I feel like I just whined in public. Bad blog ettiquette.
What I'm thinking about:
I've been trying to identify the common metaphors people use in talking about what the Internet/computing will be like in ten-fifteen years.
So far:
The Neuromancer Model:
The Internet becomes a virtual reality space in which people interact with each other and representations of various entities through personae.
Gibson's model has physical sensation being piped into the individuals in some cases, but that's not strictly necessary. At it's most basic, this model is Everquest or The Sims Online with the existing marketization of those games dramatically extended.
I read recently about a Korean site that was a cross between The Sims and MySpace or Friendster. People decorated virtual rooms and went to visit each other. I wouldn't be surprised if some companies set up shop in the same way.
The Gadget Model:
Computer chips keep getting smaller and wireless broadband becomes more and more widely available. So data production and checking becomes embedded in everything. The paintings on your wall are flat-panel TVs searching the internet for high-resolution images that are similar to paintings you tell it you like. Your car is constantly aware of the location of the nearest gas station and may suggest detours to stores you might like. Historical markers relay information to your iPod about what happened here. Life becomes overlayed with a layer of information.
If in the Neuromancer model the Internet turns data into virtual space, here it becomes a sixth sense. Being disconnected from the Internet already feels a little odd. A Wired article I read pointed out that you often Google things multiple times rather than just remembering them. In this model, the internet becomes, in part, our memories, our means of communication, and a way of richening what we learn about the world.
The technology piece of this will happen. What makes this really compelling, however, is if we can improve our algorithms for finding the right information.
Collaborative filtering, for instance, lets Amazon predict books you'll like. And Page Rank, ideally, means Google can find the webpage you want, rather than all the junk. As these processes develop, we might do better and better and predicting kinds of information than can be pushed unintrusively onto customers. So your iPod goes and finds songs you'll like. And your house goes to the temperature you prefer given the weather. And, a touch creepily, stores track your behavior and purchases and recommend that you buy things that you actually want.
The Brain Model: This metaphor still captivates me. The basic principle is that the connected-node structure of the internet maps rather nicely onto the similar structure of a brain. Just in the way that an ant hill is a super-organism that performs relatively complicated operations despite the simplicity of its fundamental units, the Internet may yield highly complicated or even intelligent behavior from its traffic.
At its most ambitious, this metaphor suggests that we may generate a meta-mind. More coolheadedly, that there will be interesting effects emerging out of the way traffic flows through the internet. Maybe these effects will be at the memetic level--different schools of thought encounter and respond to one another*--or maybe higher--the way people think changes, in a sort of feedback loop.
*One of my favorite lines in /Kaddish/ occurs when the author wishes that the Buddhists and the Jews had encountered each other a few hundred years earlier. Think of the disputations, he says.
I don't like any of these metaphors, and have my own to suggest. But this is enough for tonight.
