The future is made of and affected by decisions made in the present just as the present is a product of decisions made in the past. Nothing happens in a vacuum. There is always a context within which events and trends occur. These decisions are made at an individual level as well as at a collective, usually subconscious level. Till now, the present has always been understandable in the context of the past. All the major trends and events to-date can be traced and understood via events and decisions in the past. Events, trends, technologies are often connected in surprising ways.
For example the profession of a social media marketer was simply not possible before the rise of social media sites like Facebook and 4Square. These sites in turn depended on both the widespread availability of the Internet and the mass roll-out of high speed connectivity. This widespread availability of the Internet in turn depended on creation and availability of the appropriate networking technology which needed the development of the appropriate protocols so that different devices could communicate with each other. All of this was driven by the desire of the Pentagon to create a robust communications network that could withstand a full scale nuclear attack. However this desire was necessitated by the Cold War and the development of nuclear weapons; the latter in turn had been developed as a result of World War II when it was feared that the Nazi Germans were on the verge of creating them. So we can clearly see the connections between a modern profession (social media marketing) and seemingly disparate events and decisions made in the past.
The interesting things about the connected nature of the world and how it develops is that no one can predict how technological change will proceed and since that is not possible, it is also not possible to predict the future shape of society since social developments are heavily affected by and in turn themselves affect technological change. For example, in the early 2000s, no one was concerned about the privacy impact of social media simply because said media did not exist. Now, there is discussion about how Facebook will impact and drive social change specially among a generation that has grown up with it. Five years from now, we may well be discussing the impact of some technology that is no one is aware about today. Decisions are made today without knowledge of what the ultimate impact will be. Incidentally, this aspect has been explored in a wonderful BBC series called Connections which highlights the surprising connections between developments in the past and the development of modern technology.
As the series also highlights, there is a corollary to a connected world. Over time, the number and nature of connections will deepen as disparate developments take place and start to be used in other contexts and in ways never anticipated by the original developers. This increasing interconnectedness will in turn drive this process further and faster. As a result, the pace of change will quicken over time and in fact this is what can be observed as well: the pace of change has increased dramatically over time, specially in the last 100 years. What is more, there is no indication that this pace is slackening. Infact, it is accelerating. This has profound implications for social and personal developments and this brings us straight to the concept of the Singularity in the human context (which will be the subject of a later post).
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