Forty Years From Now

In 1969, spending time with your friends meant piling into a car and driving around.

Every town had a strip called “the drag,” a place to see and be seen as you cruised back and forth at 20 miles an hour. It's how you made contact. And when you and your friends weren’t in your car, you were sitting on the hood of it in a parking lot, talking to the people sitting on the hood of the car next to yours.

Did we shape our technology or did our technology shape us?

Had you asked us in 1969 to describe our vision of 2009, we would have told you of flying cars, driverless cars and carburetors that would get 200 miles per gallon.

If you told us the cars of 2009 would travel at the same speeds and get about the same gas mileage we were getting in 1969, we would have rolled our eyes and thought you a fool.

Forty short years ago General Motors stood tall as one of the most powerful corporations on earth.

Not one person in 1969 would have said,

“In 2009 we’ll carry cordless telephones that will have TV screens in them and all the world’s knowledge will be at your fingertips because you’ll be connected to a thing called the worldwide web. And that TV screen will show you any movie and let you listen to any song, any time you want. And you’ll be able to tell it where you want to go and the screen will show you a map of how to get there. And as you travel, the map will continually update to show you where you are. The map will even talk to you and tell you where to turn. And there won’t be any long distance charges.”

No American in 1969 would have predicted the iPhone because we were a nation on the move, obsessed with transportation. Then somewhere along the way we fell out of love with transportation and became obsessed with communication.

But not quite in the way you think.

In the January 18, 2010 issue of Time magazine, Joel Stein explains why people today are uninterested, not just in videophones, but in talking on the regular phone as well. “We want to TiVo our lives,” he says, “avoiding real time by texting or emailing people when we feel like it.”

Sherry Turkle, an MIT professor who studies the social aspects of science and technology, says, “VideoSkype, which was the fantasy of our childhood, gets you back to sitting there and being available in that old-fashioned way. Our model of what it was to be present to each other, we thought we liked that. But it turns out that time-shifting is our most valued product. This new technology is about control. Emotional control and time control.”

Again, are we shaping our technology or is our technology shaping us?

Jaron Lanier, the internet guru who coined the term “Virtual Reality,” has become worried about the real reality we’re creating.

Commenting on Lanier’s new book, You Are Not a Gadget, Michael Agger says that Lanier is asserting,

“The Internet's long tail helps only the Amazons of the world, not the little guys and gals making songs, videos, and books. Wikipedia, a mediocre product of group writing, has become the intellectual backbone of the Web. And, most depressingly, all of us have been lumped into a ‘hive mind’ that every entrepreneur with a dollar and a dream is trying to parse for profit.”

In essence, Jaron Lanier believes that Web 2.0 technologies are based on the assumption that an aggregator of content (Google) is more important than an actual creator of content. Additionally, the implied belief of Web 2.0 technologies is that a million men are wiser than one man.

But “individual genius” is based on the assumption that one man is wiser than a million men.

Which do you believe?

And by the way, are you shaping your technology? Or is your technology shaping you?

When's the last time you had an extended, face-to-face conversation with someone who was important enough to you that you turned your cell phone completely off, rather than just setting it to vibrate so you could check to see if the caller was important enough to interrupt the conversation?

Something to think about.

Roy H. Williams