I saw an article recently that has me thinking. What is the next big thing?
Personally I am pulling for an honest governor in Illinois, but I am pretty sure that is not going to happen any time soon.
I remember our first computers as a child. Large cumbersome things that were NOT portable. The one I took to college had a 30 megabyte hard drive. You read that right.
No one had a cell phone.
When I first started running, no one had music. Now we can't imagine running without a pair of headphones plugged in.
I remember when Atari was cool. Now my PS2 is hopelessly outdated.
I remember when it was OK to ignore your impact on the environment, and I feel vaguely guilty about all the Aquanet I used, releasing ozone killing chemicals into the air. If only ignorance could save the environment.
What is the next big thing. What will CHANGE everything.
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5 comments:
Very interesting.
How is the training?
Very thought provoking! Makes you wonder how our grandparents and great grandparents processed all of the technological change of the last century. They were probably so overwhelmed by progress that they didn't really have the room to focus on the environmental impact.
Privacy, or better said, peoples attitudes about privacy will change. It almost has to given how readly available information has become. Institional data (addresses, phone numbers, criminal records etc) is already readily available at very low cost. Combine that with the type of information people willingly post to sites like youtube, facebook and myspace and it starts to sound a little extreme, by todays standards. There are already a number of lawsuits to identify "anonymous" posters to libel suits or cyber bullying cases. Research into online searching via an image is gaining a lot of ground, which means anyone with a cell phone camera will eventually be able to find those embarassing college photos online of someone they just met in a few seconds. That has huge implications in getting and keeping jobs, as we have already seen. I do not expect to see anything dramatic in the next 10 or even 20 years but I do expect to see this topic become more of a hot topic as time goes on.
Good point Aaron, I saw a documentary on how little upcoming generations understand their cyber footprint and the ramifications of what they leak onto the internet. I am sure it was easier for our parents, their big decisions were phone in room and whether to give us access to a car. :)
One guideline that my folks seems to have followed was that if "X" (where X can be a phone in the room, access to a car, their own unsupervised computer or the thing we can not even imagine today) costs money, then the child can only get it if they can earn and manage the money to pay for "X". While I tended to decide that "X" was not as interesting as I thought it was going to be, my sister paid for her own phone line with baby sitting at age 13 and got a job to pay for the car insurance price hike when she was added at 17. Not sure how that will work out for our house but I thought I would mention it.
*smiles*
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