Paranormal
As you must be blissfully aware by now, we now live in the Age of Information. It is something as obvious as a pimple you get on your nose hours before a date.
It would be near impossible to be ignorant of this fact. Even if you were stuck in an endless cycle of shampooing, rinsing, and repeating as a direct result of the instructions on a shampoo bottle, you would at one point be festooned with popups advertising a better shampoo that can either reduce your debt, enlarge your member or help you reduce weight and anxiety.
The Internet has turned into an intermingling of individual expressions, business imaginings, communities, and outlets for personal beliefs among other things so obscure they can't be put into any particular category. A world away from the world we live in where billions, even trillions of electrons are regularly inconvenienced for the purpose of transferring data from machine to machine. Decisions are made, lives are affected and profits are made. Opinions are exchanged, and a surfer now has access to attitudes and viewpoints, which would otherwise have been unreachable due to country-specific media censorships and jingoism in addition to the propaganda disseminated upon them by society itself. A person can now be accepted for her thoughts and viewpoints instead of looks.
On a tangent, while the Internet did have its humble beginnings, it has now exploded into our lives and has spawned technologies, jobs and ironically, needs which attribute their existence to the presence of the Internet itself. Cause and Effect. Take for example, a firewall. Something not really required on a standalone computer. But the need for the Internet almost implies the need for a firewall. A corporation jumps on it, sells a well-made firewall product, and it is what we "need" to have installed on our machines. Popup blockers, Anti-Virus software and messenger clients are just other examples of this.
All in all, it's an abstraction that exists, an abstraction so requisite in our day-to-day activities that its absence is now inconceivable. One may wonder as to why something as seemingly insignificant (to them) as the Internet could have such an impact, as to why large corporations exhort their presence, people of an unhinged mind express their thoughts and creativity bordering upon insanity, and talk of things which would make as much sense to you as an astrophysicist speaking to a gathering at a flat earth convention.
Akin to the concepts of god, religion and money, the Internet gives us a conviction we can subscribe to, in a manner more substantial than the others. The point of belief here, for most anyways, is Information. The compilation of the Information may be different, but it is the end result. But what is this information? Where is it? You cannot touch it or feel it. You can only be aware of its presence and the effects it can have on us. It is the effect of this information which makes it of extreme connotation. And at the same time, it is starting to show attributes similar to that of religion.
This leads us to the technologies that have been yielded to facilitate what I've just described here. Languages have been made to allow for the creation of dynamic sources of information. Products and services are brought about for working with, accessing and manipulating the information.
As a programmer, the high level view of my work is to use technologies to allow for the manipulation of information by the users of the services or products being rendered. One could say it's another layer upon the existing abstraction of the Internet. I like to look at it as a behind-the-scenes operation which allows this. It's what's behind the scenes that grows in complexity, due to the somewhat fixed nature of the Internet. Databases become richer, languages grow in complexity, applications scale to gargantuan proportions. These come together and facilitate the manipulation of the ethereal pieces of data that are of such value to us.
Now that we've established ourselves in the Information age, with the Internet as a business, communication and information model, where are we going? What's the future going to be like?
As any other discussion regarding the future, it is one that can only be reduced to mere speculation based upon inference and objective belief.
While self-appointed Oracles may continue to assert that very soon, everyone would be connected, and that national units (such as economies, judiciary systems, etc) would be based upon the Internet, that there may soon be entire individual brain structures and personalities trekking the web, that of communication being able to eliminate transportation in their personal races, among other Star Trek like visions, I feel that is a somewhat exaggeratedly sanguine hope of a future, as opposed to the reality of what it shall be.
To start with, analogous to any other system of belief, not everyone would be so inclined to subscribe to it unless it is forced upon them to the extent of it becoming a necessity, such as the case of money and (as one would like to think) not in the case of religion.
A third-world nation struggling to provide for its people would not consider replacing an existing system with an automated one just to achieve the same purpose with a slight difference. The Internet, as shall be observed, is not a necessity and will not be forced upon the masses due to its implementation expenses and its relatively selfless, non-profitable nature as relative to the current system. In other words, a mindset that can be prevalent is, "If it's not broken, why fix it?" A developed nation, on the other hand, with the finances to implement such a system would do so. This would explain why the first-world nations have over 50% of their population on the web, while countries on the verge of caving in on themselves have at most a thousand users out of a population of millions.
Furthermore, not everyone wants to use a computer. The reasons may be varied, such as fear, mental blocks, lack of time, non-necessity, but the resolve is mostly steadfast. And it's true. Not everyone needs it or wants to use it. Some might even be frustrated by the assault of technology into society and the effects it has on us. It's very similar to a notion that religions are silly and baseless.
In the future, this could translate to a deep rift, an amplification of what is today but a coined phrase, the Digital Divide. Societies, nations maybe, shall be divided into the haves and the have-nots, each finding sustenance in its own domain. However, with the nature of today's interconnectedness of nations and societies (the Global Village), one would have to presume that either the digital divide becomes a major source of interminable conflict between the two, or that it becomes the reason for a very noticeable segregation. Something like a family feud, where certain members of a family either fight all the time, or simply don't talk to the other members for years on end.
Taking the scenario of an unending conflict between the haves and have-nots, one can analogize it to a conflict such as that of the Industrial Revolution. A resistance to the increasing change in society towards a medium of information. A futuristic version of the Luddites, whose aim would be to protest the change and often find ways to sabotage the advances which they perceived as threats towards the current state of society as well as their jobs and way of life.
However, as all things are, good and bad, the conflict would come to an end. An end most definitely in favor of the haves, but not necessarily one that would impose a tenet upon the have-nots. For with the information age has come greater value for individualism, and freedom of choice, albeit a somewhat theoretical one, but one that exists nonetheless.
From here, things get a little difficult. Perhaps this may lead to a segregation. Or the conflict may be avoided altogether and we can dive right into the segregation.
Or one may take into account the nature of us as the world, villages, cities, countries, races and societies living in a global village and would say that this factor alone would prevent the segregation from growing to be everlasting, continuing on to where the two sections of society start complementing each other, similar to what we have now.
A little too optimistic.
Take into account the nature of us as humans, and what is apparent is the inevitable conflict between the digital haves and have-nots, with the fury of the have-nots contiguous with religious fanaticism. Bible thumpers declaring it to be the age of Armageddon where the Internet is the metaphorical Anti-Christ or Satan and its users are its followers, giving it illusions of joy and "another heaven."
Or how about the concept of the future as illustrated in "The Time Machine," that of the Eloi and Morlocks? Wherein societies and economies as a whole become so dependent upon the Internet and the concept of the Information Age that those left behind as dependents (the Eloi) try to live in what they view as a perfect society, and those involved, with power (the Morlocks) choose to occasionally prey upon one of the dependents by exercising control over them. The Morlock might even have the power to eliminate their existence! One of the concepts popular in futuristic Hollywood movies, but not to be written off, as a lot of the developments we imagine for the future to be are inspired by movies. "Space may be the final frontier, but it's made in a Hollywood basement." Although a little ironic, one must take note, it's past the year 2000, but we can't teleport and there are still no flying cars!
That was regarding the impact of the future of the Information Age on society. What remains is the impact on the Internet and its progeny, the technology itself and its so-called "followers".
Imagine technology evolving to a point where technology can generate itself. While the current scenario is that of technology being used to automate existing processes, it would be quite useful and advantageous if we were in possession of technologies which could perform the same tasks with minimal human intervention. Manifestations of the assembly lines, as alluded to earlier, and who knows, an origin of an "internal" conflict. Because with self-automation, we head towards self-elimination. Not only of the technology engineers, but of the users of the services rendered by that technology.
The elimination wouldn't be a complete one, of course, but to an extent where the discontentment of the qualified unemployed would call for newer strategies. By that time, there may be other areas where one may exercise their acquired skills of the trade. Or maybe not. What if it heralds a renunciation of all of technology and for us to go back to our roots, living the "simpler" life? Perhaps that won't happen, for the lure of the other abstraction, money, is stronger than life itself.
Many different scenarios and possibilities have been reached here, and I confess they are pretty scattered, but I wanted to explore several paths which I think are possible. Perhaps one of them may turn out to be true, or none of them at all, and we end up with a near utopia like society without the uncertainties expounded in this article, but if they are never contemplated on, we would never know if we need to take certain precautions, or at the least, observations for the future.
Admittedly, I've taken up the role of yet another self-appointed Oracle here, but hey, at least I'm not an automated one.
Yet.
