My grandparents had access to telephones, then their own phone.
My parents had a hard line telephone, then a cordless phone and now have internet access.
I have a telephone (VoIP based), cellphone, PDA, 3 computers, a laptop, web mail, email, voicemail, call waiting, call forwarding, CallerID, Call Blocking, Wi-Fi and worldwide access to this little place.
I have several 24hr a day news channels on cable TV, RSS news feeds, terrabytes of information at my fingertips... For what? So I can find out a little faster what stunt MJ pulled at court today?
I wonder sometimes if we're just inventing media, content and delivery systems at a pace that actually is far faster than the number of interesting things that happen each day. I can remember my Dad relaxing on a Sunday morning as he read the entire Sunday edition of the New York Times... Today, all of that news would have been repeatedly broadcast several hundred times before he could have opened, let alone read, that paper...
Is it possible we were far better off when we were blissfully unaware? When the news that we did hear was 'filtered' because the news was delivered in 30-60 minutes and only the biggest stories made the cut? When the only weather we cared about was our own?
I do wonder sometimes, is all this 'information' a good, or a bad thing?
1 comment:
Jaro-Winkler is an algorithm for comparing two strings and determining how similar they are.
It was originally developed by the US census bureau to aid in idendifying 'duplicate candidates' in the census data.
If you have any further questions, please feel free to ask.
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