The format of a My Take is 150 words – no more, no less – to express an opinion on a different topic each week. This week’s topic was research
In 2007, I worked a logistics contract at the thinky-talky conference wing of a well-known Montreal music festival. It had keynotes from famous rock stars and documentarians, panel discussions about shifting from analog to digital, lawyers and dj’s debating sampling versus copyright royalties. The kind of longform discussion that, a decade and a half later, is pretty formulaic in so many Youtube or podcast formats.
As I think how the phrase “Do your own research” has morphed since becoming the mantra of the QAnon and plandemic subcultures, I remember one prophetic panelist pulling a still-revolutionary iPod from his breast pocket: “As the cost and speed of storage and transmission tends toward infinity, the value of data will tend toward zero.”
Not since the newspaper barons of the late 19th-century have we been called on to develop new practices to manage such a glut of information.
