Will we be the victims of the sociological curse of interactive Internet? Will we become electronic vegetarians consuming only the most essential social interaction? I think too little has been written of the impact of a pervasive connectivity will have on our lives and how it will affect face to face human interaction. We won’t withdraw to social avatars and usernames to assure our anonymity. We will selectively withdraw from the Internet to maintain our sanity. Here is why.
One interesting area for me is in the use of book readers and tablet computers. Bonnier R&D has examined how interactive layouts could change on tablets to make them more intuitive and acceptable to use by a larger audience. When voice recognition improves it would be easy to imagine one of these devices in a coffee shop overhearing your conversations, continuously searching for information depending on the context of your conversation. Can’t remember the name of a movie with those actors? Well it will be visible right there on your electronic secretary lying face up on the table. It would search the web, your email, your social networking accounts for that data. It would be interesting, but it would also be interesting for the other person at the table too. Now they would have a synopsis of your life history in the context of the conversation. You’d have to configure your tablet for friend mode, associate mode and stranger mode.
What happens when your TV becomes internet savvy with clickable apps and a camera like your cell phone? Video conferencing with your family and friends would be great, but what about wrong numbers? Would you want them peering into your house? Society would have to establish a protocol to allow others to video conference with you. Would you automatically video conference with all your friends? It is easy to imagine simultaneously streaming high definition TV and video conferencing to your TV set. Would you want all your friends to see inside your house all the time? How would you selectively turn on and off video depending on your mood without seeming rude? Would people even bother with turning it on in the first place? Maybe we’d all become expert liars.
The amount of data bandwidth this would require would be immense. How would data networks handle this? At the moment ISPs such as AT&T and Verizon interconnect with each other in strategic data centers, or peering points, in large metropolitan regions. To relieve the pressure on these locations, repeatedly viewed static content such as popular video files and product images are often temporarily stored on servers within their network so the user can get a speedier local copy rather than getting it from the original website. This won’t be as easy with streaming video that will have to be live. To achieve the same effect, ISPs will have to find ways to spool, or continuously store the next few minutes of video coverage, so that viewers watch a slightly delayed broadcast from a neighborhood server instead of direct from the broadcaster. The benefit to the broadcaster is that they only have to engineer a solution to stream to each of a few hundred ISPs. The ISPs will have to deal with their thousands of customers, but they can create a similar system with tiers of spooling caches in each metropolitan area and neighborhood. This works with single streams going to many people. What happens when video becomes more intimate and social? Peering at the neighborhood or metropolitan level becomes a very real possibility. Congestion will also happen in the airwaves as in some areas the towers will be overloaded. Getting data out of the air and on to a wire or fiber optic cable as quickly as possible will be necessary. Every new device expected to connect to the network will have to be vetted for its data usage intensity. It is a very real engineering challenge.
While the network engineers are dealing with that problem what about the product design engineers? With an intelligent TV, would you really need a multi-button remote? One would be enough to poke virtual buttons on the screen. They should also try to devise some method to automatically detect all the entertainment devices in the home and allow you to add them as icons to your TV screen. Having a party and you want to activate your PlayStation with surround sound while playing a game on the Wii while watching the news muted all in split screen mode? It should be possible with one remote with one button. Would you like your TV to automatically turn off when guests arrive and only have it show photos of your latest vacation or your wedding? If there is an argument in your living room, should the TV continue to show the football game or begin to exude soothing melodies of Chopin with pastoral scenes as a backdrop?
What about social engineers? If someone could hack into your TV when it was on, they would have access to the equivalent to closed circuit TV inside the home, they would know where you are and whether anyone was home, and they would be able to do this from the comfort their bedroom. Blackmail would become easier. To counteract this possibility, home owners could protect themselves by converting their TVs into surveillance systems too.
It is true that humans are social beings, but has evolution prepared us for this revolution? Will we now need an application to categorize each electronic communication avenue available to us and auto-censor our relationships depending on the context? Will electronic communication be so pervasive and easy to use but so hard to control that we decide to ignore it totally? We will probably find ourselves with multi-purpose devices and pay a premium for the ability to automatically turn select features off based on life changes and circumstances instead of having them on all the time. Will some of us become electronic vegetarians, eschewing the most complex forms of intrusive communications? If it becomes overwhelming, I probably will. Only time will tell if others will follow my lead.
