When I went out for a walk recently, this thought occurred to me:
Roads take up a lot more space than pavements. Of course, this is only because vehicles are bigger than the humans driving them. Therefore roads must be wider than pavements. But perhaps this also makes roads a lot less efficient in the utility of space - that is, they allow less people to be on them to function well, compared to pavements.
Of course, we can travel a lot faster and further by road, but we often spend more time on the road to get to our destination than we do by walking on a pavement - as we will get tired if we walk too far.
So the use of pavements is limited by our energy to walk, whereas there is virtually no such limit for driving on a road (as an engine does all the work to move a vehicle). Maybe this is why people spend a lot of time on the road, and also resources on both the vehicle and road itself. And because of this, the advantages of roads such as further and quicker travels are offset by the huge resources and time spent to travel by road.
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This contrast between roads and pavements can perhaps be used to compare the digital and pre-digital technology (new vs old). For example, the Internet offers faster and wider-sourced information compared to previous technologies, and the limits of those pre-internet resources (e.g books) do not apply to the internet.
But don't we also spend a lot of time and resources on this limitless information technology - as we do on the roads? Compared to walking on the pavement, the more we use the road - instead of reaching our destination more efficiently - we spend more and more time and energy on the journey itself.
And so with the Internet compared to pre-internet information technology, instead of arriving at any good understanding of a particular subject, we become more and more caught up in the search for that understanding itself.
