Digital life 2025

The In­ter­net was born just 25 years ago and that quar­ter of a cen­tury has seen enor­mous changes in the dig­i­tal world. So many in fact, that it is dif­fi­cult to pre­dict what our dig­i­tal lives will be like in the net­works in the fu­ture. A US think-tank, the Pew Re­search Cen­ter, de­cided to give it a try, and in col­lab­o­ra­tion with the Imag­in­ing In­ter­net Cen­ter, in 2014 sur­veyed 3,000 re­searchers and ex­perts as to how they saw the In­ter­net of 2025.

High­lights from the study see the In­terneat act­ing in a grid sys­tem, just like elec­tric­ity within 10 years. The so-called “In­ter­net of Things” (IoT), will see ad­vances in ar­ti­fi­cial in­tel­li­gence, the de­vel­op­ment of more in­tel­li­gent ma­chines and de­vices, the ex­pan­sion of sen­sors that make the func­tion­ing of our every­day en­vi­ron­ment, build­ings, house and work­places a lot smarter with a con­stantly in­creas­ing band­width and speed of con­nec­tion which ex­perts read as the Net be­com­ing less ev­i­dent but far more om­nipresent. Ac­cess to our basic needs on all lev­els are grow­ing at such a rate that there is al­ready ev­i­dence to back this up.

In a sec­ond as­pect of the pre­dic­tion, ex­perts agreed that fun­da­men­tal human ac­tiv­i­ties such as think­ing, work­ing and even our form of being phys­i­cally pre­sent, will change dras­ti­cally over the next decade. In the bet­ter con­nected coun­tries, net­worked ma­chines will or­ga­nize the in­for­ma­tion we re­ceive and our work ac­tiv­ity will be along­side ro­bots and in­tel­li­gent tools. As far as the con­cept of “pres­ence”, there will be major changes with holo­graphic tech­nolo­gies, such as vir­tual tours, be­com­ing pop­u­lar. Ob­vi­ously, in these ever-ex­pand­ing dig­i­talised so­ci­eties, data ex­change is­sues re­lated to per­sonal pri­vacy will be­come a major issue: the ex­po­nen­tial in­crease of per­sonal in­for­ma­tion cir­cu­lat­ing over net­works will re­sult in a greater risk of com­pa­nies and gov­ern­ments try­ing to gain con­trol of it.

The re­sponses of the 3,000 ex­perts who took part in the study, have also con­cluded that hu­mans and their in­sti­tu­tions are ba­si­cally in­ca­pable of adapt­ing to the sheer speed of tech­no­log­i­cal ad­vances and often, even now, do not re­spond ad­e­quately to many of the most basic prob­lems until faced with cat­a­stro­phe. With this in mind, some ex­perts fear that states, in order to pro­tect them­selves, will allow the In­ter­net to rush on un­con­trolled to an in­evitable crash which will see the de­vel­op­ment of as sys­tem of local In­ter­net net­works which will not func­tion within the presently ex­ist­ing pa­ra­me­ters. The na­ture and in­tegrity of the net­work as we know it at pre­sent, is also re­ferred to in an annex to the study, high­light­ing that 2015 is cru­cial in view of the im­por­tance of fight­ing for a free and neu­tral in­ter­net, in which large com­pa­nies and gov­ern­ments can not dis­crim­i­nate against any­one or limit ac­cess to con­tent or con­nec­tion speed.

A few weeks ago saw the launch of the new Lay­out [scur.​cat/​AZZ9Z2], an app that al­lows users to cre­ate “col­lages” made up from pho­tos stored on In­sta­gram [in­sta­gram.com]. It has been de­vel­oped by the same peo­ple who built Face­book, as well Hy­per­lapse [hy­per­lapse.in­sta­gram.com], a ser­vice that al­lows the record­ing of short videos using the “time lapse” tech­nique. These are two of the many apps which can en­rich the In­sta­gram ex­pe­ri­ence.

An­other is In­sta­size [munkee.co], which makes it eas­ier to edit pho­tos to suit In­sta­gram's unique square for­mat. Like Lay­out, it also pro­vides the op­tion of mak­ing col­lages. In­stapan [www.​getinstapan.​com] solves the prob­lem of panoramic land­scapes using the for­mat of the net­work: it sug­gests in­stead, trans­form­ing the im­ages into panoramic videos.

Lat­er­gramme [www.​latergram.​me], al­lows a cal­en­dar sched­ul­ing for­mat: users can enter or leave sched­uled re­minders and au­to­matic pub­li­ca­tion of an image on the date and time in­di­cated.

Pho­tore­post [pho­tore­post.com] lets us col­lect videos and pho­tos we find on In­sta­gram that we like and up­load them to our own wall. And there is Textgram [textgram.me], which pro­poses cre­at­ing cus­tomized im­ages with texts from dozens of tem­plates. In­spired by the Pin­ter­est net­work [pin­ter­est.com] In­stadash [in­stadashapp.com] was de­signed to trans­fer pho­tos from In­sta­gram onto your com­puter screen.

And to print the pic­tures posted on the Face­book so­cial net­work , we have the choice of a num­ber of apps such as Prin­sta­gram [printstagr.am] and Origami [www.​origrami.​com].