I am no futurist. The future often surprises me when it becomes the present. But I've been thinking lately, about the future of social media. Where is it all going? What does the world look like when social media becomes a commonplace, everyday activity for 100s of millions of people in the world?
I think the master trend is that social media technology will be continuously refined so that people will be able to behave and interact online as they do in everyday life. This is a long-term trend that started years ago, perhaps with the telegraph or maybe with the jungle drum. It speeds up and slows down but it keeps relentlessly moving forward.
Over the years, I've heard lots of predictions, some seemed logical at the time, others made you wonder whether the prediction was visionary or hallucinatory. But here are a few that keep coming up. Most have been around for years and in no case do I know whose vision came first. It probably doesn't matter. Vision only needs credit when it becomes reality.
Anyway here are some of the ideas I've heard that may come true--that I hope will come true:
- Virtual reality in teaching. Some day students will take a VR tour of the wildlife lands of Africa, or the melting ice caps. They will understand what it really was like to have fought with mace and ax at at Battle of Hastings. This may happen in the classroom or the comfort of their homes--or both.
- Computers will emerge out of the boxes. When we socialize online, we will no longer be confined to the types of devices we use today. Instead, when I talk with you, I will be watching a realtime avatar of you on my desktop or in my living room. If you are Chinese, I will speak in English and you will hear it in Chinese and the reverse.
- Global Neighborhoods will be marketplaces. As in the tangible world, each of us will be familiar with multiple neighborhoods. But social media technology will have minimized the relevance of geographic barriers. In so doing, people will bypass government, language, currency and other barriers to deal with each other, trade, collaborate or inform each other.
Either that, or sometime in a few decades, some web surfer will come across this very post and shrug and smile about how off base I had been.
