In the flesh
My online life started about 18 years ago with the BBSs, Fidonet, Relaynet, etc. In 1994 I got my first “true” connection to the Internet. Contrary to non-geek belief, this “staring at the monitor for hours on end” has not alienated me from the world, quite the opposite. I’ve met a whole lot of interesting people, some of which have become my friends, some even In Real Life. People I wouldn’t have met if it wasn’t for the Internet and all the interesting services that run over it, like Twitter for instance. I’ve written about Twitter before, and now I’m organizing a monthly Twitter meeting in Lisbon, so you can meet your fellow Twitterers in the so called Big R!!
Mountains of knowledge
Within the mindset of our parents’ generation, being a well informed and cultured person meant reading a lot of newspapers and magazines, going to exhibitions, listening and watching news and opinion programs on the radio and on television, and discussing the current events and tastes within the immediate circle of family, friends, and even acquaintances. The selection of which sources of information to absorb was helped by the overall bias each person had in political, ideological, and aesthetic terms, and how well it aligned with the image they had of each source.
We’re living through a transition, made possible by the development of the internet in the past fifteen years. Some people still use the new medium as a digital replacement of the old system – they read online newspapers, chat with people they know personally, basically do online what they did “in real life”. But others, and you’re one of this group if you’re reading this, have adopted a completely new posture of being “well informed people”, taking the advantage of the p2p (person to person in this case 
) system made possible by *everyone* being able of becoming a source of information and creativity if they wish to do so, basically “for free”, in a whole range of different mediums.
This has created a wealth of available information, some of it excellent, some of it original, and some of it intelligible to non-experts outside each field, and we can discuss about what we learn with people we’ve never met before. This makes the selection of what we read or watch, and who we interact with, much more important decisions than they were under the old system, due to the sheer scale vs. the available time that we have. How do you personally handle climbing these mountains of knowledge?
Can someone explain it to me?
Look at the following map of the Lisbon Metro in the airport area. The dotted red line is what they are building now, all underground. The solid blue line shows what could have been built, all on the surface, since 1993 when the Campo Grande station was opened.
I’m not against the new line being built. I just want to know why we haven’t had a metro connection to the airport in the last 15 years for 10% of the cost of the line being built now, including the advantage of having a terminal 2 station too. Can someone explain it to me?
update: in a little more detail.
