The World Wide Web is only 5'000 days old – and what the next 5'000 days will bring us.
The keypoints from Kevin Kelly's talk at the 2007 EG conference:
"The internet is less than 5'000 days old."
"We thought the internet was going to be TV – but better. And it turns out that's not what it was."
"Something like Wikipedia is something that was simply impossible. It's impossible in theory, but possible in practice."
"The first lesson of the web: We have to get better in believing the impossible."
"The internet is basically a single global machine."
"The internet uses 5% of global electricity."
"The web works similar as our brains work – however our brains are not doubling in power every 2 years…"
"First computers were linked. Then in the 2nd stage, pages were linked. In the 3rd stage, data will be linked, from one idea on a page to another idea."
"If you wanna have total personalisation, you have to be totally tranparent."
"When 6 billion people are googleing, who's searching whom?"
"We are the web."
"The next 5'000 days is not gonna be the web and only better – it's gonna be something different."
"It's gonna be more like a large organism that we are going to be interacting with. There's a unity that's starting to emerge. It's a ONE."
Born in 1952, Kevin Kelly is the founding executive editor of Wired magazine, and a former publisher and editor of the Whole Earth Catalog. He has also been a photographer, writer and conservationist. Kelly is an expert in digital culture.
Explore more of his fascinating ideas on his site:
Kk.org
What Kelly did not explicitly mention is the upcoming trend of the internet which is becoming 3D: Web 3.0 will be a 3D virtual cyberspace landscape!
Afraid of? Scared? You dont’ believe him? It’s a growing organism turning inside out everything you want to keep hidden. Imagine children telling the whole world the truth about the “perfect families” they live in. Imagine being always put on a live-stream by every webcam you don’t even know about. Imagine having tenthousands of friends on facebok while you eat your pizza alone. Imagine the loneliness you can feel in a 7 billion world at you reach, sitting alone in your flat. Imagine everybody always on his way and nobody there. And no Stop-button to go back to the world you once knew. The organism will be a big challenge to deal with and perhaps mankind is not up to it. The organism wont be stoppable. don’t bet against him. We are leaving in interesting times, that’s the good new.
Very interesting talk. Kelly Kevin is definitively on to someting. The future of the internet will pretty much rock!