Now, procrastinating in my usual manner, but without the distractive aid of the internet, I found myself asking "What would you rather give up, salt and pepper, or instant communication?" This was in contrast to my usual "Would you rather have a lungful of hydrogen ignited, or have an image of Dora the Explorer permanently imprinted on your retinas?" and various other painful scenarios.
Oh, wait. There isn't really that much of a contrast. Losing salt and pepper would make food amazingly bland, or all sweet. When everything is either tasteless(ie. natural) or sweet, the craving for chips would probably become overwhelming. Losing mobile phones and the internet, on the other hand, would also be amazingly excruciating, albeit different ways.
In this age, information is expected to travel almost instantaneously. After all, we have things like Wi-Fi, copper transmission cables, and radio waves. While technically taking considerably more than a jiffy to traverse regular distances, your email usually gets to its destination long before you could walk to your kitchen for a snack. However, the rate at which information is really transmitted around the world is notably lower, due to several factors that I have managed to come up with off the top of my head.
There could be a mathematical equation for this. The speed at which information reaches any individual, measured in megabytes per second, is proportional to the actual transmission rates, multiplied by the inverse of the magnitude of procrastination on the part of the sender, the desire to receive information on the part of the receiver, "unforeseen" circumstance, and of general idiocy. See, much of the time spent transferring information around is wasted before the information is sent. Often, the information is right there, waiting to be brutally compressed into a .zip file, but the person who has been charged with delivering it usually has Other Things To Do.
Yes, that shall be an acronym now. OTTD, along with Someone Else's Problem, and And Your Point Is?
The solution to this is to turn everyone into cyborgs, where they would lose any ability to make a decision regarding the sending of information, and instead be controlled by an automated system that makes them send an email when they are told to. This would be exceptionally useful for people in charge of the dissemination of various things, such as personalised spam, and advertisements promoting the enlargement of certain organs.
The other part of the problem, is on the receiver's end. Many people assume that once information is sent, the other party will receive it. This is simply not true, as anyone who has ever tried using this invention known as Short Message Service could tell you. For one, the receiver may not have felt the telltale vibrations in his pants upon the reception of his message. This probably counts into the equation detailing this side of the transfer.
Unsurprisingly, the solution I am offering also involves invoking the loss of people's ability to make decisions. Also, since most often we are alerted to information by sensory input, and that much of this sensory input goes unnoticed(vibrating pants), it is natural to look for a solution that bypasses this limitation. One way to do it would be to raise the chances of one becoming aware of incoming information. This would be done in ways such as having mechanised trousers that amplify the vibrations of one's mobile phone. This approach, however, is expensive and very uncool. The alternative, while no less expensive, is very much lacking in the uncoolness department. Instead of making the signals of information more obvious to the receiver, this method entirely bypasses the need for sensory input.
Naturally, this would involve sending information directly into one's brain. This would also involve turning people into cyborgs, as the brain doesn't store information like a computer chip. Also built in with the memory device, will have to be something that forces people to look at the information. To make sure that they understand it, the device will have to put the person's thought processes through some algorithms, and perhaps force the person to acquire the necessary knowledge required for understanding the subject information.
This could backfire in that people might abuse the system to make other people mess up the schedules during the mandatory knowledge-acquirement periods. Undoubtedly, there would be ways to prevent this, but that would sound way too technical. Even I can't discuss something like that here.
And I still can't remember any announcement that I was planning to make. Maybe there wasn't one, and that I just thought that starting a post with "People!" was amusing.
Hmm.
Oh, and by the way, the Second Law of Thermodynamics doesn't disallow evolution in any way. Just saying.
-Joe