Education, privacy, democracy, copyright, media and commerce. I am repeating myself (see Silence is golden) but I thought some clarification might be in order.
Education
When information was scarce it was essential that people learned how to wade through large masses of text and remember the most important things. Education it was called. Digitalization has made information plentiful. Basically any piece of information that a regular person might need can be found in mere seconds.
Digital tools are even giving the sacred art of writing a run for its money. The tools are giving us the power to effortlessly combine images, video, audio (smell and taste are still going to take a while) and share them with others. Why try to write about something when you can just use the tools to show the real thing? Sure, the most talented writers are going to be able to capture the moment, idea or feeling perfectly but the rest of us are going to use the easy way out.
Education should not be the same as it was before. It should be about creating ideas. Creatively combining information and media to make something new. Something of value.
Privacy
Digital information is eternal. Once you make something public in a digital format it becomes eternal. It might be a bit hard to find, but chances are someone somewhere has it. There have been quite a few campaigns aimed at teens addressing this issue. The argument is always: “Do not put anything questionable online because it is going to lessen your chances of getting a job in the future. The people that are thinking of hiring you will not do so once they find the thing.”
The only flaw in this logic is that the people that are doing the hiring will also have some indiscretion tarnishing their reputation. At it will be online for everyone to see. Once everyone has something, it levels thing out. People are no longer going to care so much.
User generated content is going to change the way we think about privacy. What was once though of as private will no longer be so. And people are going to be ok with it, because humans have been living in small villages and communities where basically everything is public for a lot longer than we have been living in large cities. The only difference will be that this time the village is global.
Democracy
We have already seen a few examples of what digitalization is doing to democracy and politics. The free flow of information is going to wreak havoc on politicians that have something to hide. People are using digital tools to speak up about the issues that they care about. They are forming communities and putting pressure on people that are in a position to change things.
Unfortunately the public sector has not yet opened up the wealth of data they have stored in their massive databases. I bet that once that happens, even politically inactive citizens might find a good reason to become active. Going to vote on election day might still be too tough for them but they would have the possibility to do some watchdogging from the comfort of their own homes.
Copyright
From Wikipedia: “Copyright is a legal concept that gives the creator of an original work exclusive rights to it, usually for a limited period of time. At its most general, it is literally “the right to copy”…”
Copyright is a very good concept. It rightfully prevents anyone from stealing another persons creative work. The problem is that digitalization is making it impossible to enforce the law. Copying, modifying and distributing anything in digital format is just too easy. In fact, digital is the the new punk. Only this time, it is not only about music. It is about everything. Punk news. Punk tv. Punk anything and everything.
So the only way to get out of this mess is to figure out something new. Something that ensures that artist and creators get paid for what they do and the public is not unnecessarily inconvenienced with laws that are unenforceable.
Media
Talk about turmoil. I bet that each and every media company executive in the world is scratching their head trying to figure out what to do.
Problem number one:
The old business model was based on creating content for an audience and inserting ads between the two. The audience has become the content creator so there is no place to stick the ads anymore.
Problem number two:
The internet is a lousy mass medium. By my unscientific calculations the websites per users ratio is currently at a little under 10. And that is only counting sites, not the billions of pages that the websites contain. Even if everyone visited a hundred websites a day the mass would only be a thousand strong.
It is just not going to work out when the business has been built on rounding up the masses and selling advertising based on that. No mass available.
Commerce
Yeah, eCommerce and all that. In honor of the new year I think something more inspirational is in order.
3D printing. Yes, printers that print 3D object instead of text and images on paper. The current 3D-printers are not very useful to ordinary people. Yet. Think about mobile phones twenty years ago. Very expensive, very cumbersome and not very useful, because not very many people owned one.
If 3D-printing technology evolves at the same rate mobile phones did, the next revolution in commerce will begin before the current one is over. Imagine if buying a household object becomes as easy as buying music from the iTunes music store currently is. A few clicks (or a few something else. It would be nice if someone figured out a better interface than the mouse and keyboard by then) to buy a 3d-model of the object and a few more to print it.
Now, that is what I call eCommerce.
Oh yeah, there are some other issues involved with 3d-printing, like copyright, but more on them later.