Quick Notes on my Firenze trip

After a won­der­ful trip in Italy, I am now back in New York. As I men­tioned in my pre­vi­ous post, I was in Firenze, Italy for the past cou­ple of weeks, enjoy­ing great art, great wine and great food. Just some quick thoughts in no par­tic­u­lar order…

• Europe and the United States are now mov­ing for­ward on two dif­fer­ent paths when it comes to tech­nol­ogy and its uses. I’m still work­ing on sort­ing some thoughts on this and will post more on the sub­ject in the future.
• While we believe that the Inter­net is accel­er­at­ing the speed of change, our fun­da­men­tal assump­tions of the impact of new com­mu­ni­ca­tion tools may be wrong. This thought is due to the fact that I’ve now real­ized that the great shift of the renais­sance hap­pened over the course of only a cou­ple of decade, a rad­i­cal shift that was much quicker than I had pre­vi­ously thought. My trip, cou­pled with read­ing The Con­fu­sion by Neal Stephen­son, which cov­ers a sim­i­lar stretch of time prior to the enlight­ment, leads me to thing that all great his­tor­i­cal changes are made over a one to two decade period. If you con­sider the Inter­net just a nat­ural evo­lu­tion of the com­puter evo­lu­tion, we are now look­ing at a move­ment that lasted about as long. Will the impact of com­put­ing be as rad­i­cal as the changes made dur­ing the renais­sance and the enlight­en­ment? I don’t know for sure but do believe this to be true. Need more data to for­mu­late a longer theory.
• When pre­sented with two much data, your brain needs rest to process infor­ma­tion. I started to suf­fer from a mild case of Stendhal’s Syn­drome dur­ing my visit, which required a lit­tle brain rest.

All and all, though, I must say that this was a great vaca­tion. I’m now tanned, rested, and ready to join the con­ver­sa­tion again.