June 21, 2010

"Projecting Our Ignorance Is The Past, Injecting Our Ignorance Is The Future" It appears that Kynetx's Blog Post Buzzword Auto-Generator may have some bugs in it.

In case somebody wises up and fixes or delete this (maybe not, it's over 24 hours old and has been tweeted and retweeted a few times), here is what it originally said: One thing that my generation should be thankful for is our shameless ability to find out more about our surroundings. Even the shyest amongst my generation are seemingly not afraid to question and learn when it is necessary to do so. It is not uncommon for me to post, or see, a question on Facebook or Twitter that is meant to further understanding on a specific topic within a trusted network. This has lead to, in my opinion, a generation that is the epitome of knowing very little about a lot, or in the terms of Joe Vito, a generation willing to, “projecting our ignorance”(my emphasis - foop). Social media properties such as Facebook and Twitter have made it easy for my generation to project our ignorance. All it takes is a sign up form, a few connections, a status box and voila! We have answers from a network of people we trust. This sort of willingness to project our ignorance is a necessity for our generation because we are expected to know a little about a lot, and social properties allow us to project our ignorance in a very elegant way. I would even go as far to say that projecting our ignorance on the web has been, or is close to, perfected. This, to me, is a shame. Why must I always project my ignorance in order to figure out how to appropriately fill out my FAFSA for college, or consistently email my friends already in college asking what classes I should take with which professor in order to get the most out of my classes I am paying exuberant amounts for? After all, most of this data is already available on various websites with vast amounts of relevant information stored in their databases, why am I not being connected with it automatically? Wouldn’t it be wonderful if while looking for classes to register for, students’ reviews populated each class description? This would save a great amount of time, effort, as well as a bit of personal sanity. Thankfully, the platforms that enable injection rather than projection are here, with Kynetx leading the pack. Just take a look at Steven Nay’s BookComparison application, a tool that I am sure many students of BYU are extremely thankful for. With Steven’s application built on top of the context aware Kynetx platform, the ignorance is brought to the user, not projected from the user. This is how the web as we see it needs to work, and hopefully Kynetx will be the center of that. Of course, a lot needs to happen before the web turns into a platform where our ignorance is brought to us. One of the first steps that needs to be taken is allowing developers to access the data that is now hoarded by many web properties. That, though, is a topic worthy of many posts that will have to be held off for another day. In the meantime, Joe Vito is right, my generation is great at projecting our ignorance in order to further ourselves in this world, and the web as a whole is making this easier for us on a day to day basis. Still, I hope that this does not continue to be the case, and that Kynetx does lead us into a web where the ignorance is brought to us. After all, wouldn’t it be nice if you didn’t always have to admit that you are, in fact, an ignorant person (this may be the point the author is really trying to get to - foop). I am sure it wouldn’t do our egos any harm having a contextualized web.

  • OK, I'll bite. MonkeyFilter: the ignorance is brought to us
  • Ouch! You bite hard!
  • I fail to understand this post at all. However, as we only get a post or two per day, that is hardly a complaint. What I particularly do like about this post is that I believe it has established a new record for most inside when there is a "more inside" to click.
  • Sorry, I felt compelled to cut and paste the entire text of the blog post when I believed the poster or the site would realize that "injecting our ignorance" is either the most badly worded or purely asinine concept ever promoted by a software company and take it down or fix it. I obviously overestimated their intelligence since they have been re-tweeting all mentions of the absurdly worded post. This is true "Worst of the Web" yet quite valuable for identifying a company with its head so far up its ass that extraction may not be possible.
  • It looks like a disgruntled person searched and replaced "information" with "ignorance", perhaps. Or "intelligence" for "ignorance". Or it was machine translated from the original Klingon without proofing. Perhaps they don't have a Preview button either.