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future forecasting
Jan. 19th, 2000 11:00 amWed 19 Jan
Business opportunity: something to do with MP3, musical formats and storage media. CDs have been the backbone of our musical media for only 10-12 years now. If technological progress is truly working exponentially, what will the future bring for the way in which we listen to music?
CONTEXT
At the dawn of Y2K, we encounter media in a variety of formats, sizes and shapes. We're online X % of our time, and receive multimedia messages such as 3D graphic images, animation with 16 million colous and digital hi-fi stereo sound several times a day or week.
Enormous advancements in computer memory, data access and storage, networking, and computer processing power have now begun to make media distribution go fully mainstream. No longer does one have to pay a premium for "the IMAZ experience," for example, as the technology now sits in our living rooms in the form of a digitally-processed home theatre system.
So what will the future bring? Certainly, further refinements to our standard technological infrastructure will reduce further the physical size and power required to produce or process increased amounts and complexity of data. In the short- to medium-term then, the music media will probably reduce to the size of small microprocessing and data storage chips, making it completely portable and accessible wherever you are.
But having said all of that, I think it's even more interesting to contemplate what our opportunities could be if we threw away the basic models by which we presently live, and construct a completely new paradigm by which humanity could operate and live and communicate with each other. Indeed, what if we were to discard the medium altogether and discover a totally new means to communicate? I mean, really - why must we be constrained by mere language when we could instead be communicating DIRECTLY to one another through the simple and sheer conveyance of MEANING to one another? What then, happens to KNOWLEDGE?
Business opportunity: something to do with MP3, musical formats and storage media. CDs have been the backbone of our musical media for only 10-12 years now. If technological progress is truly working exponentially, what will the future bring for the way in which we listen to music?
CONTEXT
At the dawn of Y2K, we encounter media in a variety of formats, sizes and shapes. We're online X % of our time, and receive multimedia messages such as 3D graphic images, animation with 16 million colous and digital hi-fi stereo sound several times a day or week.
Enormous advancements in computer memory, data access and storage, networking, and computer processing power have now begun to make media distribution go fully mainstream. No longer does one have to pay a premium for "the IMAZ experience," for example, as the technology now sits in our living rooms in the form of a digitally-processed home theatre system.
So what will the future bring? Certainly, further refinements to our standard technological infrastructure will reduce further the physical size and power required to produce or process increased amounts and complexity of data. In the short- to medium-term then, the music media will probably reduce to the size of small microprocessing and data storage chips, making it completely portable and accessible wherever you are.
But having said all of that, I think it's even more interesting to contemplate what our opportunities could be if we threw away the basic models by which we presently live, and construct a completely new paradigm by which humanity could operate and live and communicate with each other. Indeed, what if we were to discard the medium altogether and discover a totally new means to communicate? I mean, really - why must we be constrained by mere language when we could instead be communicating DIRECTLY to one another through the simple and sheer conveyance of MEANING to one another? What then, happens to KNOWLEDGE?
