This entry has been sitting mostly-done in my drafts for a couple days now, but amusingly enough, “anachronism” popped up as today’s Merriam-Webster Word of the Day. I think someone’s trying to tell me to get off my keister and finish this up ;)
You will often hear people say things like “I should’ve been born in the sixties,” or the middle ages, or one of various other eras in history. It’s not uncommon for people to feel like living anachronisms. But I can’t be the only one who feels like they might have been born too early. I find myself genuinely baffled sometimes that technology hasn’t yet seemed to have caught up with where my brain tells me it’s supposed to be.
The particular instance that prompted this entry was while reading “What the Hashtag?” an entry by Meghan Wilker on Geek Girls Guide (ironically, my sense of time is stuck in the future, and my general online reading is a couple months behind); specifically the section subtitled “What does each hashtag mean?” where she introduces the readers to What the Hashtag, a “user-editable encyclopedia for hashtags found on Twitter.” She says, “…this approach of asking the public what [hashtags] each mean is the only way it can be realistically managed.”
And immediately, my brain says, “Why isn’t there a program handling that? You know, one that processes each instance of a hashtag and understands them logically and linguistically, and outputs the gist of each, as well as divergent/aberrant meanings based on cases of irregular usage?”
Yeah.
Then I think about it with my “Now Brain,” and I assume (without any personal knowledge of AI programming, of course) that it’s probably because that sort of program would require huge physical and intellectual/programming resources and likely lots of funding. But even Now Brain thinks this technology has to be out there somewhere, maybe in a research lab or something. Then Future Brain chimes in again. No no, this kind of thing should be so ubiquitous, people don’t even think about it anymore. Where the heck is this technology?!
This is not the first thing Future Brain and Now Brain have disagreed about, and I’m sure it won’t be the last. Generally, it has something to do with technology that Future Brain says should be so pervasive as to be trivial, invisible…and isn’t, (and Now Brain grumbles about how this disparity inevitably impacts my bank account because things are expensive when they aren’t commonplace). And this is more than just a thought that crosses my mind occassionally. It’s an odd sensation that I feel at once in both my gut and my head, like my senses are telling me the wrong things. Very weird. Usually that part of it only lasts a moment, and then it turns into something almost completely intellectual.
Do you ever get this feeling? Like you’re out of place in time? Share in the comments! You are not alone! ;)
Do I get this feeling? All the time. Well.. not that I’m in the wrong time, but that there’s technology that we should have but we don’t. For instance, why are search engines so retarded? I mean, I consider my Google-Fu to be VERY strong, and yet there are times that I look for something using a very specific search string.. and Google returns things that just make me scratch my head and wonder.
Especially image searches. Seriously, they’re working on face recognition software, why don’t we have “basic object recognition software”? Why when I search the term “red bouncy ball” do I get several images that have *nothing* to do with what I looked for? Even if that term is in their description, why can’t Google “look” at the image and realize that not only is it NOT a red bouncy ball, there’s nothing RED or BOUNCY or BALL-LIKE even *in* the picture?!
Also, yay for you being able to track comments, but now I’m not going to know if you reply. :[ Unless this thing automatically emails me. :\
Oh, man – I have this thought all the time! Mostly I’m waiting for a laptop that goes as fast as my brain sometimes wants it to; I’m tired of getting the spinning beach ball of death when I’m switching back and forth between a million apps and tabs.
Your point is a good one, though. A couple months ago I read this great book by Clay Shirky called Here Comes Everybody and in it he talks about how social media allows people to organize themselves in ways that have been historically impossible because there simply was no business case for anyone to develop a method for them to do so.
He refers to this guy named Coase (an economist, I think?) who said that organizations exist to lower transaction costs. He talks about this idea of a Coasian ceiling, but then adds that there is also a Coasian floor: transactions that have to be organized, but that no organization is willing to pay for. His example was photo tagging of the Mermaid Parade in Flickr. Flickr removes the “Coasian floor” by allowing people to organize themselves (and their content) without the overhead of the organization.
So, WTF does this have to do with your question? I think that right now, hashtags — and the management of what those hashtags mean — are something no business would engage in because the cost to develop or deploy the technology would be too high and the payoff is unknown (but presumably quite low). Personally, I also have this bias against believing that machines can understand context (e.g. all the sarcastic hashtags that exist). But now that I’ve said that out loud, someday a machine will probably prove me wrong on that! And I guess that’s a long way of saying yes, you were probably born in the wrong era because someday a robot will clean up all our hashtags for us.
That’s my two cents!
P.S. Thanks for reading Geek Girls Guide. ;)