So yesterday, I posted an email I wrote a bit more than ten years ago about what I saw for the future of the internet. How well have they held up to time? Pretty well, I think.
I first mention the effect that the web would have on commerce. Although the dot-com bubble did kill off some of the more ridiculous e-commerce startups, and one area that I specifically mentioned (food sales) has never really taken off to the extent that other areas have, for the most part my prediction remains true: you can get anything on the internet now. If you wanted, you could do all of your shopping over the web and never have to leave your house. This benefits not only large, established companies, but anybody who has gotten their start selling homemade gadgets on eBay.
The internet has also let to a great deal of time-saving. We still don’t have the widespread use of fridges that signal when you are running low on food, but other time savers are all over the place. I used to write many checks a month to pay my various bills, then mail the payment (and pay for a stamp). These days, I pay everything but my bus pass with a few clicks of the mouse: even my rent, which I pay by check, is not a check written and mailed by me, but one written and mailed by ING Direct. I can’t say that I’ve put all this free time to excellent use, but I’m certainly thankful for the convenience.
The problem with finding stuff on the internet is still very salient, but it has improved. We still don’t have search engines that can do plain text searches well (The overhyped and underdelivering WolframAlpha, which is supposed to do these things, choked on my search for “Find the top 10 stocks for the period from 11/6/98 to 4/20/99”). We have, however, come a long way from the time of AltaVista and Webcrawler in terms of finding good, relevant information more easily. Google is responsible for much of that, and Google can even do simple calculations and conversions natively. Figuring out plain English searching is something that will be solved.
Socially, everything that I predicted has pretty much come to pass. Many people have huge online social presences on the web, and increasing numbers of people have never met in real life and yet have very fulfilling relationships that exist in computer-space. Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, blogs, online discussion forums, sites like Reddit and Digg…all of these sites allow people who are widely separated geographically but share common interests to come together and have real communities. At the same time, it’s dehumanizing: spamming, trolling, arguing, and conning are a lot easier to do when you aren’t doing it to somebody’s face, just a screen name. Rarely do people go up to strangers, yell “UR GAY”, and run away, but sadly, this kind of behaviour is common in the web. On balance, though, the positives definitely outweigh the negatives.
Cybersecurity, and especially the use of the web for warfare, is something that is very important but seems to be ignored by the vast majority of people. Sure, we worry about identity theft and fraud and other, more personal, web-based attacks, but the web as a tool of warfare hasn’t yet come to prominence. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist: just today there are reports that North Korea was behind several high-profile denial-of-service attacks in July. The Department of Homeland Security takes this threat seriously, and is looking for experts to help defend our country’s infrastructure. In future conflicts, especially conflicts between countries of similar technical ability, I think this will be a very big issue.
The web has undoubtedly had a huge democratizing effect on media. Not only blogs, but sites like YouTube and even Craigslist make it pretty easy for user-generated content to get spread far and wide for free, away from the old-fashioned “gatekeepers” that used to dictate what was written, said, seen, and heard. Traditional media outlets still haven’t fully determined how to use the internet effectively. The MPAA and RIAA fight losing battles against piracy: when I wrote that email, Napster was just a few months away, and to this day file sharing continues mainly unabated. Newspapers are rapidly losing circulation and haven’t yet found a way to monetize their websites. Network television continue its decline. VoIP services like Vonage give you free long-distance not only in the U.S., but to many foreign countries as well. Those who grow up only having cell phones, not landlines, will never think about having to dial 1 before a long-distance number, let alone what a long-distance calling card is.
There wasn’t really anything that I was completely off-base about. Yes, the Y2K bug was completely overblown, and technology hasn’t quite advanced as far as it could have, but it hasn’t stopped advancing. The one bit that may have been most wrong, though, turned out to be anything but: you may argue that my last paragraph, about the usefulness of my pager, would be horribly outdated now that we have netbooks, iPhones, and other connected devices, but the joke’s on you: not only do I have a pager for work, but I have the very same model pager I had when I wrote that ten years ago. Funny, and sad.