Blog 8: The Digital Future

And just like that, we’re already done with Johnny Ryan’s A History of the Internet. I’m honestly surprised, looking at this book before this class started, I thought this would be a title we would cover for an extended amount of time, seeing as it went so in depth with the history of things. Guess looks can be deceiving.

Well, anyways, the final three chapters more-or-less look at the internet’s future. Or rather the possible future, since we have yet to find a way to see into the future. Various idea’s about what the internet has done in the past are brought up, from connections to media to politics. Since this book was published in 2010, we do see that some assumptions the book had made were right. Sociality via gaming and other services has definitely boomed, and now it’s just expected that politics will include internet tools, even if a candidate is well off enough to fund an extravagant campaign the old fashion way. The topic I found most interesting was the discussion covered in the final chapter, involving Google’s relationship with China.

As the book stated, Google has always had a “do no evil” approach when it comes to business, and this mindset has been trouble for them when it comes to China’s regulations and the already existing chinese search engine, Baidu. Despite having the ability to take their business elsewhere, Google still wants to have a branch in the country as they worry about the ramifications of leaving an area with a ton of potential in the internet department. Usually, Google can do pretty much whatever they want since they have their business to back them up if financial issues come up; they’ve shown this multiple times now, going into technological areas that have little to do with search engines. The fact that even they were hesitant to completely take their services out of the country means they must be worried that the internet’s future will involve the growing of digital use in areas where it’s currently limited, and Google doesn’t want to miss out on it.

Hopefully pre-internet establishments see this as an example of the importance of the internet, and, as the book states in page 197, “...weigh the prospect of failure” to support it in the future.

Questions

• What other area’s of our life could the internet become a part of in the future?
• Do you think restrictions on the internet will improve or worsen as time goes on?

Image from: http://cordis.europa.eu/fp7/ict/programme/challenge1_en.html