Dan sees The Future, again... - #34

Hold on to your paperbacks folks, Daniel Rutter says they'll eventually become antiques.

I've taken an awful lot of photos. Maybe well over a hundred thousand, by now. I'm not sure, because most of them have been product shots of one kind or another, and fiddling around with lighting and exposure and angle means that several images go to the bit bucket for every one I bother to keep.
But I don't think I've taken more than 20 film photos in my life.
I'm a member of a new generation -- people for whom film photography feels weird and old and, well, icky.
Put the flamethrowers away, silver halide lovers. I know all of the practical and artistic reasons why film is still relevant and sensible. I just don't want to use it.
What else is going to go the way of film photography? What else is going to have a new generation of people who do things the New Way, and consider the Old Way to be up there with stagecoaches and hitting your washing on a rock?
Well, there's books, of course. And every other kind of current media delivery system, except P2P applications.
Old farts like Kurt Vonnegut (he said it, not me) may be convinced that books 'involve our hands and eyes, and then our minds and souls, in a spiritual adventure'. But I read that passage in a copy of Timequake that spat out its bookmark half a dozen times while I was reading it, and also spat out the Post-It I stuck in there to mark the page the quote came from. And it fell open anywhere but where I was up to, and it wouldn't stay open without supervision. At least the binding held.
But electronic books are too expensive and too fragile and their screens look lousy and their batteries don't last long enough and you can't get enough content for them!
Yep.
Also -- rewind 100 years -- automobiles are too expensive and they break down and there's practically nowhere you can buy fuel and there aren't nearly enough good roads to drive them on!
It'll be a while before we have an e-book that can cope with being whacked with a hammer. We may never have one. But they'll still beat out paper, sooner or later, and the kids'll think anyone reading a wood-pulp book looks rather retro.
Well, they will as long as the dead hand of corporate-owned copyright doesn't strangle e-books, along with other portable media devices. If you think legal prohibition of sensible things can't hang on for decade after decade and even get worse and worse, I invite you to try smoking a joint in public.
If we assume that the eventual legislative equilibrium reached by the media dinosaurs and the Copyright, Schmopyright crowd doesn't put MP3 players in the same category as bongs, though, then I think a lot of separate media objects are going to become anachronistic.
Books, CDs, DVDs; all will collapse into a single general purpose solid state storage lump you carry around with you, or possibly into a nebulous data-cloud you can access from wherever you happen to be.
If the communications companies don't make network access into a service that's more like water than like a phone line, then ad hoc mesh networking devices look likely to walk right past them and eat their lunch. Then, the technology that makes your digital camera and mobile phone and music/video player work, storing and retrieving and transmitting data by some means and in some place not immediately obvious to the user, will also help make everyone else's gadgets work.
And if Sony won't make devices that work with the mesh, you can bet that Sanctified Griffin Manufacturing Corporation of Guangzhou, China will. And they'll be about as easy to keep out of a country as are all-region DVD players today.
What else is going to look Old School in short order?
Well, youth employment be damned, the supermarket checkout as we know it has got to go.
Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tag prices are dropping, so here come non-stop high-efficiency trundle-through checkout lanes, just like the E-Tag lanes on toll roads. With technology to avoid 'tag collision', a trolley full of products, some identical, can be scanned in one go. And with an RF-enabled credit card, you can pay for that trolley-load by waving your wallet (or your arse, assuming a back-pocket wallet location) past another sensor. You'll just have to look out for jokers dropping stuff you don't want into your trolley.
There's more to life than mere efficiency, of course. If you like reading books or dawdling around a little shop full of interesting things or watching Casablanca in all its black and white, 24 frame per second, 4:3 aspect ratio, low resolution glory in a cinema with sticky carpet, then I hope you'll always be able to do it.
Efficiency is one hundred per cent desirable when it's applied to things that you don't like doing, though. And I think waiting for your photos to come back from the lab, taking up shelf after poorly-organised shelf to store data that can fit on one $200 hard drive already, and waiting in line at the supermarket, all qualify.
All this is small potatoes, though.
Next month: Why every single thing you own today may look as high-tech as a stone axe by 2050 AD.