One of my students passed this along:
Shift Happens – Click Here for more great videos and pictures!
I don’t know where this is from, nor have I verified the facts contained therein — although it seems that they’re directionally correct, even if a few details could be disputed.
In any case, it’s about six minutes long and well worth watching.
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That Myspace factoid reminds me of the subscription numbers for Second Life, which is adding something like a million accounts every six months.However, if you filter for accounts that are still accessed 30 days after creation, the number of real “users” drops by 60-75%.Numbers can mean anything though; it’s all about the context. This video is sorely lacking in context, so while I can’t prove or disprove any of the numbers, my bullshit detector is pinging loudly.
Good point. anon: 12:54I recall one time that I signed up for myspace just to look at a picture of a family member. I never accesed the site again, and do not evn remember the password. If I ever needed access to myspace again, I would probably have to make a whole new account, and, then likely, I would never visit it again.
And how many people have more than one account?
Reference to England in 1900 was telling. Interesting juxtaposition with post on New Bedford raid. Per the World Factbook, our 300 million population gives us less than 5% of the 6.446 billion people on the planet. One can presume that at least a majority of them live in conditions which would encourage them to better their lot in life, by any means possible. This would include illegally entering a “First World” country. Would it not behoove us to face the reality that America is increasingly incapable of handling open-ended, uncontrolled demographic and social change? “Robbing Peter to pay Paul” usually gets the support of Paul, eh?
Yup … lack of context. OK, so kids in schools today are being trained for technologies that don’t exist. You could have said that about someone who went to school in the 1930s and grew up and became a television repairman. The number of text messages on any given day exceeds the number of people on the planet? Whoop-dee-doo. I bet you could have said the same about telegraph messages at one point.
I’ve just gone through about half of it, and will go through the rest.And interesting set of numbers and statistics, the sum total of which signifies, pretty much, nothing.But, what led me to stop the video and comment here was the screen that saidWe are living in exponential timesNo, we are not living in exponential times, we are living in experimental times, as have our forefathers that came before us, and as will our descendants who come after us.We all live in experimental times. Get over it./rant–raj
The significance of the content aside, this trend of turning something simple into a “dramatic” video with soaring music is annoying. A simple web page would have given me the same thing in one minute, and I could have wasted the other five minutes somehwere else.
here’s the story behind the presentation and there’s a link to the guy’s sourceshttp://thefischbowl.blogspot.com/2006/08/did-you-know.html