In this six part article (found via Doc Searls blog), Tristan Louis writes about the trends he sees on the Net today and where those trends may be taking us in the future. I think, for the most part, that him being away from his blog for most of last month was a good thing, since it gave him time and space to think about this stuff :)
Among other things, he mentions two things that I can see and agree with him on, one that I don’t really know (or care) much about, and one in which I disagree with him.
What we agree on:
- The raise of always-on high speed internet connections. Yes, that’s the direction the world is moving, and sooner rather than later, a great majority of the households will have always-on internet access (how fast, I have no clue…the stuff Tristan talks about when refering to the telecomunications companies makes me uncertain of how fast it can actually be), and that changes the way the people in the household see the Net. It’s no longer a thing you have to prepare yourself to use (ie. use it during hours in which you hope nobody’ll call you on the phone), but something that is there, ready to be used whenever needed…much like running water and electricity. Now it’s easier for you to become an IM addict, for instance, who prefers to communicate with friends and even work people through IMing instead of phones or in person. For instance, I’m that kind of person…my business card doesn’t have a phone number, but it has an email address and 3 different IM contact names, and most of my clients only see me when they need me to go with them to meet somebody else.
- The IPzation of everything. I’m going to have to say it…I hope this newlogism does *NOT* catch on…it’s an ugly as hell word lol! I usually think of it as the networkization of everything. Everything will have an IP and will be accesible or findable through the Net. This started as one-off geeky things, like the Carnegie Mellon University’s Coke machine in the School of Computer Science, which you could check availability of cans from anywhere on the Net, but it doesn’t have to stop at that kind of thing. A networked world will make life a whole lot easier for people, specially people like me, who prefer the Net to the RW :)
The one thing I don’t know a thing about, and have never cared much about (even tho I did work with a company that did intelligent buildings for over a year) is real-world sensors. I can see where if he’s right that sensors will get way cheaper and embeded in everything, it’ll help make things findable through the Net.
And the one thing we disagree on is in the *way* he sees the rise of participatory applications.
I understand, and even agree with him, that participatory applications, aka social apps, will become more and more important and widely used every day, to the point that they are, even now, becoming economically important (there’s a bunch, not a big bunch, but a bunch of people making big money with blogs, for instance).
What we don’t agree on is on the kind of social apps that will become the driving point for this raise. He believes that the virtual world will come from online games…and that makes no sense to me, and I’ll tell you why.
I used to be an extremely addicted Diablo player…six to eight hours a day, every day, for almost four years, you’d find me either on battlenet playing with friends or in JustUs, the chat room we, the friends from the alt.games.diablo newsgroup, had in battlenet. And I was not the only addict who’d spend hours upon hours online, there were a bunch of us (hi, Rich! :) who’d play daily or almost-daily, read and posted to a.g.d, chatted on JustUs, and even started an IRC channel or two. Then, EverCrack came out and some of the people moved to that, some stayed in Diablo, some played both. And when Diablo II came out, the same happened again.
So…why, if I was a game addict for a long time, don’t I agree with him on this? Because the operative word here is “was”.
I don’t play online games anymore…I haven’t found one that’s worth paying for since the days of Diablo…and I think the problem with that is me, and not the games. I got older, my interests changed, my habits changed, and compulsive gameing became something that I didn’t really care about anymore. Maybe when virtual games get to holodeck levels and you can create your own personal game while you play, or can conduct business there as Neal Stephenson proposes in Snowcrash (book that I should review one day soon :) then, maybe, I’ll be interested in it…but I very much doubt that’ll happen any time soon. The current patent environment, mainly, will slow down the arrival of this kind of technology, because companies will balkanize the research, as it happens now with other things, and will make it more and more difficult to arrive to something usable. And until we have a holodeck or a Metaverse, most people will reach a certain age when they stop playing games and use the Net to do other things.
So…I agree that sooner or later, we’ll create a virtual world (balkanized virtual worlds, most probably, unfortunately) in which everybody will want to participate and most of us will…I just don’t agree that said virtual world will come from the gameing side…I think it’ll most probably be an extension of IM, IRC and blogs…the communication side of the Net, and not the entretainment side of the Net…unless the porn business decides to get into the virtual worlds deal…then all bets are off, ’cause the when porn business gets into a technology, it explodes and gets pushed to the limits.
As for his conclusions…I have to say that, fortunately and unfortunately, I agree with him.
Big business and the government will duke it out, trying to set the limits to what can and can’t be done, and who can and can’t do it…and we, the actual users, will get not a word in edgewise, and will most probably end up screwed, so make yourself ready for a Metaverse not run by hackers, like in Snowcrash, but by big business and the government, limiting what we can do to what they think we should be allowed instead of what we could be able to do.
As for the fights between the network providers and the users…I think that the second option Tristan sees, about users creating a parallell network loosely connected to the one that the big network providers will build is what is most probable to happen. Just like the MIT hackers created their software community and changed the way software was seen, even today, by a big group of people, just like the hardware hackers from the Homebrew Computer Club started the personal computer revolution, just like the Third Generation hackers (as Steven Levy calls the hackers that created the original computer games that helped in the PC boom) pushed that computer revolution to where the PC became a household item like the TV or the radio, there will be a group of people that will think that with cheap hardware and Free Software, the people will be able to bypass the big communications oligopoly and do what they need to do to be able to do The Right Thing.
I agree with the rest of his conclusions, except, obviously, in some details of the fifth change he sees.
Tristan’s article is very interesting, worth reading and, more important, worth thinking about, both in your mind and in the collective mind of us all that we call the Net.
Technorati Tags: technology, virtual worlds, communications, future developments
Tags: Thoughts
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