Reality of Hyper-Connected Lives

That was 1993 and movie audiences laughed off the concept and the film from the box office. Improbable, some said, impossible, said the rest. Even the most optimistic of fantasists thought the characters were way out of touch with reality. It was precisely what people thought of the Internet too. When it first emerged into public consciousness, it was regarded as nothing more than an email facility that had the potential to put postal services to pasture.

We all know it is much more than that. It has now become like ‘ether that is pulling at the tether’ — an amorphous entity that continues to spawn and breed in and around our existence, growing, morphing and extrapolating to meet our very real-time needs and desires. A fact corroborated by a recent survey conducted by the Pew Internet & American Life Project. Titled ‘Future of the Internet III: How the Experts See It’, the survey’s findings shed light on the new age of human hyper-connectivity.

Mobile phones will continue to form the core of our existence sharing space with the Internet, which will coagulate voice recognition and touch-screen interfaces to our interactive environment.

The raiders of the digital realm will continue to roam information superhighways with impunity, breaching secure gateways and sharing their spoils with the scavengers of the virtual domain. As expected, the boundaries that separate your work life from your personal one are expected to blur even further and those ‘connected’ will find it harder to disengage. So what’s new? Nothing really, it all seems to fit rather snugly into the general projection of the foreseeable future — everyone’s connected, everyone’s talking, and everyone’s happy. Time to banish that thought. It’s going to be apocalyptic, if Internet evangelists, interviewed as part of the same survey are to be believed. Of the 537 interviewed for their version of the digital future, most believe that the Internet landscape will be marred by the human tendency for a spat. Tribes will be defined by their social enclaves on the net, rather than by geography or kinship, but the world will be more fragmented and less tolerant, according to one expert. Another equates the idea of greater virtual harmony to the Prius reversing global warming — “People are people are people. And people are terrible.”

There are positives too. Among other things small sensors on your teeth will help you tap commands, sensed by your eyeglasses, eyeballs will be able to track desires, haptic gestures and air typing will become commonplace and predictive behaviour modelling will fundamentally change the human-computer interaction model. In all it’s a brave new world that we are entering and to manage it well will be our responsibility. The only difference this time around is that if anything goes wrong we will not be able to blame it on a higher power. It’s our burden. It’s of our own making.