In a hundred years, people will look back at us and laugh.
It’s a quote from a science fiction book. A sequel, even. The movie totally wrecked the book and the very character to coin this oh-too-true message didn’t even make the cut.
He claims that they’ll laugh at our belief in photons and electrons. Can you imagine anything so silly, he asks, (It’s Michael Crichton, in Jurassic Park: The Lost World, if you wanted to know). “Because by then there there’ll be newer fantasies.”
Blogging is one of those fantasies.
Before blogging, there wasn’t blogging, and life somehow still found a way. After blogging? Well, I think we can call assume that the principle of blogging–the open sharing of information for the people, by the people–will survive in one way or another. Blogging has left too big of a print for it to disappear entirely.
But I sit and wonder, what’s the next phase of this evolution?
For those of you who think blogging is what your weird aunt Gertie does because she doesn’t have anyone to talk to…
Well, that’s true.
But blogging is also basically driving every point of information you can possibly find on the internet, outside of a commerce website or a wiki article.
When you google something, all those nicely coined and well packaged articles dangling out there with user experience and “back in my day” details ripe for the plucking? Well, that’s the blogosphere.
It represents a new and intrinsic layer of the dissemination of information (and maybe even the INSEMINATION–and I don’t mean porn).
So what does the future look like? I’d love to pull a Tyler and say that you climb the wrist thick kudzu vines that wrap the Sears Tower.
But no, the world I see is digital, and we will only get deeper and deeper. I’ve idly considered jumping into VR software and trying to make the first visual blog. Unfortunately, I can’t get past the image of wrangling together this kick ass VR setup and some coding so crazy my team’s eyes collectively bleed, only to find myself standing in… yep, you guessed it…
A library.
A digital one, but still just stacks and stacks of content and a place to not meet nice people who don’t want to talk because they’re too busy sitting quietly and flipping through a book.
Good times.
So that’s interesting. Will we come full circle? Or will we reverse polarities and end up in VR so far removed from a library as to be considred a step EVEN FURTHER back.
This step brings us to the dark ages, when nobles risked an uprising just to get a shot at the pretty little milk maid, and crowds filled huge stadiums to watch other men led to slaughter. An even’s entertainment watching a bludgeoning or a hanging or severe evisceration at the paws of a big hungry lion.
It’s video games, naturally. Now that might just be the future. The bleak and dismal future, in which everyone is as callous as me and twice as mopey.
Don’t mistake that. There are same AMAZING video games, some of which are celebrating their teenage years, and others who seem to be perpetually reborn year over year.
Still, the story games and RPGs won’t be enough for tomorrow’s crowd. We’ll see heavier bloodloss and more catastrophic approaches to the hero’s journey before long.
MOBA and battle arena will become stages for actual and individual combat, where gore represents real loss in life, and your only risk outside the VR headset is whether you’ll have an aneurism trying to get to the fridge before your Mountain Dew fix wears out.
Well, it’s a future. Maybe not anything to look forward to, and honestly maybe that’s just the preparatory step necessary for civilization to prepare for a few thousand years inside eco bubbles while the world banishes a little carbon back to the earth where it belongs.
So, in the meantime, I guess there’s always blogging if you need something to do. You can get free blogging courses anytime you want. They run the information highway for the regular folk. Climb aboard.