Closer to home in the digital space, content of all kinds is continuing to move to on-demand, watch at will, on a screen of choice. TV weekly schedules are just a tradition, and of some continuing value to sports and news fans, probably in that order, but customised individual programming is where we are heading.
Telling time
What about my elegant wristwatch, treasured present (from self) for more than a decade and a souvenir of boom times past? Alas, it’s just jewellery really. It only tells the time… in analogue. The time is on every electronic device in my life (except the Kindle). Now a smart watch would keep track of my exercise and fitness (irrelevant), monitor health (hmm, maybe) and perhaps double as a speech phone. But do I want it on my wrist? Wearables are definitely an interesting new line of gadget development and an area where the kids are likely to be better prophets than the business analysts.
Physical media: now here’s an interesting category that affects everything digital. Spinning disks are electro-mechanical miracles of precision engineering, CDs and DVDs have given us the best sound since analogue records and HiFi. But they are clearly on the way out. Thumbnail size microSD cards are up at 64gbs in the general market with 200gbs plus on the way, standard for smart phones and tablets and almost ridiculously reliable. MTBF [Mean Time Between Failure] is no longer an acceptable standard in any aspect of ICT.
Which brings us alas back to The Cloud — or internet computing or remote computing or ICT-as-a-Service or whatever better and less misty metaphor we come up with — is without question the next wave or generation. At least for consumer digital services and general purpose business and civil administration. Security may go back to physical isolation. We currently think 256bit encryption is military or NSA grade. But the cloud itself offers compute power for cracking tools to break that in useful time scales. You can bet the Mafiosi and Dark Net Knights are well advanced in that field.
So we may be back to various forms of sneaker networking, as it was called back in the digital past — storing and conveying valuable data on well-guarded physical media and workstations with no internet or even LAN connections. On the other hand, the vast bulk of data leaks have been from human errors or deliberate disclosure, not the hackers and crackers. Bribery or seduction or blackmail are usually much less costly than all that tech investment.
Fulfilling needs
Overall, this train of thought is that CIOs and enterprise bosses and political and civic leaders should listen to today’s generation in matters technical as well as cultural. Because successful technology fulfils the needs and wants of the prevailing culture. Yes, they are an impatient lot, accustomed to instant gratification, of mind as well as the rest. They are possibly less well read in the educational sense but perhaps more widely informed, more culturally open and less afflicted with inherited attitudes and conventions.
There is ample evidence that they can delve and think as deeply as any other generation when a special interest is triggered or a profession or career embarked on. Would you prefer your surgeon to be from the scalpel age or today’s minimally invasive laser and fibre optics school?
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