Our Tapping Life

Our Tapping Life
Human life has become more convenient through streamlining the world around us. But a stream should flow without any barriers or restrictions even if it is channelled. Different taps should be able to unite or diverge. We started with tap water to make it available in most households. Admittedly, the old traditional way of (usually) women going to fetch water from a river or a well had its advanteges whether social and physical but it was inconvenient and inproductive. The invention of print made other types of media, mostly text media, possible. Electricty followed. Our nights turned to days and our days to nights. This has made work possible any time or any place. Then the phone, the radio, the camera and the TV, the telex and fax machine were introduced each separately. The internet technology has now come to combine them all.

Our tap life has already started. Next to the water tap and the electricity tap, we have now media tap. It is a pity I can t demonstrate this graphically but a drawing would demonstrate this perfect household. We can organise the taps in our house by hardware and software. The hardware tap is the water tap, whereas electricity and media are software taps.The software tap can be divided into different subtaps for shopping, services including medical service which are then delivered through an additional hardware tap. Humans needs have to flow from a set of taps to be installed and provided.

Tapping has revolutionised our life. The old way of life from the provider to the user is disappearing. The traditional hierarchical, vertical or dicatorial system is becoming horizontal and democratic. There is no difference between the user and the provider. Everybody can be a user or a provider at the same time. This is democratic, dynamic, fast and productive. We don t need to wait for a journalist to write an article according to his/her preferences or those of his/her employers. There is no set menu any more but al carte. People in thier different parts in the world have more access to information than say a journalist, a TV channel or a dictionary written by a board of editors. Everybody is a writer or editor.This is very social indeed, democratic, powerful and up-to-date. But does this development herald the victory of communism over capitalism?

We are trying to install additional taps or directing different small taps to one giant tap. Just take Youtube, the Wikis, the Blogs, the Twitters the Flickers and so on. Now we need to realise the impossible ie not only concentrate on cooperation, file sharing, open source but address other important issues like human-human interface or human-machine interface. I always wondered what it would be like if one giant brain with a powerful memory capacity can combine, link all human knowledge. Downloading somebody s brain content would be fascinating. But human beings still have two constraints. First, we need to learn from the beginning. A child has to go to school and learn and waste a lot of energ. Unfortunately, knowledge cannot be imparted to other human beings except through media and stressful learning. Second, we have a memory problem. We learn but we forget. In addition, we can only learn a certain amount and then are exhausted to take in any more.

We must learn from animals and develop bionics. Our traditional life practices and models like school, family, shopping and medical care might soon become obsolete. They will flow from the tap. Of course we will still have some other limitations being organic bodies subject to decay and disease. There are time and space constraints as well. We can t be at different places at the same time although we can be at one place at different times.The invention of print and other media and now the internet have removed some of these time and space limitations. Let s hope for the rest.

Jamshid
Bremen, 21 May 2009

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