PREVIEW OF THE YEAR
2007 is about the future. And about the past.
It’s about some young buck called James McAvoy who’s going to dominate our screens, and it’s about a host of new ‘grown-up’ festivals. Find out what else is in store in our guide to the year ahead.
THE FUTURE
CYBERSPACE INVADERS
We may not be flying around in hover cars or wearing spangly all—silver outfits, but thanks to the internet the future has truly arrived. And the revolution will continue apace in 2007, argues Suzanne Black.
brand neyy ciyilisation has sprung up. IIeraIdcd as ‘yyeb 3.0’ and the democratisation of the internet. the yast majority of people in the Western World Iiye some part of their Iiyes online. The delining feature of this neyy era of the yyeb
is 'user generated content‘. The creation of
interactiye. user-friendly sites like Wikipedia. i'I‘unes. MySpace and I‘Iickr haye opened the floodgates to mass immigration. It is noyy incredibly simple to create and share \yords. pictures. sound and yideo. and to access it.
In the early days. bIogging was like arriying off
a plane. jctlaggcd. in a foreign country with no map. I-Iash foryyard 20 years and the alien technology of the computer world has been humanised and made second nature. As people haye grayitated onto the internet. a process not unlike hyper-speed colonisation has occurred. At last count .\I_\Space. had lIl) million users making it the lllth biggest population in the world. just behind .\Iexico.
'I‘his shift to yirtual territory \inI continue. The shift from tmnel‘ship to access ldmy‘nIoading a song rather than physically holding a CD) \inI extend as it has done in the realms of knowledge. With (iooglc and Wikipedia at your fingertips
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there is no need to commit anything to memory.
With the proliferation of profiling sites lMySpace. Bebo). identities haye become more to do with a person’s online interface than physical impressions. The link between a person and their online presence is murky. It won't be long until an online citi/en gains problematic autonomy. Perhaps the first murder committed by a \ irtual entity'.’
In addition to personal changes. the landscape of the internet is under construction. .-\t the moment cyberspace is rapidly working to resemble the 'real world”. With corporate monoliths gobbling up all the these sites that contain millions of users’ personal details and adyertisers become eyer cleyerer. big business has taken root. International Iayys regarding copyright and e-commercc are also striying to put structures in place marking the internet's status as a modern. capitalist ‘ciyilisation‘.
The internet is going to eyolye beyond physical models of commerce and politics. When we can leap the physical barrier between the human and the computer and jack our minds directly into the \ycb there \inI be no need for a \'i.\llilI interface 7 the internet \inI become a pure data stream. It‘s impossible to predict. since it will be something no one has seen before and. existing in our heads and the ether. \inI hate no physical form. Instead. the 'internet' will denote the ubiquitous mesh of information signals coating the globe. like a uniycrsal consciousness.
.-\s the internet goes through its next eyolution we won‘t need to trawl to the moon. There won’t be anything we can’t experience here.
AS PEOPLE HAVE GRAVITATED ONTO THE INTERNET, A PROCESS NOT UNLIKE HYPER- SPEED COLONISATION HAS OCCURRED
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THE PAST
THE ANALOGUE BACKLASH
All this progress, all this pixellation. Haven’t we blundered into a new digital
age while casting asunder some very lovely things? Neil Cooper forecasts a nostalgic comeback for Airfix modelling, bakelite and Pen Pals.
Illustrator Kam Tang’s vision of a digital and product-filled future (above) contrasts with the original Pop Artist Richard Hamilton’s 1956 visual essay, ‘Just What Is It That Makes Today’s Homes $0 Different, So Appealing?’ (left)