...that people will no longer go to it. It will be either too dangerous (like Facebook is now) for lack of security, or too boring, or too old hat. Its power to make carloads of money from advertising will be severely curtailed, simply because people will not use it any more. Or at least to the same extent.
Information will still be available of course, but it will be from new sources, maintained in a forum as yet unfamiliar to us, delivered maybe to our phones, or maybe to earbuds, or maybe to microprocessors we have implanted in our forearms that feed special goggles that look just like glasses. Don't have a clue.
Oh, I can imagine a future where there are still a few bedraggled internet porn sites for people who can't get it anywhere else, but that will almost be it. Your banking, scheduling, email, entertainment, and research needs will all be served by a paid-membership service, which will try to be all things to you, because it wants as much of your money as it can get. I honestly don't know what the next big thing is; I'm just stabbing in the dark. But it seems inevitable that that's where it's going. The success or failure of such enterprises will depend on how well they play with others. I think Yahoo is a microcosm of this: it had its heyday, and then fell behind the times, and is now struggling in an environment where others (Google, MSN, Apple) are simply minting money. And almighty Google had better be planning very, very carefully and skillfully if they want to stay up front in the locomotive. They ain't guaranteed shit.
What the internet specializes in right now is pandering to people's egos. People post pictures of themselves, which nobody will view as much as they do, and caption their photos with drivel only they find witty. How will future technologies encourage this ugly impulse? I don't know, but you can bet they will find a way.
So as the poachers and miscreants (corporate and otherwise) pollute the internet with their greed, there are planners - scientists and visionaries and just smart entrepreneurs - who will inject some combination of hardware, firmware, and software that will throw over the internet as we know it. It won't happen all at once, but to me, it's already under way. Just look at the amount of advertising you see everywhere there. People just don't want that, and are willing to pay a premium not to have to deal with it.
Information will still be available of course, but it will be from new sources, maintained in a forum as yet unfamiliar to us, delivered maybe to our phones, or maybe to earbuds, or maybe to microprocessors we have implanted in our forearms that feed special goggles that look just like glasses. Don't have a clue.
Oh, I can imagine a future where there are still a few bedraggled internet porn sites for people who can't get it anywhere else, but that will almost be it. Your banking, scheduling, email, entertainment, and research needs will all be served by a paid-membership service, which will try to be all things to you, because it wants as much of your money as it can get. I honestly don't know what the next big thing is; I'm just stabbing in the dark. But it seems inevitable that that's where it's going. The success or failure of such enterprises will depend on how well they play with others. I think Yahoo is a microcosm of this: it had its heyday, and then fell behind the times, and is now struggling in an environment where others (Google, MSN, Apple) are simply minting money. And almighty Google had better be planning very, very carefully and skillfully if they want to stay up front in the locomotive. They ain't guaranteed shit.
What the internet specializes in right now is pandering to people's egos. People post pictures of themselves, which nobody will view as much as they do, and caption their photos with drivel only they find witty. How will future technologies encourage this ugly impulse? I don't know, but you can bet they will find a way.
So as the poachers and miscreants (corporate and otherwise) pollute the internet with their greed, there are planners - scientists and visionaries and just smart entrepreneurs - who will inject some combination of hardware, firmware, and software that will throw over the internet as we know it. It won't happen all at once, but to me, it's already under way. Just look at the amount of advertising you see everywhere there. People just don't want that, and are willing to pay a premium not to have to deal with it.
Box acknowledged! Drop some science, Father-man!
ReplyDeleteI can tell you that dealing with the builders of the future everyday that nothing would surprise me about how the future would play out. I fancy myself a writer of words, and, on top of that, a writer of books, something I've read as a dying thing. That makes me laugh. I don't think I can be convinced that books, as a way of collecting ideas, will be finished before humanity ultimately is.
In any case, abject greed and a completely unreflective society is what we seem to have here, and I think we can have some fun trying to figure out the mechanics of how the breakdown will occur.
Have you seen the garbage that's on TV? It boggles my mind...