Head in the cloud

No apologies to New Line Cinema or people with actual photoshop skills

A little while ago I admitted I was worried that after purchasing a Nexus 4 I would become a walking, talking advertisement for Google. A week later and I used some dodgy Titanic analogies to confirm that I was indeed in love with my new phone. Fast forward 9 months and my Nexus hasn’t let me down once—unlike my Blackberry, which constantly disappointed me, but, as with any problem child, I still loved it and just bitched about it behind its back.

Speaking of being let down by technology, my alleged laptop decided recently that it had had enough of being carted around in my K-Mart backpack, and decided to passive-aggressively fry its own battery rather than admit truthfully that it didn’t want to go on another jaunt with me to the library (P.S: my therapist thinks the reason I anthropomorphise my devices is that I feel it’s a lot healthier to have 8hr+/day relationships with things I consider ‘friends’ rather than pieces of humming silicon. Also my phone is rly cute).

Anyway, my laptop still works, but only if it’s plugged in. For a while I ignored its childish protests and carried it around along with its trusty power cord. Portability is important for me at the moment, because I’m “writing” a Master’s “thesis” and am “studying” a lot at the university library. Things were peachy if I could find an outlet, but more often than not this involved spending hours finding available powerpoints and then draping the cord precariously across tables, walkways, time/space continuums etc.

Also, for some reason, the designers at HP decided it would be a nice idea to build a brick right into the power cord itself. I wonder if this is actually an anti-theft device: not to use as a weapon against thieves, but rather because the would-be burglar is just too tired to carry the cinder block power cord further than three steps.

What this is all leading to (eventually) is that I finally got sick of my laptop’s resistance and started thinking about alternatives. Because I like tactile (and positive) feedback when I type I ruled out buying a tablet, although I did briefly consider one of those tablets that look like a laptop but can then detach from the keyboard. I ultimately decided against this because most of them were really small and I have kipfler potatoes for fingers. Also I learned my lesson from a flimsy phone I had circa 2010, which had a screen that flipped up and exposed the keyboard (my god, remember flip phones?).

Flipping, spinning and detachable doohickeys are fine in theory and look good when the salesperson is demonstrating them to you, but the reality is you want something INDESTRUCTIBLE and when intentional partial destructibility is built into the design then you just know something will go wrong sooner rather than later. The only time I will allow any of my devices to be taken apart at will is when we finally perfect Lego/phone technology, which granted this guy has given a pretty good go but clearly portability was way down on his design brief (also, vale Blackberry).

Image courtesy http://gadgetsin.com/

Enter the Toshiba CB30 Chromebook. According to the Toshiba website, it

STARTS FAST AND STAYS FAST

TO KEEP YOU ON CLOUD NINE

Who can resist such corporate poetry? I’ve been informed that the words ‘starts’, ‘fast’ and ‘cloud nine’ are all joint owned by Toshiba-Google, and so I have reprinted them here with their benevolent permission (but how could they refuse? I’m pretty much writing a 600 word ad for them).

Look, I’ll be honest. I don’t write tech-heavy reviews of products, or even really evaluate them properly w/r/t other options. I’m more of a gut-feel kinda writer (i.e. lazy) and the DPP seal of approval for the Chromebook is an emphatic WINNER. Here’s why:

- It has a battery life that lasts more than a tenth of a second. This isn’t me being hyperbolic; if my old laptop becomes unplugged it means instant death. So in this case, a battery life of 8 hours seems like an eternity.

- It’s light. You might not have gotten the subtle hints when I was talking about portability and brick power cords before, but my old laptop is a pain to carry around. The only bad news about getting the Chromebook is that I now seriously have to consider buying a gym membership, because lugging the HP around was the only thing keeping me in shape.

- It’s cheap. Maybe too cheap. To be honest the build quality is middling at best. I admit the whole thing feels a bit like one of those fake laptops you give to a seven year old that has lollies inside (Toshiba-Google: possibilities of lollies being included with next Chromebook? You know those stickers that are like ‘Intel Inside’? Imagine if it said ‘Fantail Inside’). But, surprisingly, the keyboard itself feels nice, and this is where 90% of computer-human interaction takes place.

-It’s not a Mac. I will never, ever get over my irrational aversion to Apple products (except iTunes. ILY).

The elephant in the cloud (SWIDT) at this point is that the computer is pretty much totally dependent on internet connectivity. I admit being so reliant on Google servers not fucking up is a little concerning, but really, I already depended on them anyway. I would advise against cloud computing unless you’re like me and have an unhealthy obsession with backing stuff up and have predictable file naming systems. Right now I back up everything I’ve written for the day on a USB, and when I get home to my housebound HP I download everything out of the cloud onto my hard drive. 

The whole internet connectivity thing isn’t really a big deal anyway, because I figure if I’m in a place without WiFi then I’m not there to study anyway. Plus if worst comes to worst, the computer can save documents temporarily offline and then update once an internet connection is established again. Feel free to quote this ‘feature’ to me when I lose three days of work due to a connection error.

So there you have it, an unbiased, unpaid, well-thought-out endorsement for the Chromebook. I figure that if I keep doing this often enough Google will one day send me a real thing to review. Of course, knowing me, that will be the day after I pledge everlasting and unconditional allegiance to Apple.

Yes I’m scared of becoming a Google fanboy; no I don’t want to talk about it

Two days ago I took the plunge and ordered a Google Nexus 4. If you know about the history of me and my Blackberry, or my penchant for keeping things until they are absolutely, embarrassingly unusable, then you’ll understand this is kind of a big deal.

Basically, my Blackberry is still ‘usable’ in the most literal sense of the word, but ever since I dropped it in my parent’s toilet (unsoiled, thankfully) using it has been even more of a labour of love than usual. Added to my general Blackberry woes of low (i.e. non-existent) compatibility and infinite loading screens was a trackball which steadfastly refused to do what I wanted it to. This is fine if you don’t use the trackball often, but back here in tactile user interface land you must understand that the trackball is the essence of the Blackberry Curve.

My trackball kind of works okay for the most part, but it has become incredibly sensitive; especially in the scroll up/down department (I don’t want to think about what’s causing it to malfunction since its Cousteau-esque adventure). This stops me from scrolling up and down message histories, meaning that I have to commit entire conversations to memory and then hope that my replies cover everything. Too bad if someone refers to a message they sent a couple of days ago, that baby is gone. In a Zen kind of way it’s somewhat refreshing to be constrained to the present, but in an actual day-to-day want to live successfully kind of way it’s shit.

As attached as I have been to my Blackberry, I’m excited about my new phone. I've been checking the order status hourly and telling anybody who'll listen about my purchase. My childish glee may say something about the attractiveness of Google products, because generally I try not to let material objects determine my emotions. This is clearly a lie if you read my Blackberry post, but in any case as someone who tries not to buy into new product bullshit I’m somewhat embarrassed about the daydreams my imminent new phone has induced. 

I’ve been imagining the endless range of apps and games I’ll be able to download, and how I’ll suddenly become infinitely more valuable to my friends, because while they’re all struggling to load an Apple maps page on their iPhone I’ll be whizzing around with the greatest of ease on Google maps (or, you know, something else that people do with smartphones. I wouldn't know). Even stupid stuff that I know I don’t care about—such as the Nexus always being the first phone to receive Android updates when they come out—has me pinching myself as if I’m in some sort of wonderful dream.

And this is all before the phone has even arrived. At the time of writing, the order status is still ‘Pending’*, so I technically haven’t even paid for it yet. Which leads to the real reason I’m worried. I’m not even a Nexus owner and already I feel like I’ve become a massive Google tool. I’m going to be that person at parties who starts talking about all the reasons their semi-obscure phone is vastly superior to everybody else’s and have all sorts of little stupid apps to prove it. I’m going to be that person in the supermarket using Google Goggles to take photos of all the products and then read other Google tools’ reviews of them. I’m going to inadvertently check the wrong box while browsing my Gmail account and sign away my power of attorney to Sergey Brin.

This is troubling because I’ve often been asked why I don’t own/want an iPhone. I usually mumble something about not wanting to be a mindless drone to a giant corporation. And then I go and buy a Nexus. I suck.

*It's probably frozen because they've discovered I use Hotmail.

Google Glass: half empty or half full?

Here’s a quick test:

Do you have a lot of disposable income? Yes/No

Do you find your smartphone clunky and distracting? Yes/No

Would you feel confident walking down the street wearing a strange apparatus on your face while appearing to be talking to yourself? Yes/No

If you answered yes to any of the above (or tried to ask a qualifying question such as ‘can the aforementioned face apparatus shoot lasers?’) then you might be in the target market for Google’s new gadget, a wearable smart device simply called ‘Glass’.

She failed the Voigt-Kampff test.

We don’t have flying cars or jetpacks, and the absence of brightly coloured skivvies worn as sensible daily garments is disappointing, but at last we seem to be moving toward the future that so many people predicted in the 1960s. Glass is voice activated and can be ordered to do lots of useful things like send messages, take pictures and video, give directions or provide translations. Google’s introductory video demonstrates that using Glass is meant to be as intuitive as possible, and if you say ‘take a picture’ then the device will indeed take a picture. In my (admittedly limited) experience with voice recognition technology I have discovered that most devices will struggle to understand your commands unless you’re a post-adolescent male with an American accent. The voice recognition technology is therefore something that the developers will want to spend some time perfecting if they want Glass to be remotely successful beyond Silicon Valley.

Google gave people in the United States the opportunity to obtain a pair of ‘Glasses’ if they could demonstrate to Google in under fifty words what they would use the device for, with Google selecting the most innovative responses. The competition was a clever ploy by Google; it got people talking about Glass on social media and provided the developers with a way to get some cheap beta testing done. According to Google, the wider release of Glass will take place before the end of 2013 and is expected to retail for around $1500.  

Glass has generated some excitement in the digital world, not least, of course, from Google themselves. For product director Steve Lee, Glass is an attempt to bridge the gap between being connected with the information provided by your smartphone and being connected with the world.  No longer will we be stuck in a zombie-like trance with our noses in a smartphone—instead we will be able to charge through life, still intimately linked to our devices but with our heads held high. As quoted in Joshua Topolsky’s article on The Verge, Lee says, “What if we brought technology closer to your senses? Would that allow you to more quickly get information and connect with other people but do so in a way — with a design — that gets out of your way when you’re not interacting with technology?” Lee has a clear vision of the future in which technology becomes part of the human experience rather than existing parallel to it.

There are still some kinks that I imagine will need ironing out. What do people who wear traditional eyeglasses do? Perhaps in the future Google will be able to develop a device that clips to people’s existing frames, instead of having to be a separate framework altogether. Also, if using Glass in a crowded environment, will the voice recognition technology be able to adequately detect the difference between other voices? Furthermore, how do the developers imagine Glass will replace traditional smartphones if it is only voice activated? There are definitely moments (which I would prefer not to have to spell out for you) in which a typed text message is infinitely preferable to a phone call. And what about using Glass while driving? While it has the potential to be an incredibly useful and safe device for navigation, how will authorities be able to determine if somebody was using a heads-up GPS app or just checking their Facebook?

People may wonder if Glass can bridge the gap between functionality and fashion: will the device be something people will want to wear? This is a valid but not necessarily vital question.  Rather, before we all begin walking around like T-1000s, maybe we need to ask if a wearable smartphone is actually necessary. I have a feeling that, for all the bitching and moaning we do about people becoming ‘disconnected’ when they take out their smartphones, there will be more bitching and moaning about everybody walking around talking to themselves and posting inane shaky first person video footage of just about anything that takes their fancy. At least with smartphones you can tell when somebody isn’t listening to you, with Glass you could be rambling on for hours before realising your companion has been attempting to beat their high score on Bejewelled the whole time.

Despite Google’s impressive videos and promotional campaign, I can’t see Glass catching on, at least not this iteration. There is something too conspicuous, too forced, about the whole thing. In the future we very well could see something like Glass replacing the hand-held smartphone, but right now people are stressed enough as it is without having to worry about barking orders to a computer clipped to their face. There will be early adopters and techno geeks who will use Glass, but right now it's a bridge too far for the general public who, as far as I can tell, still like their computers somewhat removed from their person. I’ll be really impressed when Google have developed the technology to allow users to telepathically communicate in order to control Glass, because until then there are going to be a lot of awkward train rides with people out-loud sexting their partners. I just don’t know if that’s a world I want to be a part of.

Coulda, Woulda, Shoulda: An open letter to the second place getters of the Digital Age

Do you ever stop and wonder about those websites that seem perpetually on the cusp of greatness, but haven’t quite cracked the big time, and instead constantly play second fiddle to the big corporations? As in Chinese philosophy, to every Yin there must be a Yang, and for every Simon, there is a Garfunkel.* For every wildly successful multi-billion dollar internet start up that contributes new verbs to the common vernacular [‘Did you friend her? Nah, I googled her and she’s wanted for armed robbery in three states’ etc] there is another site which offers remarkably similar services yet hasn’t quite reached the critical mass of users to become the popular standard.

Google > Yahoo!

Did you know that Yahoo! is the second largest search engine on the web? Seems like a pretty good deal for them, huh? The problem is, the first place holder, Google, holds 85 per cent of the search query market. Yahoo! comes in at second place with 6 per cent. That’s the equivalent of Usain Bolt winning the 100m as his competitors cross the 20m mark. Hardly a satisfying second place, is it?

Beyond the search engine itself, Yahoo! offers similar services to Google, in terms of webmail, videos, maps, and advertising. So why is there such a large discrepancy between the two? Google made a name for itself due to its search algorithm being notoriously accurate, at least more accurate than its competitors. Whether or not Yahoo!’s search system is now on par with Google is irrelevant: during the critical period of people flocking to the internet (new millennium onwards) Google proved time and again the best search tool. Searching with Google is so seamless (especially if you’re using Chrome) that I hardly think of myself as ‘using Google’ anymore. I just think of something I need to know, type it in, and it appears before me. Google has effectively become an invisible hand in the information gathering process, and this is surely the goal of any serious search engine company.

Similar examples of complete market saturation exist outside the internet. Band-aids, Bubble-Wrap, Eskys, Stanley Knives, are all examples of ‘Generiscized Trademarks’, in which the product name has actually transcended its own company or service and become the standardised term for any similar product. Google is approaching this now, with most people using ‘Google’ as a term which incorporates virtually any sort of internet search. Of course, with an 85 per cent market share, chances are most people actually are ‘Googling’ everything.

YouTube > Dailymotion

Daily-whawha? At least, that was my reaction when I discovered French video hosting site Dailymotion was the second largest video sharing website in the world. Much like the Google/Yahoo comparison, Dailymotion is a fair way behind YouTube, with 60,000,000 video views per day compared to YouTubes astronomical 1,200,000,000. Of course, YouTube’s success is helped by the fact that it is owned by Google, so that many video searches undertaken by Google will inevitably direct you to YouTube.

However, YouTube was a successful site in its own right before the takeover, and Google have been smart enough not to try and merge YouTube with Google Video, but instead keep the recognisable branding that YouTube built. What’s even more interesting is that before the takeover, Google Video never really came close to the sort of traffic YouTube was generating, despite the fact that Google was the largest search engine at the time.

YouTube, like Google, found success with its easily useable interface. Videos were easy to find and upload, utilisation of attractive site design and memorable branding (the red loading bar is particularly iconic) and clever innovations has meant that YouTube has secured a place as the third most popular site in the world, behind Google and Facebook.

There is nothing inherently wrong with the Dailymotion website, and it was founded only one month after YouTube in 2005. However, like Google, YouTube has become the pop culture standard for a generation of users. Additionally (and I have no idea how much influence this has) it takes approximately 0.45 seconds less time to type youtube.com than it does to type dailymotion.com. Add in the fact that Chrome users can now press ‘Tab’ and search YouTube content instantly, and it becomes hard to see how Dailymotion (or anyone else) will come close to knocking YouTube off its perch as the No. 1 video site.

Facebook > Myspace

I feel particularly privileged that I can actually remember the day I signed up to Facebook. I’m trying really hard to hold onto that memory because it’s probably something that one day I’ll be able to tell a room full of really young people and they’ll laugh at me. I have a feeling that in the future no-one will ‘remember’ when they signed up to Facebook but instead it will just happen, like being able to tie your shoelaces or riding a bike or completing puberty. Kids will probably be signed up for an account when they’re born and then that’ll be the end of it.

One of my most distinct memories of joining Facebook was the fact that it was a social networking site that wasn’t MySpace. I mentioned above how hard difficult it appears for Yahoo to overtake Google or for Dailymotion to overtake YouTube, but don’t take for granted that it can’t happen. Facebook proved that you can take on the biggest rival in your industry and win convincingly.

How did they do it? Whole books could and will be written on why Facebook has succeeded. Briefly, Facebook started in American colleges, and in terms of pop culture, everybody on the planet wants to be doing what American university students are doing. If they’re on Facebook, then everybody will want to be on Facebook. It didn’t take long before other universities and high-schools were DEMANDING that Zuckerberg cut them into his network. When you have a controlled release like Facebook did, it creates hype, and people want what they don’t have. It was marketing genius.

But it wasn’t all to do with marketing. Facebook is actually a remarkable product. It would pretty much sell itself. It has been theorised that Facebook taps into basic human instincts and social practices, and this partly accounts for its widespread success. Zuckerberg has a knack for programming highly addictive software. The timing of FB’s release was ideal too. People had slowly learned the social network game on MySpace, but Facebook gave them something to really sink their teeth into. Innovations such as simple photo uploading and tagging, the newsfeed (which people hated at first), poking, liking and the prominence of the status update revolutionised the social networking world.

Will anybody be able to pull off the social networking coup de grace? People talk quietly of ‘the Facebook killer’, the service that is going to do to Facebook what Facebook did to MySpace. Google are launching a new service, Google+, which they hope will replace Facebook as the social networking standard. It’s hard to see how they will achieve it. People already have much more invested in their Facebook profile than they ever did in MySpace, and Facebook is much bigger than MySpace ever was. Google+ will  have to be something incredibly remarkable in order to overthrow Facebook, but if anybody was going to pull it off, then you’d think the largest internet company in the world with millions of dollars behind it probably has the best chance.

Wikipedia > Scholarpedia

Sick and tired of people telling you that Wikipedia isn’t a viable source? Why not try out Scholarpedia, the free encyclopedia that not quite anybody can edit. As opposed to Wikipedia’s delightful free-for-all, Scholarpedia’s articles are written by scholars from around the world, and are peer-reviewed. If everybody’s quest for knowledge is so great that a site like Wikipedia can become the seventh most popular website in the world, why isn’t Scholarpedia visited just as much, as it provides reputedly better knowledge? (FYI, Scholarpedia is ranked at about the 300,000^th most visited site in the world).

Of course, most web users don’t necessarily want totally correct information; they just want a lot of it. Wikipedia’s lack of exclusiveness means that an incredibly wide range of topics are covered, including things that generally scholars wouldn’t write about. The longest article on the English Wikipedia is a list describing ‘Advanced Dungeons and Dragons 2^nd Edition Monsters’. I’d like to see someone with a degree in that. Of course, this is really the stuff that people want to know about, as opposed to say, politics in Iran.

Furthermore, I have argued before that it is debateable how ‘unreliable’ Wikipedia really is. Many Wikipedia pages are guarded so carefully by those with a vested interest in them that vandalism becomes incredibly difficult. It seems that people have embraced Wikipedia, and are willing to defend its stance as the sum of most of humankind’s knowledge. It would appear that popular opinion is worth more on the internet than a doctorate. Whether or not this is a positive development is debateable, but most people are smart enough to recognise Wikipedia as an open source site, and treat its information accordingly.

So there you have it; a not particularly comprehensive guide to the world’s biggest websites and their poorer, uglier stepsisters. It must be kept in mind that the secondary websites are still, for the most part, multi-million dollar corporations, with the sort of web traffic that many can only dream about. I’m sure the founders of MySpace, Yahoo!, Dailymotion and Scholarpedia probably sleep quite happily at night. But it’s interesting that there only ever seems to be room for one at the top. And being at the top in the digital age is about more than raking in huge profits. It’s about having your company, your brand and your image representing your industry. Your company doesn’t just provide a service anymore; it provides a representation of the zeitgeist, which is something that immortalises corporations. Google is internet search, just as Facebook is social networking, and YouTube is online video. That sort of success and brand recognition can’t be bought by advertising no matter how hard you try: it can only be endorsed by the masses.

*Please don’t take this statement to mean that I have any sort of grasp of Chinese philosophy. P.S. sorry Art.

nostradamus.com

Humans love to try and predict the future. There seems to be something carnal about knowing what will happen before it actually occurs, probably linked in to some sort of human God-complex that innately infects our super-intelligent/narcissistic species. It’s often embarrassing, and sometimes amusing, when someone gets it wrong. 

But what about the few times we get it right? It’s fascinating how accurate some predictions have become, particularly in regards to the World Wide Web. For a technology that really only came into being around 1990, the fact that over a century ago somebody predicted something similar to our current setup of a worldwide network of billions of computers is astounding, a little scary, and very, very cool.

In 1909 E.M Forster wrote a short story entitled ‘The Machine Stops’, a dystopian (or perhaps utopian, if you’re Zuckerberg or Jobs) tale about humans who have become isolated and dependant on their personal machines which provide for them all they need to survive. Forster’s depiction of this ‘machine’ is eerily familiar:

"There were buttons and switches everywhere--buttons to call for food, for music, for clothing... There was the button that produced literature, and there were of course the buttons by which she communicated with her friends..."

Forster wasn’t alone in predicting the way in which the world would become inextricably connected through machines. In 1946 Murray Leinster addressed a similar concept in his tale ‘A Logic Named Joe’ which, instead of ‘machines’, calls his personal computer-type invention a ‘logic’, a machine which utilises a ‘trick circuit’ that’s so similar to the WWW that Berners-Lee might be up for copyright infringement:

"I was servicing televisions before that guy Carson invented his trick circuit that will select any of 'steenteen [sic] million other circuits—in theory there ain't no limit—and before the Logics Company hooked it into the tank-and-integrator set-up they were usin' 'em as business-machine service. They added a vision screen for speed—an' they found out they'd made logics. They were surprised an' pleased. They're still findin' out what logics will do, but everybody's got 'em."

I realise that it’s not very creative on my part to quote large chunks of other people’s text, but in this case Leinster’s description of the then imminent digital age is so wonderful I can’t help myself:

"You know the logics setup. You got a logic in your house. It looks like a vision receiver used to, only it's got keys instead of dials and you punch the keys for what you wanna get...you punch "Sally Hancock's Phone" an' the screen blinks an' sputters an' you're hooked up with the logic in her house an' if somebody answers you got a vision-phone connection. But besides that, if you punch for the weather forecast or who won today's race at Hialeah or who was mistress of the White House durin' Garfield's administration... that comes on the screen too. The relays in the tank do it. The tank is a big buildin' full of all the facts in creation an' all the recorded telecasts that ever was made—an' it's hooked in with all the other tanks all over the country—an' everything you wanna know or see or hear, you punch for it an' you get it. Very convenient. Also it does math for you, an' keeps books, an' acts as consultin' chemist, physicist, astronomer...with a "Advice to the Lovelorn" thrown in."

Are we so predictable?

I think there is a tendency to weed out the correct predictions from the millions of incorrect ones and champion them as if the author really did have a window to the future. Statistics would suggest that over the course of a century, at least a couple of people would get pretty close. Keep in mind those like Harold Camping and thousands before him, who have incorrectly predicted the end of the world (of course, one of them will be right, one day). Or how about those that assured us that ‘guitar groups’ were ‘on the way out’ in the sixties? We get it wrong a hell of a lot more often than we get it right. And so I guess that’s part of the fun when the Forsters and Leinsters of the world make such bold predictions and those predictions are proved correct.

Here are some more thoughts from our esteemed Nostradami, who both ponder about the merits of their respective technology. E.M Forster could be billed as the first anti-Facebook campaigner:

“The Machine is much, but it is not everything. I see something like you in this plate, but I do not see you. I hear something like you through this telephone, but I do not hear you. That is why I want you to come. Pay me a visit, so that we can meet face to face, and talk about the hopes that are in my mind.”

“The room, though it contained nothing, was in touch with all that she cared for in the world.”

The second statement is a particularly scary quote. Take away our Facebook, take away our Google, our eBay and our Twitter, and it becomes that much harder to engage in the activities that we enjoy. We’d have to go outside or something. And ultimately, Forster is right. These things that we care for, these Facebook profiles and Google searches and Tweets and blogs and Wikipedia articles are, in physical essence, nothing. Our rooms are empty, filled only with the electrical synapses of our digital life-supports. Switch off the power and what are you left with?

Leinster takes a slightly different tack:

“Logics are all right, though. They changed civilization, the highbrows tell us.”

Food for thought indeed. How often is it jammed down our throats that the internet and super-connectivity are good things? I’m usually very pro-internet and pro-technology. But Forster and Leinster got me thinking. Do we ever stop and think just who is telling us that today’s super-connectivity is beneficial? Upon closer examination it’s often the people who stand to make a profit from our ultra digital dependency: Microsoft, Facebook, Google, Apple. Most of us would reject an ad from a cigarette company as we now know that they are making a profit out of people’s misfortunes. Will we come to a similar realisation in the future about the internet and its paradoxical ability to connect us with the world at the same time that it isolates us from it? Will humanity descend into a Forster-like existence in which everyone is physically shut off from one another, connected only by our glowing screens and optical fibre? The alarmists will tell you that we’re already there. The profiteers will claim that we need to go further. Where will it end?

I often wonder about future generations, who will never know a time before the existence of the internet. We’re living in quite a special period of history now: there are still those alive who remember (and in some cases prefer) a time before the World Wide Web. Does their pre-net perspective keep our technology grounded? Do they stop us from making catastrophically stupid technological mistakes all in the name of profit by reminding us that the world used to work before Facebook and Google, and that not everything can be reduced to a 140 character message? When their perspective dies, and their opinions are relegated to the history books, will we - the vanguard of the digital age - somehow concede a part of our humanity to the machines which already consume so much of our lives?