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The Facebook Monopoly
I am tired of the Facebook monopoly. While Google gets fined for helping people shop websites like Facebook do the opposite. Instead of increasing the diversity of content on the web and the sharing of ideas it has helped create silos of like minded people. Likeminded people is a polite way of saying brainwashed in the case where opinions are based on opinions rather than facts.
Low value posts
Shorts on Facebook are usually very short. You skim through dozens, even hundreds of posts but none of them have much value. Compare this to blogging. When you blog you need to develop ideas that you can expand to at least three hundred words. With those three hundred words you can include images, video, tables and more. You can tell a complete story. On Facebook you post some text and people might read it.
Conversational monopoly
People use twitter both privately and publicly. People I follow have their accounts set to private so I am careful not to answer to certain comments to preserve their private sphere. Other people see no value in having a public chat. They don’t remember the chatrooms on the late 1990s in the same way that I don’t remember party lines. Whatsapp and Messenger are used instead. Both of them allow private group chats from the comfort of a computer or with the mobility of a mobile phone. Ingress, Pokemon Go and others are happy to experiment with other platforms but mid to late adopters are stuck in the Facebook universe. They have a monopoly.
Picture sharing
Instagram is a great image sharing app but it’s owned by Facebook.
Events
Almost every event you go to these days has a Facebook events page. Many events only have a Facebook page. Unless you are a Facebook user you miss out on a lot of events.
The World Wide Web offers such a breadth of opportunities for creativity that it’s a shame that people are spending time on Facebook rather than on more malleable social networks. I’m thinking of Wordpress as one example. We will see whether people go back to blog friendly social networks.
The 3g golden Goose and it’s noose.
You see, 3G is the golden goose for wireless carriers. It’s technology that turns their networks from boring voice systems to multi-functional data systems. They’re going from being a diner offering three specials/day to a restaurant with a huge buffet. This buffet is enticing and offers something for pretty much everyone but you’ll have to pay for it.
source
And that’s the part I like. The phone has never been my medium of choice. Too disruptive, too many factors to take into consideration.
Looking forward to when the golden goose has de-valued data to such a point it’s as cheap as broadband has become.
Youtube live is a dissapointment, and it hasn’t even started.
In an age where mobile video streaming is cheap in comparison to the past it’s a shame that youtube do not showcase this technology and have three hundred people streaming from one city for example. Why is it that they chose to cover live music events instead.
Of course music is cheap to cover, excluding rights issues. Get three or four cameras in a room to cover the action on stage, two or three more cameras backstage and you’ve got a program, That’s not all though. It’s something you can rehearse. The singers do their sound checks, the vision mixers and directors know the music, know the cues. Everything can be well orchestrated. The production will be flat and boring.
The BBC stopped top of the pops and now you’ve got Youtube doing live music programs. Of course it’s a different program, of course it’s a different technology, but of course it’s just one more step on the trip towards a different age of television.
I love new media and new technology but I wish they would do something more creative with their time. Look at Autumn watch for example. Camera crews went to beautiful landscapes to cover the wildlife. They even broadcast whilst scuba diving. They use the website as an addition and they’re doing some outdoor event. That’s what we need more of.
In an age where everyone walks around with a video camera, whether flip, mobile phone or other so the broadcaster, especially when it comes to entitities like youtube, should reflect their user’s method of covering the world. They should get out of the studio and get twenty cameras in a city, and cover everything that’s going on in real life, nothing setup. Just capture life as it happens.
If that’s too boring then do some research, see of a live event that you could cover, whether it’s a car show where you’ve got lot’s of drifting, a festival where you’ve got hundreds of things happening at once or a ski resort where you’ve got snowboarders, skiers and other activities taking place.
You could have cameras at the telesièges, at the teleski, you could have some at the summit and some on the other side of the valley filming as people ski down. You could have dynamic cameras.
Just get out of that studio and give us something that’s not an advert for someone’s latest single. That’s just dull.
A Homemade Electric Car – Youtube Video
On one side of the Channel, you have people like Colin Furze building fun machines that have the fatal flaw of having an internal combustion engine. On the other side of the Channel, you have people like Marc Gyver building an electric car with easily bought components. The video below shows the construction process without talking, and without music.
For about 2000 Euros, with bike parts, and the right skills, you can build your own cars. You have four powered bike wheels to power the car, two solar panels on the roof to generate 200W and a charge time of two and a half hours for a range of 20 kilometers and a top speed of 50 km/h. The range is perfect for when you need to do things within a short distance.
Within the video, you see quite a few shots of four people sitting in the car at once. I especially like this because it illustrates that young people are not limited to protests, skipping school and more. With the right skills, they build their own electric car to get around, even if it is on private property where it’s legal.
The project discussed above was uploaded seven months ago and since then he has made a car with a body, indicator lights, a windscreen and more. It looks like the cars you see in old films and cartoons. (Some of the cartoons are old). It is slowly getting closer to being road legal.
What I love about these homemade projects is that they show that self-driven cars still have a future. With electric cars, we can still do small journeys without ecologists being mad with us for combusting fossil fuels.
Electric Car Adventures
If we go off on a tangent of electric cars then you have electric cars like the one above. It’s designed so that you get the pleasure of driving a car, but without the internal combustion engine. There is an entirely new niche of projects to be thought up and programs like The Grand Tour and others could play with these devices.
For years I thought that Top Gear, Motortrend TV, and The Grand Tour were outdated and old fashioned, bound for the video archives of culture. With electric bike technology plenty of new opportunities are being created for electric cars, and in the process for our pleasure.
An interview with the creator.
I love this concept. I love the concept of young people, rather than owning conventional cars like my generation have used, owning or renting devices as we see in the video below. Too often we watch news and current affairs programs about environmentalists and the future and we think we’ll be trapped on trains and in buses with no scheduling freedom. With these machines we preserve the freedom that we’ve been used to for years, but with technology that is sustainable.
The future of exploration is on foot, by bike and for those who want to cover different distances by Swincar. Cycling and walking are great when you’re not in the middle of a heatwave like we’ve experienced for two or three summers. In a heatwave, vehicles like this are nicer. As you’re rolling over earth, grass or stones you’re cooler than if you were on the tarmac. Because you’re outside you have the breeze. I would like to play with one of these.
The Negative side
There are a few concerns with these machines. The first is that they still need to be parked somewhere and these take up as much space as a car. The second concern is that these vehicles can go anywhere but this doesn’t mean that they should. If they go on hiking paths, if they go on slopes, on skip pistes, and in other places then they’re going to come in conflict with other users of the same area.
We see a shot where these vehicles are beside horses, but if you have cycled near horses you’ll be told by the rider to make noise so that horses know you are there.
Off-Roading without the Carbon Footprint.
I enjoyed watching Dirt Every Day and programs like it but I never saw myself as ever trying offroading because of the carbon footprint. I’d rather hike, cycle or climb. I am tempted to play with the electric version. No need to worry about planting a forest after each outing.