Sunday, November 25, 2012; 9:39:53 PM Eastern
A time of information poverty
- It's Sunday night of a Thanksgiving weekend in NY and there are a bunch of movies playing I haven't seen. But in NY it's hard to know, for me at least, when theaters will be crowded. Is this a good time to go to the movies if you like a relatively empty theater and a short popcorn line?
- Sometimes the theaters in NY are packed when you'd least expect it.
- We live in a time of information poverty. Someday you'll tell your grandchildren there was a time when you couldn't zoom in on the local theater and see how many people had bought tickets for the show that starts in 25 minutes.
- It might help fill in the empty spots in theater's calendars.
- Related idea: I like to fly when the plane is pretty empty.
- Will we still have movie theaters then? Well, we don't really need them now, if it weren't for DRM and licensing we could watch them at home. But it is nice to go out to a movie. But maybe future generations will think that as quaint as the notion that it's nice to hold a paper book or printed news in your hands. Something about the smell of the ink or paper, I think.
In 1990, I was at my brother's house in Palo Alto. It was about 9PM and we knew the Mets were playing the Dodgers in LA. We decided to try to find the score, using the means available in 1990. We called the stadium. And the newspapers in New York and Los Angeles. Someone somewhere knew the score, but we couldn't find them. - A number of years before that, driving into San Francisco, I wondered how many people I knew there, and thought I probably knew quite a few. No way to find them in 1979. I figured someday I'd have all my contacts in a database and would be able to synch up with a global database with people's addresses. I'm not sure if Facebook can do that today, but they certainly have the data.
- Someday we'll have a lot more usable information, if things go as they should, or so it seems.
- It might be interesting to think of what we'll need to get there, that we don't currently have. If anything. :-)
