More pendulums

While it's perhaps a bit of an undeveloped idea for me right now, one thing that just occurred to me recently was the pendulum between computing and communication in computers. Take the initial personal computers and they were standalone boxes for which the primary value stemmed from the ability to perform computing tasks quite handily. With the spread of internet and the web, the utility started transforming from compute-driven value to communication, which has recently pinnacled recently with the whole social media scene. But parallel to this, the networkedness of computers combined with the communication aspect we now have another interesting possibility to create utility from even more massive compute resources than back when computers were more isolated and standalone devices. And of course thanks to the pendulum having swung to the communication direction, we also have a ton of very interesting data to compute with our newly refound compute power.

This stream of thinking actually spun off from a separate question I was wondering, which revolved around whether or not there is perhaps a generational gap where numerical methods or analysis has, thanks to the advent of cheap computing, become a very viable tool for solving difficult problems but for some reason the slightly older people who I've been talking to, be it about my work with coevolution of technology and industry structures or other things, don't seem to intuitively see the power of numerical methods and simulations.