Empty dreams and silent screams,
The music dies as a lone man cries,
The night has been and met its end,
In a world void of hope yet masked in smiles
Nothing is ever what it seems,
Ignore the mask yet meet the eyes,
Every stranger is a potential friend,
But not if your soul within torment riles
Take my hand come and dance with me,
If just for one night set your soul free
When should you buy content?
With the range of services you can use online like NetFlix that let you watch as many TV Shows and Movies as you want, or subscription based music services that let you listen to whatever you want whenever you want there is a question you need to ask - when should you buy content?
Buying content is defined in the traditional sense that is you pay a price and get the content to keep. Whereas renting content can be defined as buying a subscription for access to content which allows you to access the content so long as you are subscribed, but you don't get to keep it, so when your subscription ends so does access to the content.
In the two scenarios, the former, buying content, without a doubt will cost the most in the long term. The latter will cost less, the only catch is that when you stop your subscription you can't access the content.
Buying content only makes sense if you are going to watch the content hundreds of times or you need access to it without an internet connection. I say this because when most people buy DVDs for instance they don't watch every DVD they own hundreds of times. In fact some DVDs you own you've probably only watched once or twice at the most.
We have over a hundred DVDs, I know people that have extensive collections that take up entire rooms, but really there's only so many times you can watch every one of them. Even if you don't do anything but watch DVDs all day and all night there will still be a limit to the number you can conceivably watch. There comes a point were you will have redundant content. That is content that you have, but don't need, and probably never use.
If you have 200 DVDs and you paid £15 for each one then you will have spent £3,000 on DVDs. NetFlix membership costs £6 per month, with the first month free. For the cost of your DVDs you could have paid for 500 months + 1 free of NetFlix, that's 41 years and 9 months. Now consider the fact that membership of £6 per month gives you access to NetFlix entire library with near unlimited usage. When you compare the two scenarios, the latter, renting content, makes more sense economically arguably it leads to greater freedom in content choice as well.
Now I realise this entire blog post sounds like an advert for NetFlix but the concept doesn't just apply to it, it applies to a number of other things. I do question whether in a world that seems to push people towards buying things, how much could we save if we rented things instead? Consider your car. If you buy a car that car becomes your sole responsibility, your upkeep. You need to pay for repairs, it likely costs a fortune in the first place. Consider the cost of renting a car instead. You rent the car for a fixed term and then rent another. You get a new car each time. Repairs and upkeep are the responsibility of the company you rent it from. Really the only thing you pay for is the rent and the fuel.
I live in a Western country, arguably one that is considered capitalist and one that promotes the capitalist idea of the ownership of private property but truth be told I have to question whether it actually makes sense to buy things and own them as opposed to renting and using them. Movies are just an example of this idea.
Buying content is defined in the traditional sense that is you pay a price and get the content to keep. Whereas renting content can be defined as buying a subscription for access to content which allows you to access the content so long as you are subscribed, but you don't get to keep it, so when your subscription ends so does access to the content.
In the two scenarios, the former, buying content, without a doubt will cost the most in the long term. The latter will cost less, the only catch is that when you stop your subscription you can't access the content.
Buying content only makes sense if you are going to watch the content hundreds of times or you need access to it without an internet connection. I say this because when most people buy DVDs for instance they don't watch every DVD they own hundreds of times. In fact some DVDs you own you've probably only watched once or twice at the most.
We have over a hundred DVDs, I know people that have extensive collections that take up entire rooms, but really there's only so many times you can watch every one of them. Even if you don't do anything but watch DVDs all day and all night there will still be a limit to the number you can conceivably watch. There comes a point were you will have redundant content. That is content that you have, but don't need, and probably never use.
If you have 200 DVDs and you paid £15 for each one then you will have spent £3,000 on DVDs. NetFlix membership costs £6 per month, with the first month free. For the cost of your DVDs you could have paid for 500 months + 1 free of NetFlix, that's 41 years and 9 months. Now consider the fact that membership of £6 per month gives you access to NetFlix entire library with near unlimited usage. When you compare the two scenarios, the latter, renting content, makes more sense economically arguably it leads to greater freedom in content choice as well.
Now I realise this entire blog post sounds like an advert for NetFlix but the concept doesn't just apply to it, it applies to a number of other things. I do question whether in a world that seems to push people towards buying things, how much could we save if we rented things instead? Consider your car. If you buy a car that car becomes your sole responsibility, your upkeep. You need to pay for repairs, it likely costs a fortune in the first place. Consider the cost of renting a car instead. You rent the car for a fixed term and then rent another. You get a new car each time. Repairs and upkeep are the responsibility of the company you rent it from. Really the only thing you pay for is the rent and the fuel.
I live in a Western country, arguably one that is considered capitalist and one that promotes the capitalist idea of the ownership of private property but truth be told I have to question whether it actually makes sense to buy things and own them as opposed to renting and using them. Movies are just an example of this idea.
Hatred Reborn
There was a time, when 'hate' was an extreme word, when it was only used to mean what it meant. To hate something truly meant to truly hate. Today hate and dislike have become synonymous. I blame this for the extremities in our world. When did we become so extreme that anything we disliked it was socially acceptable to say we hated it? Has real hatred become acceptable in society because we have forgotten how to define the difference between things we dislike and things we hate?
Spend 10 minutes on any forum or social network or a site like youtube open to comments and you quickly see that negative moderation seems to have died. I say negative as positive moderation still exists, for that I blame or I guess I should say thank, facebook. Through the popularisation of the word 'like' facebook has managed to keep the word like in our vocabulary and in such a way that it makes it true to its definition. The valuation of a "like" on facebook is negligible. It means nothing more than what it states, that someone has a moderately positive view of whatever it is they "liked" - it doesn't mean they love it, and it doesn't really signify any deep rooted emotional attachment to a brand - although if you follow social marketing spiel you'd believe "likes" were the holy grail of marketing.
No. 'like' on facebook is a moderate indicator of positive opinion. It means "I don't mind XX" - as a result like, and love, still exist in our vocabulary as distinct entities. They still exist as differentiable levels of positive accord. Dislike and hate however have melded into one common meaning, that now acts as a catch-all to the point where expressing the sentiment "I don't like XX" is by many viewed as a remark of hate. For this I could arguably turn to facebook again, this time unquestionably the correct term would be 'blame' - they are to blame for this, they contributed to this wholeheartedly. Facebook has never had a "dislike" button, despite the multitude of efforts by members over the years urging the network to create one.
As a result it is my view that 3 levels exist today:
I like this
I love this
I hate this
People have forgotten how to say "I don't like this" without it having to mean anything at all other than a simple statement of whether or not you feel positive or negative about something.
Where's the line between dislike and hatred? Or rather where was it? Well that's rather easy to answer, again it comes down to the role of active and passive emotion. Disliking something was a passive emotion, "I don't like this, but meh I don't care" whereas hatred was an active emotion "I hate this, and I am gonna make sure the whole world knows" - the latter is the problem we find ourselves with. There is no moderate negative emotion anymore, it is always extreme.
There will of course be people who read this and disagree, and I welcome that, I would argue that you are in a minority however, and I would even go so far as to say that this is self evident as you will likely already know this. You may be moderate, but you will surely know from experience that your moderation is rare online. "We do exist" is something that becomes increasingly harder to convince people to believe.
Spend 10 minutes on any forum or social network or a site like youtube open to comments and you quickly see that negative moderation seems to have died. I say negative as positive moderation still exists, for that I blame or I guess I should say thank, facebook. Through the popularisation of the word 'like' facebook has managed to keep the word like in our vocabulary and in such a way that it makes it true to its definition. The valuation of a "like" on facebook is negligible. It means nothing more than what it states, that someone has a moderately positive view of whatever it is they "liked" - it doesn't mean they love it, and it doesn't really signify any deep rooted emotional attachment to a brand - although if you follow social marketing spiel you'd believe "likes" were the holy grail of marketing.
No. 'like' on facebook is a moderate indicator of positive opinion. It means "I don't mind XX" - as a result like, and love, still exist in our vocabulary as distinct entities. They still exist as differentiable levels of positive accord. Dislike and hate however have melded into one common meaning, that now acts as a catch-all to the point where expressing the sentiment "I don't like XX" is by many viewed as a remark of hate. For this I could arguably turn to facebook again, this time unquestionably the correct term would be 'blame' - they are to blame for this, they contributed to this wholeheartedly. Facebook has never had a "dislike" button, despite the multitude of efforts by members over the years urging the network to create one.
As a result it is my view that 3 levels exist today:
I like this
I love this
I hate this
People have forgotten how to say "I don't like this" without it having to mean anything at all other than a simple statement of whether or not you feel positive or negative about something.
Where's the line between dislike and hatred? Or rather where was it? Well that's rather easy to answer, again it comes down to the role of active and passive emotion. Disliking something was a passive emotion, "I don't like this, but meh I don't care" whereas hatred was an active emotion "I hate this, and I am gonna make sure the whole world knows" - the latter is the problem we find ourselves with. There is no moderate negative emotion anymore, it is always extreme.
There will of course be people who read this and disagree, and I welcome that, I would argue that you are in a minority however, and I would even go so far as to say that this is self evident as you will likely already know this. You may be moderate, but you will surely know from experience that your moderation is rare online. "We do exist" is something that becomes increasingly harder to convince people to believe.
Online Life Expectancy
Twice in as many days now the concept of online life expectancy has cropped up in conversation - for a definition use the following:
Now these are mostly self inflicted terminations, there are however a plethora of reasons as to why a website available and accessible today might not be around in years to come. Websites that run on a profit basis such as Facebook and Google will be around as long as their owners can maintain a profit margin, this is not necessarily for want of greed, these sites have large user bases and the hardware and software for that matter that is required to keep them operational costs a significant amount to maintain. Websites over the years have changed, updates to websites and redesigns have seen some content completely deleted, others integrated into other services. Even in the latter case the movement of content can be as bad as deletion. You need to be certain that those who looked in the former place will find their content in the latter.
It is for this reason perhaps most of all that we should be aware of our Online Life Expectancy. If we have content we want to make available to the world for-evermore then we need to develop contingency plans and failsafes that can preserve content. I don't mean in the event of data loss etc as that will already be taken care of by backup and restore policies etc - I mean to develop a repository based approach that allows us to store all of our content in services that will be maintained, this ultimately means we will have to pay for this privilege as so long as you are willing to pay then your content can be kept safe - rather like using a real world lock-up or self-storage facility, places with little to no overheads who simply charge for the use of their storage. These services are usually extremely low risk, I don't know of any real world storage facilities that went out of business.
The spark that started this fire of intrigue came from reading a BBC news article about the British Library who plan to archive the Internet, the project will cover 4.8 million websites. This in itself isn't too surprising really there have been a number of services that aim to archive the Internet, one notable example is the WaybackMachine what was surprising however was that Richard Gibby from the British Library stated that presently the assumed life expectancy of web content is just 75 days.
Article: 'Libraries to store all UK web content' - http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-22028738
75 days being approximately 2 and a half months give or take, this at first seems quite short but when I think about it, this really isn't that hard to believe. Save for a few massive websites in terms of their content catalogue and their user-base, emerging websites tend to have short lives or they rocket to fame. Of course there will be those that buck the trend and those that rise slowly but even forums and lesser known social networks will have an archive system, and a life expectancy for posts. In the case of forums I would even go so far as to say that some content is "current" and is continually updated whilst other content is abandoned and left to be buried in the nether regions of the forum only to be found by random google searches.
75 days is not a long time when you stop and think about it. Even with a blog or a social network like Facebook, Twitter, Google+ etc, there is an expected length of time someone will go back over your posts or tweets. You don't expect people to go back and read your every tweet, indeed for some people on twitter with hundreds of thousands of tweets that would be rather time consuming - and actually rather difficult as I have explained previously twitter only caches your profile for a limited time, all older tweets are inaccessible except by search and direct links, so you would need a link or search term for every single tweet. So at least as far as twitter is concerned old content is not really accessible, and if you tweet often enough your twitter feed can go back as little as 2 weeks. Suddenly 75 days doesn't seem like such an exaggeration.
Facebook's timeline feature arguably made older content more readily accessible, but in doing so I am still yet to discover how many people went back and deleted a tonne of old posts. I know a few people whose profiles from a few years ago looking back would be cringe worthy even for them to read, I am sure they at least would have pruned their old posts.
So the question is, how long can you reasonably expect your content to be available on a given website?
Online Life Expectancy is the duration of time a web page or web site is expected to stay online before being replaced, updated or closed.My blogs are an example of websites which are not expected to remain online forever. I say this as I have mentioned numerous times that I often go through phases where I remove content and rework things. My facebook profile was another prime example, having been deleted last June almost 6 years worth of content went with it.
Now these are mostly self inflicted terminations, there are however a plethora of reasons as to why a website available and accessible today might not be around in years to come. Websites that run on a profit basis such as Facebook and Google will be around as long as their owners can maintain a profit margin, this is not necessarily for want of greed, these sites have large user bases and the hardware and software for that matter that is required to keep them operational costs a significant amount to maintain. Websites over the years have changed, updates to websites and redesigns have seen some content completely deleted, others integrated into other services. Even in the latter case the movement of content can be as bad as deletion. You need to be certain that those who looked in the former place will find their content in the latter.
It is for this reason perhaps most of all that we should be aware of our Online Life Expectancy. If we have content we want to make available to the world for-evermore then we need to develop contingency plans and failsafes that can preserve content. I don't mean in the event of data loss etc as that will already be taken care of by backup and restore policies etc - I mean to develop a repository based approach that allows us to store all of our content in services that will be maintained, this ultimately means we will have to pay for this privilege as so long as you are willing to pay then your content can be kept safe - rather like using a real world lock-up or self-storage facility, places with little to no overheads who simply charge for the use of their storage. These services are usually extremely low risk, I don't know of any real world storage facilities that went out of business.
The spark that started this fire of intrigue came from reading a BBC news article about the British Library who plan to archive the Internet, the project will cover 4.8 million websites. This in itself isn't too surprising really there have been a number of services that aim to archive the Internet, one notable example is the WaybackMachine what was surprising however was that Richard Gibby from the British Library stated that presently the assumed life expectancy of web content is just 75 days.
Article: 'Libraries to store all UK web content' - http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-22028738
75 days being approximately 2 and a half months give or take, this at first seems quite short but when I think about it, this really isn't that hard to believe. Save for a few massive websites in terms of their content catalogue and their user-base, emerging websites tend to have short lives or they rocket to fame. Of course there will be those that buck the trend and those that rise slowly but even forums and lesser known social networks will have an archive system, and a life expectancy for posts. In the case of forums I would even go so far as to say that some content is "current" and is continually updated whilst other content is abandoned and left to be buried in the nether regions of the forum only to be found by random google searches.
75 days is not a long time when you stop and think about it. Even with a blog or a social network like Facebook, Twitter, Google+ etc, there is an expected length of time someone will go back over your posts or tweets. You don't expect people to go back and read your every tweet, indeed for some people on twitter with hundreds of thousands of tweets that would be rather time consuming - and actually rather difficult as I have explained previously twitter only caches your profile for a limited time, all older tweets are inaccessible except by search and direct links, so you would need a link or search term for every single tweet. So at least as far as twitter is concerned old content is not really accessible, and if you tweet often enough your twitter feed can go back as little as 2 weeks. Suddenly 75 days doesn't seem like such an exaggeration.
Facebook's timeline feature arguably made older content more readily accessible, but in doing so I am still yet to discover how many people went back and deleted a tonne of old posts. I know a few people whose profiles from a few years ago looking back would be cringe worthy even for them to read, I am sure they at least would have pruned their old posts.
So the question is, how long can you reasonably expect your content to be available on a given website?
Google it!
I don't like it when people tell me to use Google when I ask a question. By saying this you don't encourage me or anyone else to go and solve their own problems, you just encourage people not to talk to you. "Google it" is one of the most unhelpful things you can say. For one, often the main reason someone asks you in the first place rather than just googling it is because they want someone to explain it and they regard you as someone knowledgeable of the field or someone who they think might know and understand the answer, there's a difference between finding an answer and understanding it.
There are a lot of teachers that don't seem to grasp this concept, nowhere is this more evident than at University. During my time at University there were a number of lecturers who gave this response, there was one in particular who more or less, every response they gave was "google it" - no, this University charges £3,000 [now £9,000 - that's $13,500] a year in "tuition" fees - you fucking explain the problem don't tell your students to "google it" - google is not an explanation. You're essentially saying "pay me for a service I don't actually provide".
Beyond University however this mentality still persists. In academia and in life when I am confronted with a person who responds like this I will stop talking to you period. If we lived in a society where we simply didn't answer any question at all that the answer to could be found online we would very quickly descend into a level of existence where we don't communicate with one another.
More than this, there's the issue of discussion to be considered, knowing and understanding the answer isn't the end of the matter, contemplation comes next, and by extension derivation of new knowledge and ideas based on what we know and what we could add. Discussion of ideas is integral to human growth, knowing the answer and understanding it should not mean that you do not continue to ask questions, if you did stop you would be accepting blind faith - I hear the answer, the explanation seems reasonable, I won't bother questioning this any further, I'll just accept it. That's quite a dangerous mentality as it makes you easily manipulated. If your "depth of questioning" is known, then in order to make you believe a complex lie the author only needs to prepare enough evidence to convince you of that depth.
"Google it" encourages shallow thinking there are various aspects of Google that highlight this, including but not limited to the number of pages of search results you're willing to sift through. Anyone who uses Google for the first time soon learns to accept the idea that "The answer will be on the first page or maybe the second, if it's not then change the search term" - everything else is irrelevant. Don't look deeper, don't question or explore further, you asked a question you just want the answer and nothing else.
The rise of sites like wikipedia feed this mentality, even to the point where many google searches return the wikipedia article for that term as the top result, yet the number of people beyond academia who would actually pursue the citation sources in a wikipedia article is minute - I know this because the number of times I have clicked a citation link to find a 404 page or a parked domain is quite high. People accept what they see at face value and don't explore deeper. I say beyond academia in this context because within academia you are discouraged from using wikipedia as a source - do people stop using it? No, they still use it, they just use the citation links as sources instead, and when you reach a 404 or a parked domain you just look for another article or google it.
There are a lot of teachers that don't seem to grasp this concept, nowhere is this more evident than at University. During my time at University there were a number of lecturers who gave this response, there was one in particular who more or less, every response they gave was "google it" - no, this University charges £3,000 [now £9,000 - that's $13,500] a year in "tuition" fees - you fucking explain the problem don't tell your students to "google it" - google is not an explanation. You're essentially saying "pay me for a service I don't actually provide".
Beyond University however this mentality still persists. In academia and in life when I am confronted with a person who responds like this I will stop talking to you period. If we lived in a society where we simply didn't answer any question at all that the answer to could be found online we would very quickly descend into a level of existence where we don't communicate with one another.
More than this, there's the issue of discussion to be considered, knowing and understanding the answer isn't the end of the matter, contemplation comes next, and by extension derivation of new knowledge and ideas based on what we know and what we could add. Discussion of ideas is integral to human growth, knowing the answer and understanding it should not mean that you do not continue to ask questions, if you did stop you would be accepting blind faith - I hear the answer, the explanation seems reasonable, I won't bother questioning this any further, I'll just accept it. That's quite a dangerous mentality as it makes you easily manipulated. If your "depth of questioning" is known, then in order to make you believe a complex lie the author only needs to prepare enough evidence to convince you of that depth.
"Google it" encourages shallow thinking there are various aspects of Google that highlight this, including but not limited to the number of pages of search results you're willing to sift through. Anyone who uses Google for the first time soon learns to accept the idea that "The answer will be on the first page or maybe the second, if it's not then change the search term" - everything else is irrelevant. Don't look deeper, don't question or explore further, you asked a question you just want the answer and nothing else.
The rise of sites like wikipedia feed this mentality, even to the point where many google searches return the wikipedia article for that term as the top result, yet the number of people beyond academia who would actually pursue the citation sources in a wikipedia article is minute - I know this because the number of times I have clicked a citation link to find a 404 page or a parked domain is quite high. People accept what they see at face value and don't explore deeper. I say beyond academia in this context because within academia you are discouraged from using wikipedia as a source - do people stop using it? No, they still use it, they just use the citation links as sources instead, and when you reach a 404 or a parked domain you just look for another article or google it.
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