Word: feedback
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Still, even back then, the social brain, through positive feedback, was maturing. With each advance in subsistence technology, survival grew more secure, hastening population growth; and as population grew, the advances came more quickly. By the Mesolithic Age, around 10,000 B.C., with the neuronal population up to around 4 million, the rate of advance had moved from one major innovation per 20,000 years to a sizzling one per 200--including such gifts to posterity as combs and beer...
...each such advance--by easing the transmission of data, whether by sound, print or image--only raised the chances of further advances. Via endless positive feedback, the technological infrastructure for a mature global brain was, in a sense, building itself. And so it had been, ever since the Middle Paleolithic: the story of humankind is faster and vaster data processing...
That was the genesis of the Feedback Forum, one of eBay's most distinctive and popular features. Omidyar kicked it off with a Founder's Letter in February 1996 in which he laid out a philosophy that still guides eBay: that people are basically good, that they make mistakes, and that they should be given the benefit of the doubt. "I was afraid it would turn into just a gripe forum, but as I watched it develop, I was amazed to realize that people enjoy giving praise." In fact the feedback eBayers posted about one another was overwhelmingly positive...
...catchy syncopations, chanteuse vocals drowning in endless waves of synth-wash--all the innovations that Stereolab fans have come to expect --were all there. The difference was that Stereolab rocked. The aloof, polished, heavy-handed studio sound that many know the band by was shattered by gushing torrents of feedback and throbbing backbeats your ears just reveled in. From the minute they took the stage until the minute they left, the band pumped out and endless lifeblood of sound, filling the vaulted bordello-ballroom space of the Roxy to capacity...
...most recent single, showcased their new-found rock-out tendency, leaving you reeling with the overwhelming strength of their steroid-pop. But after a while it started to grate on the eardrums and sounding the same, like the never-ending conclusion to a bad U2 song riddled with screeching feedback and twisted bass-lines stretched out to the point of anguish. Who said there was no such thing as too much of a good thing...