I find myself unable to participate in most of today's the online conversations. What's the future of Twitter? I don't understand all the fuss, no matter who is the owner, fundamentally, nothing will change. The fundamental societal issues remain the same.
“We all would like to know more and, at the same time, to receive less information. In fact, the problem of a worker in today's knowledge industry is not the scarcity of information but its excess. The same holds for professionals: just think of a physician or an executive, constantly bombarded by information that is at best irrelevant. In order to learn anything, we need time. And to make time we must use information filters allowing us to ignore most of the information aimed at us. We must ignore much to learn a little.”
Mario Bunge
Philosophy in Crisis: The Need for Reconstruction, 2001, p. 20
A recent discussion in Remark.as triggered by a Paolo Amoroso's post remind me of the following story, nicely put together by Brantley Coile.
Edsger W. Dijkstra (EWD) was a Dutch computer scientist. After finishing his PhD. in theoretical physics at Leiden University, he spent his whole life helping to shape what today we know as Computer Science. As a tangential note, EWD preferred the term Computing Science because the field of study is not the computer (hardware) but the computing those computers perform (software)[1]. Sadly, the world does not care about these nuances as he does.
