The Wrong Questions

Big Screen TVs

The bigger the better, right? LCD? LED? 1080p? 4K? refresh rate? Isn't the idea is to give the most real, visual experience possible?

I wondered what does the human eye see? 1080p? 4K? It turns out the human eye constantly refreshes and continuously scans. Are we even asking the right questions about what we see?

Luxury Sheets

The smoother the better, right? 300-thread count? 1200-thread count? Isn't the idea to give the sleeper the most comfortable experience possible?

I wondered how smooth a sheet can feel to a person? 300-thread count? 1200-thread count? It turns out that the average human cannot tell the difference in smoothness beyond 400-thread count. Are we even asking the right questions about our sleep experience?

Other Stuff

The more the better, right? More stuff? More knowledge?  Isn't the idea to make the world a better place in which to live?

I think in the question of who does stuff belong to we keep trying to push the border of what can we own. What can we accumulate? How much can we know? Are we even asking the right questions about what we can know and own?

Analog and Digital

We have in our world advances that allow for more people to have better experiences. What we need and what we have are not always the same. It's not that receiving information digitally is better than in an analog method, it's about the person. If being at a concert to hear a song is a great experience and we can do our best to recreate that sound and feeling, we record, mix, add, and do a myriad of other things to digitally reproduce that analog experience. 

So, generally speaking, if someone creates new material or information that we want to experience for ourselves or share with others, we try to reproduce that. 

As people we are experiencing analog and we give others a digital recreation of what we want to share. So my question is this: Are we thinking about licensing and copyrights and patents in the right way? Those are analog ideas for sharing things that are digital, simply reproduced expressions of our experience.