Dude, where's my hovercar?
- Stefan Sojka
- 26 March 2009
The digital revolution? Just how much has the web delivered on its ultra-hyped promise of the mid-90s? As we hunker down for work in 2009, I look at all the unfulfilled promises of the internet – things that should have happened by now, if we hadn’t been rebooting, anti-spamming, or Googling Anna Nicole Smith and Britney.
International smiley face standards
How many times have you whipped off an email with a witty retort with the accompanying smiley face, only to discover it had turned into a :J or a $@&# in the recipient’s email program? Why haven’t Google, Microsoft, Nokia, the International Standards Organisation and the World Wide Web Consortium held a conference and agreed on a definitive set of cross-platform graphic smiley faces?
Double trouble
Someone sends you a nicely formatted email. You hit ‘reply’ and start typing. All the formatting disappears, including your own signature, and all your ‘enter’ keystrokes shift down double lines. What is that about? Do Apple and Microsoft executives meet every Friday 13th for a good belly laugh? This is my life you are wasting!
Moore’s the law
Why is it that computer memory and processing power have been doubling every two years, but every task I do on my computer takes exactly the same length of time to complete as it did in 1985? To top that off, I just bought a two-terabyte USB drive to conveniently store my entire digital life on, but it now takes three days to copy all the files on to it, and another four years to rename all the files in a way that won’t make any sense to anyone by the time I’ve finished.
Power to the people
How can it be that 150 million people can join a social networking site, like FaceBook or MySpace, and the most significant impacts of that unimaginable level of people power are that a bunch of virtual pets got fed and a band called OK GO now have global cultural significance, regardless of whether they are good musicians? There are only seven countries with populations larger than 150 million. Where is the FaceBook parliament? The MySpace armed forces? How can so many people be so mindlessly irrelevant? When is all this social networking going to turn into something of substance? We need better Web 2.0 apps.
Pie in the sky computing
Cloud computing sounds like our digital lives will float into perfect formation and automagically self-organise without so much as a file rename, right-click or Control-Z. Truth is, there is no cloud, only warehouses full of complicated computers, built and maintained by super-geeks who love complexity. When internet service providers are run by poets and ballerinas, cloud computing might become a reality.
The paperless office
There’s a reason why Tasmania is getting clear-felled: every computer these days seems to ship with a free printer. “Think about the environment before printing,” the friendly marketing brochure says. We think. We print. Now switch off your computer, go to your window and scream, “I’m mad as hell and I can’t take it any more!” Turn your computer back on and start blogging. That’ll fix it!
