Friday, November 04, 2005
A Vision of the Future
There is a certain image that keeps coming to my mind.
It's one of those almost archetypical images with a kind of iconic quality to them. Think of the student in Tienanmen square standing in front of the tank.
I am thinking about an image that embodies the spirit of a certain age.
However this is an age still to come.
I see this picture from the near future: a twenty-something year old girl standing in front of an armed policeman, his baton raised in mid air, ready to hit. She holds herself with quiet confidence, her right arm outstretched, holding a small videophone in her hand. pointing it straight to the policeman. a flashing badge on her chest shows the hits of her realtime feed, climbing up frenetically as the policeman approaches.
The policeman doesn't understand that quiet self-assureness and he slows down and then stops, like a video put on pause, looking around for some possible explanation. He is surrounded by half a dozen quiet determined young boys and girls, just holding tiny mobiles in front of them as shields.
Their videocasts reinforce one another due to the common area of interest, causing the emergence of an implicit community on the net, and this implicit community gets noticed and as more and more people tune in, its presence in the newssphere keeps increasing, attracting even more attention. The alarmed face of the policeman is brodcast on thousands of small and big screen, unwilling guest of his own personal reality show.
It's one of those almost archetypical images with a kind of iconic quality to them. Think of the student in Tienanmen square standing in front of the tank.
I am thinking about an image that embodies the spirit of a certain age.
However this is an age still to come.
I see this picture from the near future: a twenty-something year old girl standing in front of an armed policeman, his baton raised in mid air, ready to hit. She holds herself with quiet confidence, her right arm outstretched, holding a small videophone in her hand. pointing it straight to the policeman. a flashing badge on her chest shows the hits of her realtime feed, climbing up frenetically as the policeman approaches.
The policeman doesn't understand that quiet self-assureness and he slows down and then stops, like a video put on pause, looking around for some possible explanation. He is surrounded by half a dozen quiet determined young boys and girls, just holding tiny mobiles in front of them as shields.
Their videocasts reinforce one another due to the common area of interest, causing the emergence of an implicit community on the net, and this implicit community gets noticed and as more and more people tune in, its presence in the newssphere keeps increasing, attracting even more attention. The alarmed face of the policeman is brodcast on thousands of small and big screen, unwilling guest of his own personal reality show.
