A couple of great Blog posts from @euan recently about how big an impact the Internet may be having (or not be having) on the world at large. Partly they've made me think of current writers like Don Tapscott (@dtapscott) who contend that it's changing almost everything – and on the other has made me revisit a book from a few years ago The Shock of the Old which argues that it's all completely overblown, and actually the technology change that we are seeing is nothing new (also reminding me of The Victorian Internet, which tells the story of the development of the telegraph).
I was chatting with my Dad this afternoon, and he recalled a former colleague who used to work at UCL, who used the analogy of the development of electric motors in the late 19th Century as a benchmark for computing and the internet. In 1900 there would have been loads of visionaries running around, telling anyone who would listen that electric motors would change the world forever.
Today, they are everywhere – but invisible (for the most part). Looking around the office where I'm typing this from home at the moment, there is: one in the computer DVD drive; one in each of the two hard disk drives; at least one each in the two printers that we have at the desk; one in my mobile phone to make it vibrate; one in the CD deck of the hi-fi on the bookshelf, one in each of the two lenses of the SLR camera on the shelves; ditto in the video camera; I think one in the external flash gun for something to do with zoom levels; one in the old film SLR under the bed to drive the 35mm stock; ditto for its two lenses; one in the old hard disk MP3 player also languishing under the bed. That's at least 15.
Electric motors are ubiquitous. They are also never really spoken about. They're just there.
Computing is pretty much the same these days – there are loads of common devices around us at all times which are driven by increasingly powerful computers that we don't think of as such (I did a firmware update on my TV last weekend, by way of example). But the Internet? Well, it's starting to become invisible mostly through the development of mobile, but the big Internet-shaped transporter that is known as the Browser is still alive and well, and visible as well (Chrome adverts, for example, are all over the place at the moment).
Taking the electric motor analogy further, what might we expect? Well, “websites” are likely to become quaint relics – unless its a platform to transact, it's already likely that your content or messages are distributed better through a social network or a transactional service. It will also be interesting to see if Apps disappear as predicted by Tapscott (although refuted in a recent article by Wired's Chris Anderson).
Over and above everything, though, it's probably likely that the Internet will have profoundly and irrefutably altered the world by the time that we just don't talk about it any more…
mmitII 