Thoughts on Human Emotions, Breakthroughs in Communication, and the Next Generation of Data Mining

This paper revisits some of the breakthroughs in the field of communication that changed the human civilization and tries to understand where we are going tomorrow. It argues that while we have become very good in quickly connecting an entity with another entity worldwide as long as the former knows the address of the latter, current technology for taking the message or service from one individual to a large population of willing and interested individuals is still very primitive. We need technology for dealing with the new world of attention-economics. The paper also argues the currently popular centralized client-server model for the Internet applications may not work well in doing so. It offers some alternate thoughts borrowed from the nature and some emerging scalable applications that may offer some directions.