Searching for a better way to get informed

Beyond search engines, social networks and messaging apps

Humanity has never stopped improving his way of accessing information. Search engines and social networks are only one step in this quest where the ultimate frontier is telepathy.

Indeed, will you continue to use Facebook or Twitter when you can directly connect to the spirit of your contacts to know what they think? Will you continue to use messaging apps when you can communicate in a telepathic way? Or use Google when you can, with the help of implants, do some researches directly into the minds of each one of us?

Telepathy will eventually unify these 3 differentiated uses of the Internet which are search, social networking and instant messaging.

If it is difficult to envisage telepathy as a means of communication, it is not because the technology (intracerebral implant) is not yet mature. But it is mainly because such progress would mean that we would have accepted to let go a concept that has structured our societies and our relations since the dawn of time: privacy.

However, beyond my personal feelings on the subject, four reasons led me to the certainty that mankind will cross the frontier of privacy and this will pave the way for a telepathic communication.

1 — Our progress through the ages are going in this direction

In terms of communication and information, all the progress our species has done for millennia, are pointing in one direction: to improve our access to information.

To the extent that the information can largely be defined as a thought expressed by an individual, improving its access means improving access to the thinking of the other.

From the beginning, the first tool we have, namely the face to face conversation, was already nothing more than a way to access the mind of someone. Later, books, printing, telephony, Internet each contributed to strengthen, improve and organize this access. How then can we not think that these irresistible developments will not lead us to telepathy?

2 — Search engines and social networks are not enough effective to find content

In the current state, as a user, none of the means available to us to get informed gave me a real and complete satisfaction.

On one hand, Google Pagerank is not relevant in an area where the Internet emancipates itself from its web origin. On the other hand, social networks as designed, does not provide an effective source of access to information, either because they hold back the user in his tastes and convictions rather than open him to other perspectives, or because the signal/noise ratio in our timeline are too low.

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3 —Messaging apps are replacing social networks

In the same movement we see the emergence of messaging tool that offers a better engagement and a signal/noise ratio well above that of social networks. This is especially interesting to note because messaging apps marks the return to the fundamental origins of communication: conversation. The success of tools like Slack also demonstrates how the concept of conversation has become the cornerstone of the future of the Internet.

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However messaging apps are limited to a private conversation between few participants while Slack operates as a closed group. It remains to develop a tool based on a public and open conversation. It is on this principle of public conversation that we can consider the interface that will make plausible the idea of telepathy.

4 — End of privacy in a post-Snowden world

The absence of a proportionate response of the public opinion to the Edward Snowden’s revelations, demonstrates, in my opinion, that we accept somehow the erosion of our privacy.

This change creates a resilience in us that will eventually be consolidated by a quasi-anthropological change: future generations will end the debates around privacy and security by using tools based on transparency. The success of recommendation features, and the emergence of the blockchain protocol shows that we are heading in this direction.

“Privacy is gone […] I encourage people to get on the other side of the debate and not trying to hold on to values that are simply unsustainable in the face of the reality of technological changes.”

These 4 comments above are clues that should enable us to anticipate the arrival of telepathy. For my part, trying to work in this direction, I created a new platform called FORUM it is halfway between a social network, a public messaging tool and a search engine.

>>I invite you to discover it in its public bêta version on Android<<

>>You can also learn more about Forum here<<

This article was first published on Forum.