David Emery OnlineFuturistic
14 May 2011
So, I’m sitting in a cafe; coffee on one side, iPad on the other reading the latest issue of Wired.
I veer dangerously close to fulfilling a variety of different technology hipster clichés on a fairly regular basis, it’s true.
As I flicked through the pages, I felt something that no doubt many of you have realised before and is becoming a regular sensation for me: we’re living in the future – isn’t that crazy?
It certainly feels like certain developments in technology in the near past have changed things on a more fundamental level then previous developments, at least in my lifetime. Mobile phones, for one; they’ve been around for a while now and were merrily changing the way people communicate but in a way that was an evolutionary step, not revolutionary; phones we have always had – phones without wires is a nice progression but not something new.
Phones without wires that have a communication method like Twitter on, though – that’s revolutionary. Social networking, a term that is so overused that we’ve almost lost sight of the fact that it’s a term that doesn’t really mean anything, is something new – something that didn’t exist before but is now being adopted by significant proportions of the worlds population as a way to communicate.
It’s also something that wasn’t anticipated by anyone. I was reading a Philp K Dick book the other week (again, I downloaded it wirelessly to my tablet in less then 30 seconds – a sentence that could be straight out of any sci-fi book) written in the late 60s. Obviously it got a fair amount wrong about the future we live in today – as is common in 60s sci-fi space travel and flying cars were common place – but it got a fair few details rang true, like one character getting customised news delivered to him (admittedly printed out on ticker tape, not displayed in an RSS reader), or some spookily accurate elements on 24h broadcast TV and celebrity culture.
What wasn’t predicted, in this or anything else I’ve seen even in recent literature was the rise in sharing information that Facebook and Twitter promote – the personal broadcast as communication method.
Going back to the cafe, it also feels like technology has now got to a point where it can realise some of the more exciting but everyday ideas that used to crop up in sci-fi books; the emagazine on iPad experience may well be an evolutionary step rather then the end form of the medium, but it still feels like something incredibly futuristic. It’s the sort of thing that was used as little setting building devices – no one would ever just open a door, it would always be that they’d use their thumbprint to open it or some such technological device – that we now have permeating through our world in a practical capacity:
In common with most Londoners I have an Oyster card to use the Tube network, which uses a little RFID chip to let you tap in and out of the network, automatically deducting the correct fare as you go.
If you go to the cinema these days to see a big blockbuster, it’s most likely it’ll be in 3D; this afternoon I saw an advert for a program entitled “The propaganda of the 3rd reich in 3D” on the Sky 3D channel, which could have come straight out of Back to the Future Part 2.
When walking down the street I can use my phone to listen to practically any piece of popular music via the Spotify app, and my friends can see what I’m listening to as it happens via the Last.fm scrobbling feature.
It feels like we’ve now got to a point with consumer technology that while obviously not everything is practical – don’t expect a jetpack you’d actually want to use anytime soon – a lot of things suddenly are, and even better a whole bunch of things that we never even thought of are not only about to happen, they probably already are happening in some lab somewhere, just waiting to turn up in an Amazon basket near you…