By Tom Hayes
The biggest take-away from last week’s Consumer Electronics Show is that every device in our lives is rapidly becoming a computer connected to the Internet. That new reality means the Internet will soon transition from the conspicuous to the unconscious-from something you go “onto” to something you never go off of-and in fact hardly even think about.
Much the way electricity did a hundred years ago, the Internet is segueing from near-magic to life staple. And much the way electrified homes and cities revolutionized our culture and economy at the turn of the 20th century, the Internet as core utility will do the same for this century.
Light on actual new gadgets, the CES was a watershed for showcasing network ubiquity. Machine-to-machine communications, what some used to call the Internet2, will mean that modern life depends on connectedness in a whole new way. In fact, we may soon stop referring to the developed and undeveloped worlds, and instead talk about the hot and the dark worlds-the online and the offline hemispheres. And as I write about in my book, Jump Point, by 2011 more people will be online than off as the Internet crosses the 3.5 Billion user mark that year. So it makes sense that the CES this year looked more like the consumer shows of the 1950s in demonstrating the new wonders and conveniences of the modern home. Almost every booth featured models of the digital lifestyle. For example:
- By 2011, 90 percent of all Sony products will connect to the Internet, Howard Stringer, the chief executive of Sony, predicted.
- New televisions from LG, Samsung and others will now let viewers seamlessly watch movies from Netflix and other Internet sites.
- The Palm Pre phone promises to make it easy to call your friends by looking up their phone numbers on Facebook for you.
- A new version of the Ford F150 pickup truck will let contractors check service manuals by browsing the Web from an in-dash computer.
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27 Comments
1. Pajamas Media » The End of the Internet as We Know It:[...] Read more here. [...]
Jan 13, 2009 - 12:37 pm 2. goy:Great observations. But on many levels, the future is now.
I’m in the process of moving from AT&T and digital phone (via cable service) to Skype for telephone, which includes conference call capability, video calls (which are amazingly hi-rez and in-sync!) and unlimited calling in the US and Canada – all from anywhere I have Internet access (i.e., not just my house, where the phones are). Cost savings: over $700/year.
We’re also slowly switching from exorbitantly priced cable TV service to streamed video from Netflix directly to my LG DVD player, and other streamed video from various internet sources to a cheap Acer computer hooked to the DVI-in on my TV. Potential savings: another $700/year – depending on which channels I can get my wife to do without. At the rate things are being made available, soon she won’t have to choose.
All in all this provides better all-around connectivity in these areas, no constant barrage of advertising, more flexibility, and a huge savings as well. This allows me to bump my hi-speed internet service up to the next level and still save money.
Jan 13, 2009 - 1:16 pm 3. Jm:The problem with all this connectedness, the old infrastructure that it’s sitting on. Fiber needs to be laid across the nation, why as such a technological advanced nation are we so far behind?
Next we have companies who are capping and throttling, which accordingly is because of this old infrastructure. With everything moving to the internet, these companies need to move with it instead of trying to stop it.
Jan 13, 2009 - 1:53 pm 4. njcommuter:Also a new day of eavesdropping, search, and seizure. For instance, the new GM OnStar-equipped vehicles can be shut down remotely, and the authority to do so will come from the police. If you care to hand the police this capability you are, of course, free to do so. You can also give them the keys to your front door and the remote code to the taser implant you’ve so considerately had installed in your belly.
I’m not against technology. I work in the field. Products with my code in them have shipped. But we have to extend our principles of law (property rights, Bill of Rights, etc.) into the virtual world, and we have to learn how to put up fences and how to lock the gates.
Jan 13, 2009 - 2:15 pm 5. SaraforAmerica:Sorry but I have to say this sounds awfully like “1984″.
With Google analysts monitoring our searches, Obama’s interest in putting our medical records online, GPS tracking technology to the “nth” degree — pray tell me how we’ll have any semblance of privacy?
We won’t. And I suppose that is probably their point. I’d much rather lose a few seconds of time having to do something on my own rather than give up my life to government.
Jan 13, 2009 - 2:25 pm 6. datilcowman:Although all the new technology is whiz bang, there a large portion of the west where we are lucky to even get a cell phone signal, much less internet connectivity. without Satellite,we would never know what is going on in the world.
Jan 13, 2009 - 2:33 pm 7. kevin c:mr Hayes- I have this small problem with SONY. Why are they allowing the PROPAGANDA show called AL JAZEERA to be broadcast over your SONY ERICSSON CELL PHONES??????
Jan 13, 2009 - 2:50 pm 8. M:“why as such a technological advanced nation are we so far behind?”
Because as a society we are longer capable of long term thinking and planning long term.
Jan 13, 2009 - 2:56 pm 9. Charlie (Colorado):All that matters is the now.
Instant gratification,aversion to personal responsibility,a deep rooted sense of entitlement?
Why worry about long term profit if you can grab a quick profit now by selling you piece of tech to Japan or China?
Yeah,they’ll make a profit for the next 40 yrs,but you’ll be retired in Belize,right?
Think of the old cliche that a politician only thinks about the next election,but a statesman thinks of the next generation.
The same is true of business.
“why as such a technological advanced nation are we so far behind?”
You might ask that question about, for example, TV. It’s not because of some industrial conspiracy, and it’s not because of our sudden lack of long-term planning. It’s because we’re the world’s early adopters: we were putting cable to the ome before most anyone else, we had people doing broadband at home before anyone else. So we paid for infrastructure that was 2,4,6,10,20 years earlier than other countries.
We actually do have fiber all across the country; it’s the last mile that gets us. Korea, Japan, and so on ran the last mile years later; the available technology was an order of magnitude better.
Jan 13, 2009 - 4:54 pm 10. Mike:“the Internet as core utility will do the same for this century.”
Only as some others here have noted if affordable, usable and consistent broadband is available. Right now that is a only dream for many areas of the country.
Jan 13, 2009 - 5:27 pm 11. Western Comfort:————————————-
You liberals need to pay lots of taxes cause someone needs to pay for all the free stuff Obama promised me!
I worry about Amazon’s ‘Kindle’ device as spelling the end of books. I don’t want to read e-books all the time, I want old-fashioned hardbacks and paperbacks to remain the norm and e-books can be the new kids on the block who never fit in.
Also, two words must reign supreme: good taste. Hopefully that’s obvious.
Jan 13, 2009 - 7:39 pm 12. Craig:New televisions from LG, Samsung and others will now let viewers seamlessly watch movies from Netflix and other Internet sites.
You don’t even need a new TV. Plug in a Wii to your TV and use the Wii from your wireless nearby.
Jan 14, 2009 - 5:47 am 13. Joshua:You’re all (including Mr. Hayes) missing the elephant in the room.
The Internet is a pervasive global medium that neither knows nor respects borders or national sovereignty. If Mr. Hayes is right – and I agree that he is – then it seems to me that once we begin to take real-time, 24/7/365 global connectivity for granted, the very concept of the sovereign, bordered nation-state is going to start to look more and more like an anachronism.
Jan 14, 2009 - 6:56 am 14. Emmott On Technology » The End of the Internet as We Know It:[...] Edgelings.com » The End of the Internet as We Know It. [...]
Jan 14, 2009 - 7:07 am 15. Cybergeezer:We have to “transmogrify”, since just about every muslim in a cave has an internet connection and gets into the comments section at Politico.
Jan 14, 2009 - 7:37 am 16. Thomas:Goy and everybody else;
Skype offers for $3.00 per month unlimited calls in the US and Canada: for this amount you can ring up from your COMPUTER any land line and cell phone.
Caveat: for this amount they cannot call you back but for an additional fee you can get a phone # for your COMPUTER and you can be called up on your machine – not on your telephone equipment.
It pays off handsomely when a Customer Service ops. put you on hold for long time and every minute costs dearly.
The sound quality is superb, you can send files, voice messages, and has live video as well.
Jan 14, 2009 - 7:41 am 17. KBK:@Thomas: the only problem is I can’t depend on Skype when using customer service queues. Skype often seems to drop out under those conditions when put on hold, and you have to start over. I got dropped twice while discussing a complex issue with the IRS and finally gave up and used my landline.
Jan 14, 2009 - 9:53 am 18. Thomas:KBK
I never experienced the loss of connection you have mentioned.
Jan 14, 2009 - 10:26 am 19. Thomas:I used to chat for hours with out-of-State and European friends without a hitch: I have no way to pinpoint the cause of your problem; tangentially speaking, dropped lines are not always Skype’s inherent flaws. We all had dropped lines, lost connection experiences with traditional phone services as well. The jury is still out on this matter.
KBK
I never experienced the loss of connection you have mentioned.
Jan 14, 2009 - 10:28 am 20. Cindy Sue Causey:I used to chat for hours with out-of-State and European friends without a hitch: I have no way to pinpoint the cause of your problem; tangentially speaking, dropped lines are not always Skype’s inherent flaws. We all had dropped line, lost connection experiences with traditional phone services as well. The jury is still out on this matter.
I’m with SaraforAmerica.. I just tinkered with a new offering out there that lets a webmaster plant a TINY piece of code on their webpages that then purportedly tracks and reports users’ exact movements across webpages..
Couldn’t quite get it to work on my low end setup, but…..
The more I thought about what they were promising it would do, the more creeped out I became.. :SHUDDER:
Cookie use aside, were I ever to find a favorited website using this particular software/program without openly announcing they were with respect to privacy, I’d feel betrayed beyond words..
That so many different projects are in the works is terrifying, especially if one looks at the REAL numbers of personally identifiable information falling into the wrong hands every… single… day as it is..
Ack, and don’t even get me started on the “dog collars” they’re willy-nilly throwing on people with cognitive disabilities now to electronically TRACK their every single move……….
Yuppers, aren’t technological advancements grand..! =))
Jan 14, 2009 - 11:25 am 21. Jm:“The Internet is a pervasive global medium that neither knows nor respects borders or national sovereignty. If Mr. Hayes is right – and I agree that he is – then it seems to me that once we begin to take real-time, 24/7/365 global connectivity for granted, the very concept of the sovereign, bordered nation-state is going to start to look more and more like an anachronism.”
I don’t buy this, we already have global connectivity and a lot of people take it for granted, but…
The way you make it sound is as if we should do as China (and soon Australia) and just firewall the rest of the world out.
The ability to send information to every corner of the world is a double edged sword, on one side you can disseminate information to a lot more people, free information, radical information, subversive information…true information. On the other hand it can be manipulated by anyone along the way.
Another point, is – look around, like Facebook, MySpace or even personal Blog sites. How much personal information do you see being put out there? I see a lot. It makes me think that a lot of people will gladly except the OnStar systems, OBDIII systems, and other counter privacy instruments brought to market because they are so use to it, and have grown reliant on it – and consider it to make their lives easier.
What the hell did we do before cell phones, ipods, gps, internet? I don’t think anyone remembers…nor do the mass sheeple want too…
Jan 14, 2009 - 12:59 pm 22. BERLET98:Teens have discovered an innovative use of the internet–showing themselves in all their glory:
TEEN SEX TAKEN TO A WHOLE NEW LEVEL
As if today’s parents didn’t have enough to worry about, the latest method teens have to drive them loony and send them to counselling or to Tough Love sessions is sending nudie pictures of themselves to girlfriends, boyfriends, classmates, in fact, to the internet universe, although they may be unaware of that last exposure.
Using cell phones while driving and texting while driving are madnesses associated with somewhat older teens who, for some inexplicable reasons, including having passed useless driver ed courses, are granted license to drive on America’s roads and highways.
The younger set, maybe a year or so away from that opportunity to cause vehicular mayhem and, too often, death or maiming to themselves and innocent victims, have discovered their own vehicle of rebellion via cell phones.
Kids between aged one and eighteen have never been known for discretion. Some would say that outside age limit extends to thirty, in some cases. Way back when, teenie indiscretions meant wearing lipstick and makeup and “making out” under the grandstand at high school football games. Closer “back when’s” involved more intimate behavior but still was conduct confined to one, or two, or a few significant others.
For the past year or so, based on news reports, young teens have been letting their raging hormones soar to new, and perilous, heights, letting it all hang out, figuratively and literally.
From Cincinnati comes this story. . .
(Read the rest of this article at http://genelalor.com/.)
Jan 14, 2009 - 1:19 pm 23. Joshua:JM (#21, responding to me @ #13): The way you make it sound is as if we should do as China (and soon Australia) and just firewall the rest of the world out.
Actually the time to do this was back in the early 1990s, when the Internet was still a novelty, and global connectivity through other media (cable/satellite TV, cell phones, etc.) was still relatively limited. That ship sailed once the American people embraced these global media into the mainstream; any attempt to roll them back now would amount to political suicide for anyone who proposes it.
Now the next ship is close to setting sail as well. Once we pass the tipping point of a critical mass of Americans perceiving the global, nationally ungovernable Internet as a fundamental component of everyday life, all bets are off as to how this will reshape their attitudes toward their nation – or how they will respond when they are (as they inevitably will be) asked to choose between real-world and cyberspace loyalties, between country and virtual community.
Jan 14, 2009 - 8:11 pm 24. G Alston:There was an internet connected fridge announced a few years back. It would be clever enough to… well… it wasn’t very clever at all. Supposedly what it offered was the ability to order up groceries. Oh wait. Scratch that. When you got down to it, it could be used to make a list. Pretty nifty for an extra $300. I don’t think many of these were sold (if any.)
All of this “everything connected” stuff is not different than when pen computers were going to take over, then it was thin clients. And with cloud computing the thin client is still the big fat dream. Bad old Microsoft. Anything to kill them guys is good. Linux much?
And yet the dream didn’t pan out then and likely won’t pan out now. Turns out a great number of people don’t really want critical data living in a cloud. Silicon is cheap. And as long as silicon is cheap, the cloud will not solve much that it can’t solve now. Not everybody uses Word and needs to merge documents with the Chicago office, and if they are, they’re just as likely have a VPN anyway. Products for wishful thinking. Quick, where’s the big money in the internet world? Search engines and social networking. Period. Newspapers never figured out how to make money. Magazines have gone to net editions and they’re losing money, too. Clouds are meaningless without a mechanism to make money.
And of course, there’s convergence. Mate the e-reader and the netbook and the iphone and you simply don’t need an internet connection in your toaster. You won’t need anything connected. Everything you could actually *need* is sitting in your personal phone/reader/netbook widget. In 5 years this thing probably won’t cost much, either. And all it needs is wi-fi. Nope. Scratch that. Make that a cell connection *and* wi-fi.
So what’s an internet connected toaster to do? It’ll probably join the stupid idea support group and chat with mensa quality bathroom scales.
Question: is Edgelings some sort of advertisement for unabashed silliness? Evangelists for hire? What? Because you sure aren’t very good at analysis.
Jan 16, 2009 - 12:02 am 25. Rashputin:Joshua: Good point on the connected world. At last, Islam will be able to have all communications and entertainment cut off five times a day so as not to insult Islam. Well, at least if Google lets them.
have a nice day
Jan 16, 2009 - 5:11 am 26. Cybergeezer:The Department of Health and Human Services is offering free internet prostate exams an January 20th at 12:00 P.M. If you go to http://www.Obama’sHealthPlan.org, turn on your web cam, drop your pants and place your posterior over the key board, you shall be given this free exam. You will have to be patient, since the turnout is expected to be large, This offer shall not be repeated. The results will be emailed to you.
Jan 16, 2009 - 2:32 pm 27. dancingnancie:Nintendo Wii already has a program you can buy where you surf the web on your TV with a remote. The internet is becoming a way of life. Sara makes a good point above that we are going to lose a lot of privacy and we’ll be giving up our lives to the government.
Feb 5, 2009 - 2:25 pm