Living and Working in a Hypermedia World - Essay Example

?Living and Working in a Hypermedia World The CEO of Cisco is actually well informed, as is expected. Convergence is exactly where the Internet is going, but it is also divergence. That is, billions of devices will be constantly connected to the Internet and the Internet will be spread across all of these connected devices. So we will have the stored pages on servers, plus the desktops and the billions of smartphones, laptops and tablets holding the current information available on the Internet at any given time, plus billions more tiny embedded chips communicating with myriads of other chips to control our environments and make life easier. What this means is that we will be living in a hypermedia world, and this will affect every corner of every aspect of our lives. The connection of billions of sites with social networks has been going on for some time now. Every commercial site wants to leverage the access to social networks and asks visitors to “like” them or log in using their FaceBook or other social network logon. The next step is to connect devices beyond smartphones and tablets, such as embedded chips in home appliances, automobiles and building systems (Research ). Social and machine data will be travelling the same routes synchronizing and upgrading the world. Literally every working machine will sport a chip to send and receive data over the Internet. Devices that control home environments and appliances will only be part of the mix. The media giants are planning to converge with their audiences. Voice controls will be everywhere, and libraries of books, magazines, videos and movies are already stored in the cloud for universal access. These are all available on home computer, tables, laptops, smartphones and smart TVs. Virtually anything equipped with a screen can be streamed to and listened to on Bluetooth headsets or speakers attached or wireless. Onstream Media CEO Randy Selman boasts that more than half of the Fortune 1000 are their customers (Kleinmann 87-87). Virtually all financial institutions are gearing up to offer total remote service via smart devices for their highly mobile populations. Paying for vending machine goods and various entry and travel tickets have been set up to connect with smart devices for some time now, and banks, S&Ls and brokers are jumping in not to be left behind by more cutting edge organizations, such as ING Direct and Netbank (Kleinmann 87-87). Other businesses are either in the second round of rethinking their Internet use, after initial dotcoms and second wave interactive sites they are all moving into social networking, and social networking is mushrooming out of control. Maybe that’s a good thing. One cannot be certain at this point. People tend to prefer order to chaos, but chaos is also much more anonymous. So people flocked to what they thought was an anonymous medium due to the very vastness of the resources stored there. However, search engines are getting better and people who want to make money are getting craftier about sorting through it. The Internet represents ordered chaos, as it changes every nanosecond, but everything on it seems to be immortal. We have more knowledge (data in human usable form) available today on our little smartphones than existed in all the world’s libraries a century ago. The most valuable skill for the future will be the ability to find what one needs in this planet of data. The Internet not only survived 9/11, but it was the best available communications network in the US at that time. TV and radio news was “filtered”, phone and cell phone networks crashed, but the Internet stayed up and running, routing and rerouting around every bottleneck and crashed server . The messages all went through, even to recipients who could no longer receive them. The Internet has shown it is robust due to its wide dissemination and connected isolation. Each node on the Internet is separate, running on a different physical server and part of thousands of backbones. However, they are also all connected when running. The ability of the internet to route around problems when servers are crowded or down is what makes it robust. It is like an ambulance instantly knowing which streets are open and which are blocked or slow, which is not a current reality due to technology and the Internet and the connectivity about which this project is done. Distributed connected isolation is magic. As long as electricity flows somewhere in the world the Internet will never go down. IP6 as a protocol has not been universally adopted yet, but it will be, and by that time many early adopters will have switched to whatever is better and newer. All of this, including the possibly trillions of tiny nodes on line from connected devices will function because Internet routers and packet switchers are now capable of sorting traffic by type and size. So although traffic will increase capacity will increase alongside it (Schwartz 8-8). The world is imagined as totally connected with a monumental network of interactive devices to control everything from our home systems and appliances to parking meters and car systems ("App Central.").Tech companies are looking to sell more devices. Other companies want to ride the wave of profit and customers simply want all the new gadgetry to make life easier, or at least more interesting. For business it means that JIT (Just in Time) manufacturing, delivery and supply chain becomes a reality as the devices can communicate and regulate everything without human intervention. New application for all these connected devices will flood the market and people will be able to find whatever they can dream up. Within ten years every electronic or electric gadget in existence will be connected to something else. More than this, these connections each provide an opportunity for advertisers (Maddox T1). Most messages will have to be short and interesting to keep people from rebelling against what will surely be seen as Spam. However, we tend to tolerate advertising when it provides benefits, such as entertainment. Michael Gutenberg suggests that convergence for its own sake is not a good thing (Saltzman). After all, one would not want an MP3 player on a tiny watch, since capacity would be limited and one would have to use wireless bluetooth earphones or be tethered to one’s own wrist. So function must be the main concern for development of new devices or for connecting existing ones. Cribb (2006) sees the development as so rapid that one will hardly get a new setup when another is being released to the market (Cribb ). Considering the direction technology and the Internet are moving and how fast, it is logical to assume that we will need new skills in order to work in this environment. What those skills will be is really not as predictable as one might wish, since we cannot tell exactly how things will develop. However, since this will make us all more connected than ever before, we can assume that people skills will be very important. All of this convergence will likely be a double edged sword. Yes it will make life easier and more convenient, but it will also raise stress levels as a result of these connections. These days psychologists are advising people who work tethered to a cell phone 24/7 to turn them off on the weekend (Rodale 188-188). With all of this rapid development, there are bound to be problems and mistakes. So troubleshooting and risk assessment seem like very good skills to learn. In addition, people skills become more important the more technological our environment becomes. People need contact with other people, but some solitude is also required. Programing and development skills will be saleable and project management might be still very high stress and very high pay, considering that even with all the new devices, human planning and human response still works better than artificial intelligence. Most important of all skills will be adaptability and change management. After all, it is already acknowledged that the only constant in life today is change. This will require superb learning skills and a love for constant learning or one will simply go quietly crazy or withdraw to a wilderness if one can be found. If one is not working in business, marketing or sales, then science, development and project management will be good positions. Of course education will become more and more important, so educators and educational writers will be important. Finally, there will likely be an increase in the need for health care professionals, partly due to the aging population, but also to the environmental problems we have created with pollution, development and chemicals. The most important health care professionals will be in mental health as stress seems to accompany technological development and the speed of change. Perhaps the most important skill will still be a sense of humor. Read More