.