Читать книгу Digital Universe - Peter B. Seel - Страница 9

In the August 2005 issue of Wired magazine, then-editor Kevin Kelly published an essay titled “We are the Web” that was widely read by its digitally savvy audience.¹ In the essay, he made a number of predictions about what he termed “Web 2.0,” the second major iteration of the World Wide Web, which was then underway. He observed that the Web was an emergent technology before the Initial Public Offering (IPO) of Netscape in 1995, but cited Eric Schmidt (then Chief Executive Officer (CEO) at Sun Microsystems and later at Apple and Google) as noting that the day before the IPO the Web was nothing and afterward it was everything.

Kelly predicted that, with the rapid evolution of the Web at the time, “We would come to live inside this thing.”² Recall that he made this prediction two years before the advent of the iPhone in 2007. I think he would be astonished to look back at present and realize how prescient he was with this insight. In fact, the term “immersion” is now widely used to describe experiencing a digitally created environment in such a profound manner that users are transported by their senses into that digital universe.

The rapid evolution of the mobile phone into a “smart” phone occurred during the transition from 3G to 4G wireless technologies in the decade between 2009 and 2019.³ I would argue that this transition marked a watershed in digital immersion in that users could download hundreds of new apps that transformed the phone into a portable computer capable of doing almost everything a laptop could do at that time. This key transition, and the evolution to 5G technologies, are addressed in greater detail in Chapter 8 on mobile telephony. However, most mobile device users today take for granted the remarkable number of services provided by their phones. In fact, the first thing that connected users do on arising is check their mobile devices – and heaven forbid that they have forgotten to recharge the battery overnight. Our smart phones often recharge on a bedside table next to a smart speaker that can provide the day’s weather forecast or the news headlines with a simple audible request to Alexa, Siri, or Google for more information. We do “live inside this thing,” as Kevin Kelly stated in 2005, and in ways that even the most ardent technophiles could not have predicted then.