You are viewing a single comment's thread from:
RE: The Perpetual Consumer Wheel
And then there are those of us "late adopters" that only buy any technology when it has gotten so ubiquitous that life is impeded without it. I had a "dumb phone" until just a year ago, when I was asked to do a day of workshops and speeches at an important conference and needed some features of a smart phone. To this day, unless I'm traveling, I barely turn the thing on. I have never owned a TV, but did have CDs that I just got rid of when I sold my house. I either recorded to Mp3 or just let it go. What will replace Mp3? Well hopefully nothing soon.
Simply, different file formats will replace .mp3.
As long as there's a demand for QUALITY over any intensive examination of the content, there'll be "improvements" engineered as solutions. It's not unjustifiable, it's simply that it's seldom necessary those improvements even exist, given that the relative amount of high-quality content doesn't improve quantitatively, especially content that CAN'T be distributed without those improvements.
Truly great music, great visual art, etc. will ALWAYS be made, the overwhelming sea of what is NOT pounding true quality through the noise floor is the impediment.
Arguably, we might be able to generate the kind of mass culture we have without high-speed protocols using different network architectures (they've been around since the 1940s with the advent of digital computing).