The future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed.
—William Gibson
Here at City Squid, we live by the above quote.
A few months ago on a long car trip I posited to my fiancée Rigel that we could probably pick up a USB power converter that plugged into the car's cigarette lighter outlet (most of which are now expressly designed not to be cigarette lighters) so that she could charge her iPod.
I had never actually seen such a device, though I knew that other, device-specific charging cords existed. I just guessed that someone somewhere would have gotten around to manufacturing the proper inverter-socket combination, seeing as specific-device converters have existed for years. We found a USB Car Adapter a couple of gas stations later for $15, at which point Rigel remarked that it was a different brand from the last one she had seen.
"Wait, you knew these were real?" I asked.
"You didn't?"
I had posited the theoretical existence of a vaguely futuristic device, and it was available at a random gas station for under twenty dollars, and other people already knew about it already. In predicting its availability and existence, I was actually behind the curve.
Maybe its that so many more people are working on stepping into the future that the entire sense of it has become lost — what was once front-page-worthy is now just daily advancement. What was once science fiction is now just existence. Science Fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson said just as much recently:
The fifteen-year-old who figured out a particular sequence of applications and services to use to be able to send a text message from his cell phone to update his Facebook status (before Facebook itself implemented that feature) has done network-and-connectivity work with complexity on the same order of magnitude as the creation of the Associated Press in 1948, just a thousand times faster and more pedestrian.
Communications technology has advanced so far, and advances so far each new day, that what was once a great leap into the future that only a tiny few could accomplish is now a baby-step that any teen with the right inclination can perform.
While working on this blog, my colleagues and I regularly experienced such moments of future-stepping.
The layout of the blog, for example, started as a paper sketch drawn in a notebook at a random Starbucks in Pittsburgh. I photographed it with my digital camera, pulled the photo onto my laptop via a USB cable (a cable which is being slowly replaced with wifi transfer technology), logged onto Starbucks' WiFi (which they protect by tracking in-store purchases and granting blocks of free use based on those, requiring three or four other computer systems syncing together), and emailed the photo of the page out to my collaborators for comment and review.
Alan, who was on his laptop at the time, got the email, looked at the picture, and immediately called my cell phone with his feedback, which I wrote down on another page after a brief discussion. During that discussion, I referenced the page itself to make my points, while he referenced the photo-of-the-page. I wrote down our conclusions on another page. Two hours later, Rigel looked at the email, and, knowing that I was at work and couldn't take calls, texted me her thoughts, which I also wrote down. When I came to a point in my day where I had some free time, I added her thoughts to my hand-written list.
Hours and hours later, long after the actual collaboration and critique had occurred, when Rigel and I were both at home, I took my notebook out and put it on my desk. She came over and pawed through it, opening to the above-pictured page. "Oh," she said. "There it is. In person."
The page had become a physical artifact of a transaction that had occurred mostly digitally.
Further iterations of the design process continued to occur in cyberspace only. The current logo was actually part of Rigel's Photoshop-made mockup of a possible design.
Articles have been written in one county and edited in two others. Newsroom banter has occurred via SMS, email, and Facebook as much as it has happened in person. Thanks to the cloud computing of Blogger, we aren't even sure where the servers that host City Squid even reside, nor do we particularly need to care.
As blogging organizations go, the tools we use are not even all that sophisticated. We have yet to dive into liveblogging from smartphones, or seriously figuring out how to link Twitter, Flickr, or other services into the page. But even small aspects of our process would have been technological marvels fifteen years ago. This blog is a step forward, a deliberate step towards the next stages of journalism, criticism, and engagement.
Bur rather than a jarring "future shock" each time we do something new and interesting to collaborate and publish, what registers with us is more of a hazy lens of futuristic-feeling, a pervasive sense that what we are doing every day is the kind of stuff that used to be in Science Fiction books. We are constantly aware that we live in a strange new world.
The difference is this: what pushes us into the future now is our own willful actions, rather than the greater technological advancement of civilization. Part of the continual acceleration of technology is that more and more people are becoming part of that advancement. It is not scientists and great thinkers who are pushing most things forward now — it is the combined baby-steps of everyone. Feeling futuristic is itself a step towards the future. We are futuristic because we have decided, consciously, to be so.
While working on this blog, my colleagues and I regularly experienced such moments of future-stepping.
The layout of the blog, for example, started as a paper sketch drawn in a notebook at a random Starbucks in Pittsburgh. I photographed it with my digital camera, pulled the photo onto my laptop via a USB cable (a cable which is being slowly replaced with wifi transfer technology), logged onto Starbucks' WiFi (which they protect by tracking in-store purchases and granting blocks of free use based on those, requiring three or four other computer systems syncing together), and emailed the photo of the page out to my collaborators for comment and review.
Alan, who was on his laptop at the time, got the email, looked at the picture, and immediately called my cell phone with his feedback, which I wrote down on another page after a brief discussion. During that discussion, I referenced the page itself to make my points, while he referenced the photo-of-the-page. I wrote down our conclusions on another page. Two hours later, Rigel looked at the email, and, knowing that I was at work and couldn't take calls, texted me her thoughts, which I also wrote down. When I came to a point in my day where I had some free time, I added her thoughts to my hand-written list.
Hours and hours later, long after the actual collaboration and critique had occurred, when Rigel and I were both at home, I took my notebook out and put it on my desk. She came over and pawed through it, opening to the above-pictured page. "Oh," she said. "There it is. In person."
The page had become a physical artifact of a transaction that had occurred mostly digitally.
Further iterations of the design process continued to occur in cyberspace only. The current logo was actually part of Rigel's Photoshop-made mockup of a possible design.
Articles have been written in one county and edited in two others. Newsroom banter has occurred via SMS, email, and Facebook as much as it has happened in person. Thanks to the cloud computing of Blogger, we aren't even sure where the servers that host City Squid even reside, nor do we particularly need to care.
As blogging organizations go, the tools we use are not even all that sophisticated. We have yet to dive into liveblogging from smartphones, or seriously figuring out how to link Twitter, Flickr, or other services into the page. But even small aspects of our process would have been technological marvels fifteen years ago. This blog is a step forward, a deliberate step towards the next stages of journalism, criticism, and engagement.
Bur rather than a jarring "future shock" each time we do something new and interesting to collaborate and publish, what registers with us is more of a hazy lens of futuristic-feeling, a pervasive sense that what we are doing every day is the kind of stuff that used to be in Science Fiction books. We are constantly aware that we live in a strange new world.
The difference is this: what pushes us into the future now is our own willful actions, rather than the greater technological advancement of civilization. Part of the continual acceleration of technology is that more and more people are becoming part of that advancement. It is not scientists and great thinkers who are pushing most things forward now — it is the combined baby-steps of everyone. Feeling futuristic is itself a step towards the future. We are futuristic because we have decided, consciously, to be so.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment