Do you ever turn on one of the rerun channels on TV and gawp at the way things used to be? Shows filmed in the 1960’s and 1970’s have a bevy of corded telephones, stay at home wives and casual racism. Such a wide range of straight white people on the TV back then. Even the degenerate, heroin-addicted criminals on Dragnet look so clean-cut, the men always wearing collared shirts and dress shoes and women in dresses and heels with a big poufy do.
Now let’s say the year is 2063. What about today’s culture (movies, television, pop songs, web videos, Internet memes, lifestyles) do you think will be passe, trite, cliched and past their prime? I have a few guesses.
1. Physical media. That means no compact discs, DVD’s, books, magazines, thumb drives, any sort of media used to store and retrieve information. Everything will be “in the cloud,” whatever that looks like in 50 years. You’ll have private spaces to store data that’s yours, and public spaces to share data with others.
2. Computer interfaces. Desktop computers, laptops, tablets, cellphones, all gone. Everyone will have an appliance they wear (or have implanted) for direct access to “the cloud” where all their data is stored, where they exchange ideas and create new data structures. There won’t be any place on earth where you can’t connect to the Internet, or whatever the Internet morphs into down the road. Maybe it’s something like “the Stream,” an always-on electronic society that everyone is always connected to.
3. Clothing. No, the Kids In America won’t run around naked, but as the climate gets warmer and the oceans get higher, clothing is going to get a lot smaller.
4. National Boundaries. Speaking of the Kids In America, that’s probably the name of a street gang, not a group of people aligned to a country. This is because economic forces, combined with weather conditions, will force nations to play nice with each other, or be in a constant war for resources. Let’s hope tomorrow’s leaders opt for “nice.”
5. Privacy / Anonymity. Always-on data access combined with ubiquitous surveillance means everybody knows what everybody else is doing, always.
What do you think will be “the new normal” in 2063? Will marriage between two people be “old-fashioned?” Will we still have the employer/employee relationship we take for granted today? What other changes do you see coming?
Image attribution: Wikimedia commons
