Information Sharing Is Now Instantaneous. So What?

The ability to share information and it be readily available to consume by the receiver is the most underrated advancement brought forth by technology.

We forget that the propagation of information, historically, has been incredibly slow.

• In 490 B.C., a Greek messenger ran from Marathon to Athens to deliver the news of an important Greek victory.

• Julius Caesar used pigeons for information transmission in his war endeavors.

Information sharing at scale is crucial for any type of coordinated activity, whether for organizing a group of friends to go watch a movie, or for war.

Technologists throughout history have thus iterated over many inventions in communication, hitting milestones such as: the printing press, telegraph, radio and television.

However, with these inventions, the cost to send information has always been much greater than the one to receive it.

• The printing press versus the press

• The radio station versus the radio receiver

Given the mass sharing of ideas is synonymous to power, you naturally see a lot of media institutions nowadays be politicized.

With the Internet, not only is messaging instantaneous, but its also democratized.

Just as I'm able to share this idea and you're able to read it all at no cost. Everybody can learn from anybody, regardless of where they are in the world. It does comes with a cost for misinformation, but it's worth it.

With information now free and democratized, the best math teacher in the world can now teach math to the entire world.

Think about how powerful that is.

Repeat this for all fields and their niches and you get a flywheel of collaboration and compounding of ideas that set the world up for exponential progress.