{"id":2769,"date":"2013-02-02T09:48:36","date_gmt":"2013-02-02T16:48:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/?p=2769"},"modified":"2013-08-01T16:06:07","modified_gmt":"2013-08-01T22:06:07","slug":"worldstream-of-consciousness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/?p=2769","title":{"rendered":"Worldstream of consciousness"},"content":{"rendered":"

Yale computer scientist David Gelernter sketches<\/a>, on a napkin, the future of everything:<\/p>\n

\"lifestream\"<\/a><\/p>\n

I sketched almost the exact same thing on a napkin one Saturday night 35 years ago while listening to a Country Joe and the Fish album.<\/p>\n

Gelernter also\u00a0verbalizes the concept in a Wired<\/em> piece:<\/p>\n

By adding together every timestream on the net \u2014 including the private lifestreams that are just beginning to emerge \u2014 into a single flood of data, we get the\u00a0worldstream<\/strong>: a way to picture the cybersphere as a whole. …\u00a0Instead of today\u2019s static web, information will flow constantly and steadily through the worldstream into the past. …\u00a0What people really want is to\u00a0tune in<\/em>\u00a0to information. Since many millions of separate lifestreams will exist in the cybersphere soon, our basic software will be the\u00a0stream-browser<\/strong>: like today\u2019s browsers, but designed to add, subtract, and navigate streams. …\u00a0Stream-browsers will help us tune in to the information we want by implementing a type of custom-coffee blender: We\u2019re offered thousands of different stream \u201cflavors,\u201d we choose the flavors we want, and the blender mixes our streams to order.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Executive summary:<\/p>\n

Jamba Juice + Starbucks + SiriusXM = Future of Culture<\/strong><\/p>\n

Once you get past the mumbo-jumbo, this all sounds like old news. “Today’s static web”? The stream replaced the page as the web’s dominant metaphor a few years ago. Gelernter’s vision is the Zuckerbergian personal-timeline view of the web, in which every person sits at the center of his or her own little cyber-universe as swirls of custom-fit information stream in and then turn into “the past.” And it’s the Google Now “search without searching<\/a>” vision of continuous, preemptive delivery of relevant info. “Finally, the web \u2014 soon to become the cybersphere \u2014 will no longer resemble a chaotic cobweb,” concludes Gelernter. “Instead, billions of users will spin their own tales, which will merge seamlessly into an ongoing, endless narrative” \u2014 all funneled through “the same interface.” It’s not so much post-web as anti-web. Imagine Whitman’s “Song of Myself” as a media production, with tracking and ads.<\/p>\n

This post is an installment in Rough Type\u2019s ongoing series \u201cThe Realtime Chronicles,\u201d which began\u00a0here<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Yale computer scientist David Gelernter sketches, on a napkin, the future of everything: I sketched almost the exact same thing on a napkin one Saturday night 35 years ago while listening to a Country Joe and the Fish album. Gelernter also\u00a0verbalizes the concept in a Wired piece: By adding together every timestream on the net […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2769","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-realtime"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2769","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2769"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2769\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3570,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2769\/revisions\/3570"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2769"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2769"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2769"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}