by Kevin Kelly
Netflix announced an award: Preethi Dumpala, “Netflix Reveals Million-Dollar Contest Winner,” Business Insider, September 21, 2009.
Forty thousand groups submitted: “Leaderboard,” Netflix Prize, 2009.
150,000 car fanatics: Gary Gastelu, “Local Motors 3-D-Printed Car Could Lead an American Manufacturing Revolution,” Fox News, July 3, 2014.
3-D-printed electric car: Paul A. Eisenstein, “Startup Plans to Begin Selling First 3-D-Printed Cars Next Year,” NBC News, July 8, 2015.
7: FILTERING
8 million new songs: Private correspondence with Richard Gooch, CTO, International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, April 15, 2015. This is a low estimate, with a higher estimate being 12 million, according to Paul Jessop and David Hughes, “In the Matter of: Technological Upgrades to Registration and Recordation Functions,” Docket No. 2013-2, U.S. Copyright Office, 2013, Comments in response to the March 22, 2013, Notice of Inquiry.
2 million new books: “Annual Report,” International Publishers Association, Geneva, 2014, http://goo.gl/UNfZLP.
16,000 new films: “Most Popular TV Series/Feature Films Released in 2014 (Titles by Country),” IMDb, 2015, accessed August 5, 2015.
30 billion blog posts: Extrapolations based on the following: “About (Posts Today),” Tumblr, accessed August 5, 2015; and “A Live Look at Activity Across WordPress.com,” WordPress, accessed August 5, 2015.
182 billion tweets: “Company,” Twitter, accessed August 5, 2015.
400,000 new products: “Global New Products Database,” Mintel, accessed June 25, 2015.
total number of songs: “Introducing Gracenote Rhythm,” Gracenote, accessed May 1, 2015.
2,000 hours to completely read: Based on an average reading speed of 250 words per minute, average for U.S. eighth graders. Brett Nelson, “Do You Read Fast Enough to Be Successful?,” Forbes, June 4, 2012.
29 million words: “Great Books of the Western World,” Encyclopaedia Britannica Australia, 2015.
a third of Amazon sales: James Manyika, Michael Chui, Brad Brown, et al., “Big Data: The Next Frontier for Innovation, Competition, and Productivity,” McKinsey Global Institute, 2011. This is a conservative estimate. An outside analyst estimates it could be closer to two thirds.
about $30 billion in 2014: Extrapolated from 2014 sales/revenue of $88.9 billion. “Amazon.com Inc. (Financials),” Market Watch, accessed August 5, 2015.
300 people working: Janko Roettgers, “Netflix Spends $150 Million on Content Recommendations Every Year,” Gigaom, October 9, 2014.
automatically map one’s position: Eduardo Graells-Garrido, Mounia Lalmas, and Daniele Quercia, “Data Portraits: Connecting People of Opposing Views,” arXiv Preprint, November 19, 2013.
Studies show that going to the next circle: Eytan Bakshy, Itamar Rosenn, Cameron Marlow, et al., “The Role of Social Networks in Information Diffusion,” arXiv, January 2012, 1201.4145 [physics].
200 average friends: Aaron Smith, “6 New Facts About Facebook,” Pew Research Center, February 3, 2014.
all the posts your friends make: Victor Luckerson, “Here’s How Your Facebook News Feed Actually Works,” Time, July 9, 2015.
35 billion emails a day: My calculation based on figures from the following: “Email Statistics Report, 2014–2018,” Radicati Group, April 2014; and “Email Client Market Share,” Litmus, April, 2015.
filters the content of 60 trillion pages: “How Search Works,” Inside Search, Google, 2013.
about 2 million times every minute: Danny Sullivan, “Google Still Doing at Least 1 Trillion Searches Per Year,” Search Engine Land, January 16, 2015.
“3 billion questions a day”: Ibid.
“a poverty of attention”: Herbert Simon, “Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World,” in Computers, Communication, and the Public Interest, ed. Martin Greenberger (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971).
TV still captures most of our attention: Dounia Turrill and Glenn Enoch, “The Total Audience Report: Q1 2015,” Nielsen, June 23, 2015.
average CPM of various media platforms: “The Media Monthly,” Peter J. Solomon Company, 2014.
half a trillion hours: Calculation based on the following: “Census Bureau Projects U.S. and World Populations on New Year’s Day,” U.S. Census Bureau Newsroom, December 29, 2014; and Dounia Turrill and Glenn Enoch, “The Total Audience Report: Q1 2015,” Nielsen, June 23, 2015.
average $3.60 per hour of attention: Michael Johnston, “What Are Average CPM Rates in 2014?,” MonetizePros, July 21, 2014.
4.3 hours to read: Calculation based on Gabe Habash, “The Average Book Has 64,500 Words,” Publishers Weekly, March 6, 2012; and Brett Nelson, “Do You Read Fast Enough to Be Successful?” Forbes, June 4, 2012.
$23 to buy: Private communication with Kempton Mooney, Nielsen, April 16, 2015.
every one of the 60 trillion pages: “How Search Works,” Inside Search, Google, 2013.
guided by the context: “How Ads Are Targeted to Your Site,” AdSense Help, accessed August 6, 2015.
interest of the reader visiting: Jon Mitchell, “What Do Google Ads Know About You?,” ReadWrite, November 10, 2011.
21 percent of Google’s total revenue: “2014 Financial Tables,” Google Investor Relations, accessed August 7, 2015.
5,000 user-made submissions: Michael Castillo, “Doritos Reveals 10 ‘Crash the Super Bowl’ Ad Finalists,” Adweek, January 5, 2015.
awards $1 million to the winner: Gabe Rosenberg, “How Doritos Turned User-Generated Content into the Biggest Super Bowl Campaign of the Year,” Content Strategist, Contently, January 12, 2015.
4,000 were negative ads: Greg Sandoval, “GM Slow to React to Nasty Ads,” CNET, April 3, 2006.
asymmetry of attention in email: Esther Dyson, “Caveat Sender!,” Project Syndicate, February 20, 2013.
total lifetime spending of a customer: Brad Sugars, “How to Calculate the Lifetime Value of a Customer,” Entrepreneur, August 8, 2012.
$168,000 worth of merchandise: Morgan Quinn, “The 2015 Oscar Swag Bag Is Worth $168,000 but Comes with a Catch,” Las Vegas Review-Journal, February 22, 2015.
“downward trend in real commodity prices”: Paul Cashin and C. John McDermott, “The Long-Run Behavior of Commodity Prices: Small Trends and Big Variability,” IMF Staff Papers 49, no. 2 (2002).
dropping cost of copper: Indur M. Goklany, “Have Increases in Population, Affluence and Technology Worsened Human and Environmental Well-Being?,” Electronic Journal of Sustainable Development 1, no. 3 (2009).
Luxury entertainment is increasing 6.5 percent: Liyan Chen, “The Forbes 400 Shopping List: Living the 1% Life Is More Expensive Than Ever,” Forbes, September 30, 2014.
Spending at restaurants and bars: Hiroko Tabuchi, “Stores Suffer from a Shift of Behavior in Buyers,” New York Times, August 13, 2015.
price of the average concert ticket: Alan B. Krueger, “Land of Hope and Dreams: Rock and Roll, Economics, and Rebuilding the Middle Class,” remarks given at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, White House Council of Economic Advisers, June 12, 2013.
rose 400 percent from 1982 to 2014: “Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers: Medical Care [CPIMEDSL],” U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, via FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, accessed June 25, 2015.
rate for babysitting: “2014 National Childcare Survey: Babysitting Rates & Nanny Pay,” Urban Sitter, 2014; and Ed Halteman, “2013 INA Salary and Benefits Survey,” International Nanny Association, 2012.
cost of home visits: Brant Morefield, Michael Plotzke, Anjana Patel, et al., “Hospice Cost Reports: Benchmarks and Trends, 2004–2011,” Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 2011.
8: REMIXING
existing resources that are rearranged: Paul M. Romer, “Economic Growth,” Conc
ise Encyclopedia of Economics, Library of Economics and Liberty, 2008.
combination of existing technologies: W. Brian Arthur, The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves (New York: Free Press, 2009).
fan-created works to date: Archive of Our Own, accessed July 29, 2015.
12 million Vine clips: Jenna Wortham, “Vine, Twitter’s New Video Tool, Hits 13 Million Users,” Bits blog, New York Times, June 3, 2013.
1.5 billion daily loops: Carmel DeAmicis, “Vine Rings in Its Second Year by Hitting 1.5 Billion Daily Loops,” Gigaom, January 26, 2015.
million person-hours to produce: Personal calculation. Very few materials are consumed making a movie; 95 percent of the cost goes to labor and people’s time, including subcontractors. Assuming that the average wage is less than $100 per hour, a $100 million movie entails at least one million hours of work.
about 600 feature films are released: “Theatrical Market Statistics 2014,” Motion Picture Association of America, 2015.
12 billion times in a single month: “ComScore Releases January 2014 U.S. Online Video Rankings,” comScore, February 21, 2014.
more than any blockbuster movie: The top-selling movie, Gone with the Wind, has sold an estimated 202,044,600 tickets. “All Time Box Office,” Box Office Mojo, accessed August 7, 2015.
100 million short video clips: Mary Meeker, “Internet Trends 2014—Code Conference,” Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, 2014.
Iron Editor challenge: “Sakura-Con 2015 Results (and Info),” Iron Editor, April 7, 2015; and Neda Ulaby, “‘Iron Editors’ Test Anime Music-Video Skills,” NPR, August 2, 2007.
than with traditional cinematography: Michael Rubin, Droidmaker: George Lucas and the Digital Revolution (Gainesville, FL: Triad Publishing, 2005).
1.5 trillion photos posted: Mary Meeker, “Internet Trends 2014—Code Conference,” Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, 2014.
“database cinema”: Lev Manovich, “Database as a Symbolic Form,” Millennium Film Journal 34 (1999); and Cristiano Poian, “Investigating Film Algorithm: Transtextuality in the Age of Database Cinema,” presented at the Cinema and Contemporary Visual Arts II, V Magis Gradisca International Film Studies Spring School, 2015, accessed August 19, 2015.
in the 13th century: Malcolm B. Parkes, “The Influence of the Concepts of Ordinatio and Compilatio on the Development of the Book,” in Medieval Learning and Literature: Essays Presented to Richard William Hunt, eds. J. J. G. Alexander and M. T. Gibson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), 115–27.
Footnotes, invented in about: Ivan Illich, In the Vineyard of the Text: A Commentary to Hugh’s Didascalicon (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 97.
bibliographic citations: Malcolm B. Parkes, “The Influence of the Concepts of Ordinatio and Compilation on the Development of the Book,” in Medieval Learning and Literature: Essays Presented to Richard William Hunt, eds. J.J.G. Alexander and M. T. Gibson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), 115–27.
gaining visual intelligence rapidly: John Markoff, “Researchers Announce Advance in Image-Recognition Software,” New York Times, November 17, 2014.
“one can only reread it”: Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Literature (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980).
“He who receives an idea from me”: Thomas Jefferson, “Thomas Jefferson to Isaac McPherson, 13 Aug. 1813,” in Founders’ Constitution, eds. Philip B. Kurland and Ralph Lerner (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1986).
multibillion-dollar industry: “Music Industry Revenue in the U.S. 2014,” Statista, 2015, accessed August 11, 2015.
uncertainty about Google’s reuse: Margaret Kane, “Google Pauses Library Project,” CNET, October 10, 2005.
70 years after the death of the creator: “Duration of Copyright,” Section 302(a), Circular 92, Copyright Law of the United States of America and Related Laws Contained in Title 17 of the United States Code, U.S. Copyright Office, accessed August 11, 2015.
9: INTERACTING
dim room in the research labs of Stanford: In-person VR demonstration by Jeremy Bailenson, director, Stanford University’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab, June 2015.
empty head-mounted display unit: Menchie Mendoza, “Google Cardboard vs. Samsung Gear VR: Which Low-Cost VR Headset Is Best for Gaming?,” Tech Times, July 21, 2015.
“light field” projection: Douglas Lanman, “Light Field Displays at AWE2014 (Video),” presented at the Augmented World Expo, June 2, 2014.
first commercial light field units: Jessi Hempel, “Project HoloLens: Our Exclusive Hands-On with Microsoft’s Holographic Goggles,” Wired, January 21, 2015.
50,000 avatars are simultaneously roaming: Luppicini Rocci, Moral, Ethical, and Social Dilemmas in the Age of Technology: Theories and Practice (Hershey, PA: IGI Global, 2013); and Mei Douthitt, “Why Did Second Life Fail? (Mei’s Answer),” Quora, March 18, 2015.
Half of them are there for virtual sex: Frank Rose, “How Madison Avenue Is Wasting Millions on a Deserted Second Life,” Wired, July 24, 2007.
urinal in the men’s restroom: Nicholas Negroponte, “Sensor Deprived,” Wired 2(10), October 1, 1994.
“not enough Africa in them”: Kevin Kelly, “Gossip Is Philosophy,” Wired 3(5), May 1995.
Project Jacquard: Virginial Postre, “Google’s Project Jacquard Gets It Right,” BloombergView, May 31, 2015.
prototype from Northeastern University: Brian Heater, “Northeastern University Squid Shirt Torso-On,” Engadget, June 12, 2012.
Sensory Substitution Vest: Shirley Li, “The Wearable Device That Could Unlock a New Human Sense,” Atlantic, April 14, 2015.
she could drink from it: Leigh R. Hochberg, Daniel Bacher, Beata Jarosiewicz, et al., “Reach and Grasp by People with Tetraplegia Using a Neurally Controlled Robotic Arm,” Nature 485, no. 7398 (2012): 372–75.
“skin him afterward”: Scott Sharkey, “Red Dead Redemption Review,” 1Up.com, May 17, 2010.
40 to 50 hours to complete: “Red Dead Redemption,” How Long to Beat, accessed August 11, 2015.
10: TRACKING
200 Quantified Self Meetup groups: “Quantified Self Meetups,” Meetup, accessed August 11, 2015.
he generates an annual report: Nicholas Felton, “2013 Annual Report,” Feltron.com, 2013.
as if he could feel a map: Sunny Bains, “Mixed Feelings,” Wired 15(4), 2007.
“calendar items, to-do lists”: Eric Thomas Freeman, “The Lifestreams Software Architecture” [dissertation], Yale University, May 1997.
“Your entire cyberlife is right there”: Nicholas Carreiro, Scott Fertig, Eric Freeman, and David Gelernter, “Lifestreams: Bigger Than Elvis,” Yale University, March 25, 1996.
Steve Mann in the 1990s: Steve Mann, personal web page, accessed July 29, 2015.
Bell documented every aspect: “MyLifeBits—Microsoft Research,” Microsoft Research, accessed July 29, 2015.
34 billion internet-enabled devices: “The Internet of Things Will Drive Wireless Connected Devices to 40.9 Billion in 2020,” ABI Research, August 20, 2014.
600 percent increase in iPods: “Apple’s Profit Soars Thanks to iPod’s Popularity,” Associated Press, April 14, 2005.
production tanked in 2009: “Infographic: The Decline of iPod,” Infogram, accessed May 3, 2015.
benefits we humans covet: Sean Madden, “Tech That Tracks Your Every Move Can Be Convenient, Not Creepy,” Wired, March 10, 2014.
54 billion sensors every year by 2020: “Connections Counter: The Internet of Everything in Motion,” The Network, Cisco, July 29, 2013.
11: QUESTIONING
35 million articles in 288 languages: “List of Wikipedias,” Wikimedia Meta-Wiki, accessed April 30, 2015.
“how to make people click ads”: Ashlee Vance, “This Tech Bubble Is Different,” Bloomberg Business, April 14, 2014.
4 billion screens lit today: Calculation base
d on the following: Charles Arthur, “Future Tablet Market Will Outstrip PCs—and Reach 900m People, Forrester Says,” Guardian, August 7, 2013; Michael O’Grady, “Forrester Research World Tablet Adoption Forecast, 2013 to 2018 (Global), Q4 2014 Update,” Forrester, December 19, 2014; and “Smartphones to Drive Double-Digit Growth of Smart Connected Devices in 2014 and Beyond, According to IDC,” IDC, June 17, 2014.
50 billion devices on the internet by 2020: “Connections Counter,” Cisco, 2013.
another 13 billion appliances: “Gartner Says 4.9 Billion Connected ‘Things’ Will Be in Use in 2015,” Gartner, November 11, 2014.
built into connected cars: Ibid.
6 billion times per year: “$4.11: A NARUC Telecommunications Staff Subcommittee Report on Directory Assistance,” National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners, 2003, 68.
two lookups per week in the 1990s: Peter Krasilovsky, “Usage Study: 22% Quit Yellow Pages for Net,” Local Onliner, October 11, 2005.
1 billion library visits per year: Adrienne Chute, Elaine Kroe, Patricia Garner, et al., “Public Libraries in the United States: Fiscal Year 1999,” NCES 200230, National Center for Education Statistics, U.S. Department of Education, 2002.
$82 billion business: Don Reisinger, “For Google and Search Ad Revenue, It’s a Glass Half Full,” CNET, March 31, 2015.
four questions per day online: Danny Sullivan, “Internet Top Information Resource, Study Finds,” Search Engine Watch, February 5, 2001.
ordinary people might pay for search: Yan Chen, Grace YoungJoo, and Jeon Yong-Mi Kim, “A Day Without a Search Engine: An Experimental Study of Online and Offline Search,” University of Michigan, 2010.
average value of answering a question: Hal Varian, “The Economic Impact of Google,” video, Web 2.0 Expo, San Francisco, 2011.
INDEX
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