During the past two years, the amount of time the average Internet user spends online each week has risen from 4.4 hours to 7.6 hours. If that annual growth rate, 31.5%, holds up, then in 2025 the average Internet user will spend 590 hours online per day!
O.K., so extrapolation has its limits as a predictive tool. Still, you have to wonder. As cyberspace absorbs more and more of our work, play, shopping and socializing, where will it all end? What activities will still be off-line in 2025?
A few candidates spring to mind. Brushing your teeth. Eating. Playing tennis. Right? Not so fast. Even some of these seemingly solid barriers to the Internet’s encroachment are shaky. A quarter-century from now, almost everything will in principle be doable online, and convenience will often argue for doing it there.
Bear in mind, for starters, that in 2025 the average American will have, as they say in technical circles, bandwidth out the wazoo. You won’t just be able to monitor your child’s day care by webcam (a service already offered by more than 100 day-care centers). You’ll be able to monitor it in high-definition 3-D format, providing valuable perspective during slo-mo replays of block-throwing incidents.
And this is only the beginning. Just ask Jaron Lanier, who coined the term virtual reality. Lanier is chief scientist for the “tele-immersion” project, part of the federally subsidized research program known as Internet2, which explores the upshot of massive bandwidth and computing power.
The standard virtual-reality experience, you may recall, involves donning a head-mounted display or special glasses–or, in principle, contact lenses–and thus entering a computer-generated fantasy world. As you turn your head or walk around, the computer adjusts your perspective accordingly. Tele-immersion is to videoconferencing as virtual reality is to Pac-Man. If it works, it will give you the visual experience of being in the same room with a person who is actually in another city.
So what’s the killer app for tele-immersion? “It’s not so much a matter of particular applications,” says Lanier. “It will just become part of life. It will be used by teenage girls to gossip, by business people to cut deals, by doctors to consult.” And presumably by people who want to do long-distance lunch. Of course, there won’t be any point in saying “Pass the squash,” but otherwise it will be a normal mealtime conversation. Eating online.
Speaking of squash, playing racquet sports at long distance is in principle simple. If you’ve got a squash-court-size space to run around in, you can play with your college buddy, wherever he or she may be. (And no more annoying collisions with opponent, walls or ball, since all three will be illusions.) In fact, using standard virtual-reality technology, people have already played tennis remotely, Lanier says. But each looked to the other like a cartoon character–an “avatar.” Tele-immersion will let you see the agony of defeat on the face of your vanquished foe. A big advance.
Mushrooming bandwidth and computing power aren’t the only things drawing us deeper into cyberspace. Global-positioning satellites are turning driving a car into an intermittently online experience. And the high-resolution satellite images that became commercially available last year will move the earthiest of endeavors into cyberspace. Sitting at a desk will soon be the fastest way for farmers to inspect their crops for signs of blight.
Obviously, some pastimes lose something when performed online. (No, I’m not going to talk about sex.) Consider hiking. True, you could don your head-mounted display and get on your treadmill while a friend did the same in another city. If you wanted a whiff of pine or cedar, you could crank up the computer-controlled aroma synthesizer that the company DigiScents has said it will market. Not too tempting, right?
Yet, even though hiking may remain reality-based, it will have its online elements. People are already finding new hiking buddies over the Internet. Here lies the biggest import of the expanding online experience. Even if tele-immersion is still crude in 2025, cyberspace will have reshaped life because it will have kept doing what it has been doing–nourishing shared enthusiasms. Even before most Americans had heard of e-mail, there were chat groups with names like alt.fetish.foot and some environmentalists were mobilizing online. But the more people online, the easier it is to find your own special interest, no matter how narrow.
And as bandwidth grows, more of these narrow interests–recreational, political, cerebral–can be pursued online. In 2025, the League of Women Who Find Gilligan More Attractive Than the Skipper and the Professor can not only form online; it can tele-convene and watch reruns! More and more, obsessions will be online obsessions.
This is the big downside of the future. Obsessions are fine, but every minute you spend online–playing chess, talking politics or just shopping–is a minute you’re not spending off-line. And it is off-line, in the real world, where we find a precious social resource, people we have little in common with. The supermarket checkout lady, the librarian, the shoppers at the mall–all are handy reminders of the larger community we’re part of–multicultural, socioeconomically diverse yet bound by a common nature.
That’s the trouble with cyberspace. It leaves nothing to chance. The Internet, with its antlike order, is in some ways becoming a Web of gated communities. It could deepen cultural and socioeconomic rifts even to the point of straining a nation’s social fabric.
On the brighter side, it may bridge rifts between nations. Some interest groups, after all, are transnational. So far these groups have mainly been political–environmental groups, human-rights groups, labor groups. But transnational bonds will get richer, for two reasons. First, automated translation is improving. (Go to babelfish.altavista.com to have any document rendered in several languages–not perfectly but better than was possible 10 years ago.) Second, autotranslation is merging with video to yield “face translation.” Unveiled last year by the Consortium for Speech Translation Advanced Research, face translation lets you speak into a camera in English and be seen in Russia speaking Russian. And I mean speaking Russian. Your face is morphed so that you seem to be pronouncing the words of the language you don’t really speak.
After demonstrating face translation to reporters, the head of the research consortium admitted that “some of it still looks a little goofy.” But 25 years will smooth out not just the visual kinks but the translation itself. True international friendship, now available mainly to business big shots, can in principle become a middle-class indulgence. Stamp collecting, environmental activism, toe fetishes–all kinds of interests can kindle the citizen-to-citizen amity that makes war politically difficult.
This has all been happening for a long, long time. Telephones made distance irrelevant to talking, encouraging us to ignore next-door neighbors in favor of longer links. The invention of writing had parallel effects. Paul’s letters to the Corinthians and the Romans nourished faraway contacts while reinforcing distinctions between Christians and nearby nonbelievers. The expansion and crystallization of communities is, in a sense, the story of history. But the story has never moved as fast as it is going to move in the next 25 years.
Robert Wright is an author whose most recent work is Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny
