The future of exchanges on the Internet 🛜
The future form of exchanges could be based on tools that allow the connection of information around specific concepts and subjects, facilitating more efficient and open searching.
We have been for a long time, following the digital age scale that is going very fast, in the era of exchanges via flows or threads of content posts that are either text or videos, etc.
What will be the new form of our exchanges?
I don’t have the exact perspective but some wishes:
In recent years, the tools that structure data into « graphs » have been growing.
This structure makes it possible to connect information and find it easily in relation to anchors that can be tags, concepts, subjects, etc.
With these tools, we can find all the information in connection to a single concept, backlinked on a simple « page ».
A space like LinkedIn or Twitter only allows you to find comments related to posts related to people.
The history of all contributions on a given theme can only be found with a search by keywords. And we only can find data related to authorized people we follow.
It’s still very limited.
Then a chatGPT emerges allowing you to talk to a single « person » and access the knowledge of « all humans » - which is another possibility but which is no longer based on rebounds by interactions between humans.
There are also chats like Slack, but this remains limited to contributions in closed circles and not related to each other.
I feel that something else is going to come out and I am quite optimistic about this possibility. The functioning of current platforms such as LinkedIn seems to me outdated or even dangerous because it encloses thought and we will necessarily generate and find a lot of duplicate content that leads to information overload and therefore cognitive overload.
What would the next step be for you?
For promising tools that lead the way:
Roam research
Tana
Obsidian
Notion > When we start connecting the data of several spaces between them
Slite > but will need the possibility to connect data between workspaces
As a powerful tool on the road to these possibilities, and not so far away, I would really put Notion on the front: it is quite permissive and accessible to structure real interconnected networks.
Tomorrow there will certainly be Google and its suite just like Microsoft but they rather choose to create silos for data security issues.
In short, the reflection continues. What is yours on these subjects?
This is a topic I’ve found myself thinking a lot about recently, with regards to what the future of the academic ecosystem will look like. How will it be possible to evolve this ecosystem by using the growing capabilities to structure data into graphs?
Currently, academic ecosystems are very “linear” as you describe. This serves to exacerbate problems caused by the increasingly specialised and fragmented nature of the (in my case, mathematical) community.
I think tools like the ones you mentioned (and concepts like the second brain) support more “nonlinear” growth and connection of information. I’ve been using Notion for a couple of years (and a Remarkable tablet for a few months) and have found them to feel a lot more natural to grow ideas on. I believe that scaling this digital technology up to a community level would therefore facilitate more natural and thus fruitful exchanges between people.
This is a topic I’d really love to know more about from the digital engineering point of view. Am not familiar with all the tools you mentioned - thanks for bringing them to my attention :)