Brain Stuff

Push Button Tuning

The history of radio broadcasting served as an appropriate backdrop for understanding of what changing communications meant to their effort. Many inexpensive crystal radio sets listening to one or a handful of broadcasters. Straightforward but costly to transmit but amortized over the many who could listen with a very small investment.

Technologically constrained but economically viable. In America, advertising proved instrumental to radio's success. Zero cost replication of the message was a characteristic of the high technology medium of the time. The audience capacity to purchase what was promoted over the new medium closed the loop as they went to the advertiser's business for products or services.

Though the distribution system was novel and a sociological breakthrough, the content is what drove radio adoption just as it had done for newspapers before. A medium, at best, is only as good as what it carries.

The big difference now … cost effective to support many communication paradigms for a critical mass of the global population. Interactive, ad-hoc, flexible, adaptive etc. The very foundation of biological consciousness emergence millennia ago now reflected in its artifacts. And creative recursion had kicked it into a higher orbit.

Each medium had its masters. Who would become the masters of the medium that could enlighten masses? The machine's collection of patterns were beginning to form their own meta patterns. Synthesizing a coherent personality(s) seemed a distinct possibility. And for the first time, it looked as though one would not have to take it on faith alone that a memetic consciousness would emerge.