Yesterday marked the 25th anniversary of the Internet designation ".com." To commemorate the occasion, VeriSign is hosting a conference today in Washington. I'm taking part, along with Bill Clinton, Fareed Zakaria, Aneesh Chopra, Mo Rocca, Fred Wilson, Kara Swisher and many others.
The panel I'm on has been asked to "gaze into the crystal ball" and predict "the next game-changing .com breakthroughs" and what "the next generation of .com might hold in store."
My crystal ball is still a little overheated from filling out my March Madness brackets (I have Kentucky beating Kansas in a tight championship game), but after staring at it for most of my flight east from Los Angeles, I have a few predictions. And since I'm a crystal-ball-half-full kinda gal, I'm going to start by predicting that the Internet of the future will deliver technology that addresses the greatest needs of the present.
At the moment, we are drowning in spin, smokescreens, and lies, so the first need is to cut through to the truth.
So how can the Internet and technology help us find our way? By continuing to grow as a place where people can turn to uncover the truth. The Internet has shown great promise in this regard. YouTube, Twitter, e-mail, and turbo-charged search engines have made it easier to expose the lies our leaders continue to tell.
At the same time, this is a moment of great economic anxiety -- with millions out of work, millions of homes foreclosed, and millions going bankrupt. In times like these, people are more likely to be driven by their lizard brains and react in response to fear rather than facts, making it easier for demagogues to scapegoat and peddle conspiracy theories laced with violent undertones. In this kind of atmosphere, people sometimes refuse to believe their own eyes. And it becomes easier to perpetrate the latest Big Lie (see death panels).
So, to fill this need, I predict that someone is going to create an online tool that makes it possible to instantly fact-check a story as you are reading it -- or watching it on video.
Picture this: It's last summer and you are reading or watching a story about health care, and Sarah Palin or Betsy McCaughey is prattling on about death panels. Instantly, a box pops up with the actual language from the bill or a tape rolls with a factual explanation of what the provision in question really does. And this is a non-partisan tool. So when, in the midst of the legislative debate, President Obama says "I didn't campaign on the public option," the software will fire up and instantly show you where support for the public option appeared in his campaign plan, and clips of all the times he mentioned it in public after he got elected.
A companion tool in service of the truth would instantly provide historical context to a story you are reading or watching, as well as a narrative that helps put the facts we are getting into a larger framework.
In a compelling post, Jay Rosen writes about the need for journalists to revive the art of storytelling. The Internet has been great for putting masses of data at our fingertips but it has too often sacrificed explanation, context, and narrative on the altar of speed because, as Rosen puts it, "all the day-to-day rewards go to breaking news."
So, gazing into my crystal ball, I see a .com innovation that immediately provides a reader or viewer with the background knowledge needed to better understand the data and information being delivered as news. The powers-that-be -- both political and corporate -- have mastered the dark art of making information deliberately convoluted and indecipherable. For them, complexity is not a bug, it's a feature.
Our future tool will also automatically simplify needlessly complicated laws, contracts, and linguistic smoke screens. So when a politician or Wall Street CEO performs the usual verbal gymnastics in an attempt to befuddle and bamboozle us, his words will immediately be translated into clear and precise language. It will be Truth 2.0.
And just as our instant fact-checking, context-providing, and translation tools will bring us more truth, new .com innovations providing greater transparency will deliver a return of trust. Because dealing with the breakdown of trust is the other great need we are facing today.
The institutions that hold our democracy together have taken crippling blows in the last few years -- leaving our country awash in disillusionment, anger, doubt, cynicism and widespread wariness. Indeed, according to a recent Gallup poll, only 19 percent of Americans are satisfied "with the way things are going in the United States at this time."
Though disheartening, given all that has happened over the last decade -- including a war based on lies, an economic crash based on greed, a bank bailout with no strings attached, and a gridlocked legislative process beholden more to special interests than the public interest -- it's hardly surprising. In fact, you have to ask: who are these 19 percent? Are there that many partners at Goldman?
Think about the two biggest policy disasters of the last ten years -- the Iraq war and the financial crisis. The perpetrators of each of these calamities could not have pulled their dirty work off without a lack of transparency.
But addressing the problem is going to require more than just putting up a website for every government agency and posting a lot of public information. A story in Sunday's New York Times shows that even with the best of intentions, promising to make openness and transparency a top-line priority -- as President Obama did on his first day in office -- is easier said than done. Fourteen months later, his administration's record on transparency is a mixed bag.
So I predict that, in the future, software will be created that allows us to pull the curtain back on the corridors of power and see who is really pulling the levers. A great early iteration of this was provided by the Sunlight Foundation during the recent health care summit. During its live streaming of the discussion, the Foundation offered a dose of transparency by showing, as each of our elected officials was speaking, a list of his or her major campaign contributors. It was simple, powerful, and spoke volumes about the extent to which many players in the summit were bought and paid for.
The future version of this kind of tech will allow us to see who is funding who, and who is carrying water for which special interest, in real time and across every imaginable platform. The Sunday shows will be a whole different animal when we are able to effortlessly and instantly follow the money -- and connect the dots.
To many Americans, our political system has become a rigged game (and, thanks to the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision, it will only become even more rigged). But innovative technology can provide us with a countervailing force and give us the chance to level the playing field.
My final prediction may at first sound counterintuitive, but my crystal ball shows that the future will bring us a .com innovation that allows us to disengage from the 24/7 connectivity the first 25 .com years have led to.
Plotinus was a philosopher in the third century who studied the different sources of knowledge, wisdom, and creativity. "Knowledge has three degrees," he wrote, "opinion, science, illumination. The means or instrument of the first is sense; of the second, dialectic; of the third, intuition."
The Internet has contributed much to the first two kinds of knowledge -- science (in the form of easy access to reams of data and information) and opinion -- but has in many ways taken us further away from illumination and our inner source of wisdom.
Hence the growing need to pull the plug on our hyper-connectivity. To disconnect from all our devices in order to reconnect with ourselves. There are already a plethora of Internet sites, mobile apps, and high-tech tools that make it easier to do just that -- everything from yoga sites that let you take classes via your computer to mobile apps that provide guided meditation to devices that allow you to monitor your stress level.
I predict that, in the future, someone will create a killer app that gauges the state of your mind, body, and spirit and automatically offers the exact steps you need to take to realign all three aspects of your being. Think of it as an internal GPS designed to show you the best route to realigning your mind, body, and soul -- leaving you more able to access your wisdom and creativity. Use it to arrive at optimal living.
The first 25 years of .com have been a time of online miracles. My crystal ball sees more explosive wonder just ahead. The challenge will be to direct that combustible creativity to solving our needs for more truth, more transparency, and more wisdom.
Follow Arianna Huffington on Twitter: www.twitter.com/ariannahuff
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"gauges the state of your mind, body, and spirit and automatically offers the exact steps you need to take to realign all three aspects of your being."
Agree that we will develop additional sensors (to Quantify self) that will be fed into a model to modify our response to the environment.
1 Body: The body I believe it is already possible to but not done. Very doable
2 Mind: For the mind read "Brain" and yes there will be sensors "implanted" in the or around the brain. Very doable.
3 Spirit: I have no known information yet that would suggest that it exists, other than in ethereal space. If people can invent the meme which they can and do but it means a model, then this is also douable, but unlikely
It is more likely that there will be 5 areas
1 Brain
2 Body
3 Relationships
4 Material surroundings
5 Money
This then becomes human wellbeing and all of these activities can be sensed, measured, modeled and automatically (feedback) controlled.
This online tool exists already. It's called "The Daily Show with Jon Steward"
i think (hope) Arianna is on to something here. i was thinking about the very same thing myself just the other day. the facts we need - the TRUTH - it's all out there in the ethersphere. but digging it up - in real-time - is a daunting challenge, especially given the overwhelming sea of information.
we're going to need better technology now to help us separate truth from fiction.
Whether someone will enjoy better knowledge transfer, improved lifestyle, deeper wisdom, more resonant lives depends on whether they want them.
The most creative moments in life occur in solitude with which the WWW interferes.
The lesson of dotcom v.1.0 was that economic value cannot be assigned on the basis of aspiration and good feelings; the values that were so assigned quickly crashed.
In today's dotcom v.2.0, there is an enormous amount of content "out there" now that people feel entitled to access without payment. We are in the habit of feeling that web pages such as this should be free of charge. I kind of like that. But it seems to me until innovations such as are suggested in the article can also generate wealth for their creators, the incentive to innovate will be limited.
Dotcom v.2.0 webpages have very limited sources of "real" revenue at this point; the kind of revenue on which honest valuations could be based. Until there is a consensus on the value of these innovations and ideas (and, by "consensus," I mean that real shareholders have paid real money on an open exchange for their providers and not just as an IPO, but over a sustained period of time), I think that the innovation will lag.
You the Greek Oracle!
May all our best hopes and aspirations come to pass.
And for those of you complaining about how we are plugged in all the time? Don't forget, it *is* a choice. For me, my offline life is richer, happier, more varied and more social than it every was, simply because everything is easier online. I'm not online *more*, I'm simply more productive, more connected, more informed than I was before.
Finally, I believe news will increasingly be something people are able to act on. Yesterday, news was something you read. Today, news is what you share. Tomorrow: news you can act upon. Hopefully with a collective intelligence and kindness not yet realized.
According to the study, a 2006 Zogby poll posed the following question to a sample of voters: "Would you describe yourself as fiscally conservative and socially liberal, also known as libertarian?" Apparently 44% of the respondents said "yes"! That's very encouraging to me, because I had thought the word "libertarian" was scary or confusing to most people. I doubt that all of those 44% really have political views that I would describe as libertarian, but I think it's great that they feel comfortable with the libertarian label.
The authors of the study used a different poll to determine how many voters are actually libertarian. According to their criteria, about 15% of voters are libertarian. I think one of the most important jobs of the Libertarian Party is to make sure that libertarian voters are voting for Libertarian Party candidates. There is a lot of untapped potential out there.
Obviously, the Republicans and Democrats in Washington are not making voters happy. Fewer and fewer voters are identifying as Republicans or Democrats. We need to find those voters who are libertarians, and get them to join us in our effort to bring liberty back to America.
by Wes Benedict”
I remember when AOL was 'The Internet'.
I remember:
Matthew Broderick's 300 baud modem in 'War Games'.
I was on the internet before there even was a browser.
Bill Gates didn't even think the internet would catch on.
Anyone here ever use a BBS? Any memories?
I once downloaded an entire song. in 2 days.
I stood in line for two hours to buy 8 MEG's of RAM for $149.00.
DOS
The first time I opened a 'jpg.
Some people I know actually BOUGHT Netscape.
-The 50 baud acoustically coupled handset modem before you could connect to the phone line.
-the seventy five pound portable terminal which typed ten characters per second.
-having no browser and using an applications called Gopher to find information on the Internet before there was a World Wide Web.
-Bill Gates didn't think there was a market for DOS other than the IBM PC because no one would build a computer to compete with it.
-When the theoretical leased line modem limit was 9,600 bps and Bill Betts developed the 14,400, 16,800 and 19,200 bps leased line modems.
-When 9,600 was the highest speed dial modem possible until designers advanced it to 57,600 bps.
This and more I remember, but as my age, I will soon forget.
Some good points here. I particularly like the idea that we need to disengage from technology a bit more and re-engage in the power of narrative. I say that goes double for us guys. Around the country I have talked to men of all walks of life--black, white, rich, poor, guys in Sing Sing and coming back from Iraq--who are pretty darn confused about how to be good fathers, husbands, and men in 2010. They don't need more data. What they need is more narrative. That's how men have always communicated with one another. We don't get up on Oprah's couch to cry our eyes out. We tell stories. And stories that inspire and inform us even when the chips are down. I suspect that the internet is where this can work the best since men seem to be more comfortable talking about their troubles online rather than in person, at least at first. But there is no doubt we need less noise in our lives and more meaning.
Tom Matlack
Founder
www.goodmenproject.org
between us is huge. You forgot more about technology than I know right now. We do have something in common though. I enjoyed reading your relevant posts. HP is the
Rolls Royce of commentating with different points of view. Stick around. I'll be looking
for your posts. Arianna has done a wonderful job with HP. You & many like you are
the reason for the success of HP. Thanks.
(((fanned)))
The printing press was invented in 1450. One hundred years later, Europe was still reeling from the social upheaval caused (or aggravated or facilitated, depending on your perspective) by this technological advance: the protestant revolution, the dramatic social-economic shift in wealth and power, the collapse of the scribe industry.....
I don't think we've made it even half-way through understanding the social and political consequences of .com .... the dust is still settling.