What Comes After Streaming? Brainflix?
At some point, streaming will go away. What will replace it? Culture gives us some clues about the future of interfacing with the internet.
It’s a Wednesday evening, Abdul has had a busy day. Endless meetings, dashing about the city. A steady rain has been washing the streets and sidewalks all day. Time for a little Brainflix and chill with his wife. A quick bite to eat and they settle on the large, comfy couch in their suburban home. The kids are in bed. They both grab the soft NetCap off the coffee table, placing them on their heads. Time for a show!
There was, a few years ago, a time when there was this trend around people getting implants in their skulls. But it was pricey and there were issues with secondary infections. It wasn’t pretty. One company was hit with so many lawsuits they had to shutdown. And it just never quite took. No one really wanted something drilled into their skull it seems.
Then along came the NetCap and the CogniSpark. Nice, soft, lightweight and it rested gently on your head, or you could get the wrap around that rested over your ears with ear buds and it didn’t mess with your hair. People also liked that there were no issues with eye strain and you didn’t have goggles over your face. You could also switch to Augmented Reality (AR) mode so you could wander around with your eyes open. The caps connected to your WiFi connection and voila! Close your eyes and stream Brainflix or all those other streaming channels.
If you’d spun your way back in time about 5,000 years ago and spoke Egyptian, and you asked a scribe what came after papyrus you’d probably get a funny look and hauled up in front of the magistrate for being a nutbar. What else could there ever be than papyrus?
When books came along, society’s elite and religious leaders feared the spread of ideas and a smarter population. Yet when newspapers came along we’d all get dumber. When telephones came along, some thought we’d all be talking to ghosts and spirits.
When we are unaware of technologies, we fear them. Especially those we see as changing the way we perceive and understand the world. Even more so, technologies that help us tell stories faster, more vividly, that come closer to our imaginations. Like the book, the telephone, the television, VHS tape, DVDs and well, streaming boxes, phones and tablets, laptops.
But oddly enough, we rarely look back and think about the fact that we never thought there’d be a next communications technology, a new medium. Yet this has been the case for thousands of years. Since, well, we started drawing on cave walls.
It was surprisingly fast how quickly cassette tape walkmans in the late 80’s were replaced by the CD disc version. I’m of a generation that went from vinyl, cassette tapes, 8-tracks to CDs and owning ones music to now subscribing to listen to music.
We now know too, that we even found a way to create movies on cave walls using firelight and a method of drawing. So maybe that was TorchFlix?
To survive as a species, humans tell stories. And along the way, we figured out that the easier we can tell a story to more people the better. So, papyrus to today. We’ve told a lot of stories for a very long time. We like stories. From myths, which became religious stories to stories about one another, our customs, traditions, norms and behaviours, political systems, nations, family. All are stories.
The better we get at communicating our stories to more people, the more our cultures evolved. Which of course can get us into a bit of a kerfuffle with one another at times. Like when one group doesn’t like the story the other bunch is telling and then they go about thumping each other. And end up with an entirely new story.
Significant advances in communications technologies have pretty much always lead to social revolutions, some violent, some not.
There’s much talk today of Brain Computer Interfaces (BCIs) and how we’ll just plug in to the internet. We see it in science fiction like the Matrix. Or we’ll all wear VR goggles and connect that way, like Ready Player One. This is, I think, a transitional technology.
Getting holes drilled in our heads is not something most cultures in the world prefer. In fact, I don’t think any of them do. Try and convince several billion people to get a whole drilled in their head and something plugged in. Even if it has Bluetooth or WiFi built in to a satellite feed?
Some cultures do use analog technologies, mostly jewellery, for body modification. The Mursi and Surma tribes in Africa use large lip rings. It’s an important social signal. The Kayan Lahwi people of Myanmar use brass neck coils to elongate their necks. This too is an important cultural element.
Today, we have biohackers who embed RFID tags and other devices into their bodies. It is a subculture movement, but this is often how movements towards a new use for technologies begins.
Humans are, for the most part, quite comfy with putting technology on us, less so with putting technology in us. Although, perhaps we’ll slurp down an orange flavoured cup of nanobot juice that have WiFi 42.0 built in? No Signal? Hold your hand up in the air!
It’s almost impossible today, unless you’re at the forefront of developing communications technologies, to know what comes after streaming, but something will. Would we ever reach a stage where we want to be permanently connected to the aether, to whatever is post-internet?
Actually, we might be. It depends on the technology. In the 1980’s, when the fist cell phones came out they were big and clunky. I carried one over my shoulder with a massive battery pack. All it did was make calls. It certainly didn’t fit in my pocket. Nor my music.
It seems unlikely today that we would but all this technology inside us, but culture is always evolving. What is abnormal today is normal decades or centuries later.
The clues to how we will adopt and accept a new communications technology however, lie within understanding our societies, cultures and systems…sociocultural systems. Looking back at how technologies have changed us, we can gain some foresight into what changes are ahead. Sort of.