Progress is lumpy. The future is attained in a series of epochal strides, each followed by a lot of relatively inconsequential shuffling forward. The invention of the internet (and especially the consumer-friendly web) was a rare giant step that motivated immense adoption of computers and digital lifestyles. A global marketplace of online citizens spawned gadgets, software apps, corporate gold-rushing and other feverish shuffling.
Even with the opulent gadgetry we admire and enjoy, the whole expanding tech bubble seems to be reaching for something beyond itself. The incremental improvements of personal technology don’t thrust into the future as much as push against constraining walls of the present. Sharper screens and thinner computers are delightful results of corporate development cycles. But we are tethered to the present, which one day will seem primitive in retrospect, by two unglamorous bridles: power and connectivity?
Technology is pushing toward this: complete and frictionless integration of digital and organic life. If that sounds like a forecast of electronic implants, it might come to that. (My dogs have embedded ID chips under their skins.) But I’m really talking about a future in which we do not drag the internet around with us, but are as immersed in it as we are in the offline realm. It is not an “Other” that we go to, but an “Also” that is always at hand.
via Engadget
September 4, 2012
