Friday, August 04, 2006

Blogs are just the beginning.. The future is scary

Why should blogs be ever popular ? Is it because of the ease of the execution of mandatory web-page-publishing-cycle ? Or is it because of the push it is given by the fad propogating media ? Or is it for real ? Far away from the ideas of convergence of devices , confluence of media and unification of almost-everything ... to a meaningful granularization of existing media, every one having a medium of communication of their own, I-have-a-channel-of-my-own culture.

Imagine the death of the video-on-demand culture, instead you surf into another's personal media channel- a public broadcast of someones personal ideas and living style - cybercams fitted into living rooms, personal speech pod-casted into the cyberspace and everything that you want made available - made public. There is an enormous amount of cultural diversity waiting to be broadcasted- there is an infinite amout of information waiting to be consumed. There will be an overload of junk which today is wrongly interpreted as information. The internet is no longer be the internet as we knew a few years ago. It is bound to be a living, growing and thriving society where you will have to fight for your personal space, wars waged over virtual boundaries and everything that you see or do leaves behind traces of your cyber fingerprints.An artist's impression of human implants and the future !


Grids of Information
Everything would be done over the internet - the grid. Your life would revolve around ( or stand still ) on what the grid has to offer today. The grid would be so very ubiquitous that everything that is pluggable would be plugged into the grid. We are not talking about the laptops or the PDAs .. we are talking about your toaster, hair dryer, battery charger, telephones, water heater,ceiling fan, tubelight, 100-watt GE bulb, dishwasher - anything electric - to begin with ... and slowly micro-chip-embedded devices like fountain pens, wine bottles, pepsi cans, post-it notes, razor blades, shirts, shoes and even the liquid nail polish would have grid enabled technology in it. Everything would have a story to tell and all this would be available over the internet - data flowing into the internet like streams of radiation from the sun.

Plug - but dont Play
A little distant future is even more scarier - The world as we know today is over. I dont even want to think about the possibility of detachable, grid-enabled body parts out for sale in the walmarts-of-tomorrow. You would be moving around in an invisible but recognizable ether of 'grid-fluid' .. thick, dense and full of data - your presence easily monitored and broadcasted by a universal GPS - Grid Positioning System. If you want to find out where your teenage daugher or for that matter your tootAmal Graafstr's RFID implanted handshbrush is ... all you have to do is just log in to the GPS ( G for Grid ) tracking site and search by the GID ( Grid ID) (todays prototypes are the RFIDs) - but the question remains - how will you remember the GID for something as trivial and 'useless' as a cork-opener ? There comes the solution in the form of AIG ( Artificial Intelligence for teh Grid ). You think about it - and you get it ! Sounds crazy ? - sorry to dissapoint you - the future is already here. But that would be another blog ... The grid is here to stay ! Plug yourself in .. Unplugging yourself would be the equivalent of suicide. Someday, scores of eons from now when the Bible would be re-written, it would read like ..
" In the beginning, there was the blog ...."

1 comment:

Sakshi said...

wow the future sure looks scary..!!

"Florentino is so in love with Fermina that he eats gardenias and drinks cologne so that he can know her taste. He becomes drunk on the cologne, and his mother finds him the next morning, in a puddle of his vomit, in a cove of the bay where drowning victims are known to wash ashore" - Love in the time of Cholera