 When
technologies reach a tipping point, they can suddenly lead to dramatic
changes in human behaviour, at least among those who are comfortable
with technology. When bandwidth becomes almost unlimited, and hence
essentially free, it means everyone can have her own phone number
(which in turn means we can soon expect global 12-digit numbers to
replace the current 10-digit ones), and cell phones can essentially
replace land lines. It also means that the cost of calling becomes
essentially free, as Skype users have discovered. This means you can
essentially be in touch 24 hours per day with anyone anywhere in the
world, for next to no cost -- if you have the hardware and the (free)
software to do it. With cost no longer being a constraint to voice
communication, the onus shifts to the recipient of calls to filter
those calls to a manageable number -- and deal with disgruntled callers
who don't make it through the filter.
Google G-mail essentially
reduced the cost of storage of e-mail messages to zero. That means you
no longer need to keep messages on your hard drive, which in turn means
that you can manage your e-mail from any computer. For some, that means
smaller portable devices will become their major communication and
information tool, replacing the PC. But in the future, if it becomes
possible to keep your whole hard drive on a secure central server, it
may also mean that stripped-down inexpensive PCs with almost no memory
and all-free software may pop up everywhere, built into every desk and
table wherever you go -- so the idea of a 'personal' computer may
become obsolete. Why lug around an appliance when the content and
functionality you need can be accessed from every flat surface on the
planet?
The simplicity and near-zero cost of blogging software
has allowed millions of people to become instant publishers --
producing everything from private newspapers to influential journals to
travelogues of their vacations for the folks back home. Why write
anything by hand, and why put your journal entries in a place where no
one can see them, when it's just as easy to blog them so you can get
Google to index them for you, and so that you can share them with the
world?
I think the next tipping point will be focused on
wikis. We are close to the point where we will no longer have to pick
an 'application' to create, open or change a document, any more than we
have to pick a particular type of writing implement to do so in the
physical world. What that will allow us to do is convert our entire
hard drive -- every document -- and all the content we maintain on
central servers -- every message and blog post, into a single 'virtual'
wiki, a kind of giant tableau of all our stuff, everything we have
created or contributed to, and everything created by others we have
filed away or bookmarked or otherwise 'taken as our own'.
This
would be useful, first of all, for personal navigation. Google Desktop
is a big help, but it's still a hunt-and-peck kind of personal content
management. A wiki of our 'universe of knowledge' with a mind-map-type navigator would allow us to explore and amplify what we know and share with others in a more holistic, powerful
way than anything we can do now. It would allow us to 'get our head
around' everything we know, and care about, everything that has meaning
for us. It could literally allow us to 'expand our minds'.
But
-- and here's the really exciting part -- it could also allow us to
'share our brain' with someone else, to allow someone else to see how we think, and what we think about, and get an idea of the frame of mind
that organizes, filters and colours our thoughts. And, if memory
becomes cheap enough, we could even 'subscribe to' the wikis of those
whose thoughts, for whatever personal or professional reason, we care
about, and we could then annotate
that other person's 'brain', shared consciousness, with our own
interpretations, understandings and amplifications, and, if we and that
other person were so inclined, we could then share that 'feedback' with
the person whose thoughts provoked it. A kind of digital,
brain-to-brain, dialogue or conversation. What could come of all of
this might be some shared spaces, some collective intelligence that two or more people agreed was a synthesis of information, agreement or shared understanding, that they owned in common. So your wiki would then have three 'flavours' of content:
- stuff that you created (more or less) yourself
- stuff that others created that you have taken for your own, your 'accepted wisdom'
- stuff that is 'shared wisdom' that you and others have inseparably created in common
We are presumably close to the point where transcriptions of conversations could also be indexed and added to this repository.
One
of the challenges would be one that those of us who spend much of our
lives online are already grappling with: How to integrate e-mails and
conversations into our organization of more 'formal' documents. I'd be
interested in readers' thoughts on this subject. How do we integrate
the results of conversations and e-mail 'discussions' into our own
brains, our 'frames of thinking'? My sense is that these context-rich
exchanges and searches for common understanding are very important to
us, and get distilled tacitly by our brains, in ways different from how
we internalize either analytical writing or stories. How might we
represent this in a wiki-brain tableau?
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