The future eagerly awaits us
Although it may be a bit scary to imagine, these theories mentioned below could happen.
These changes can be considered useful or catastrophic depending on our particular viewpoints. Whatever the consensus may be, we should all be ready!
1. The United States Post Office. Can you imagine a world without our mail service? This enterprise has become so deep in debt that there is absolutely no way to continue the way they are. Computerized e-mails, Fed-Ex, and UPS have taken away many of the post office’s means of money: their customers! Most of the things you receive in the mail today are considered junk or random advertisements.
2. The Check. Large countries with complicated infrastructure are making plans to do away with checks by at most the year 2018. Financial practices lose millions of dollars a year processing and sorting checks. Credit card payments and Internet purchases will inevitably amount to death of the paper check as we know it. The Post Office will also take another hit by the loss of checks: much of their business now stems from delivering checks!
3. The Newspaper. Members of the younger generations just do not read the paper like past generations have. Few and far between are they signed up for a daily subscription. The newspaper may die out just as the milk delivery man and the laundry delivery services have. For those who enjoy reading the news online, it will soon be a paid service. The rise in availability of Internet-ready equipment and online readers has caused all the newspaper and magazine writers and publishers to create alliances. They have been working with big names such as Apple, Amazon, and the many cellular phone organizations to develop a system for paid-subscription services.
4. The Physical Book. Many vow they will never surrender the physical book that they hold in their hands and flip the leafy pages. Many tried to adhere to same principles with iTunes. Soon though, the convenience won out, and I began trading in my discs for money for online buying. The breaking point was getting all of the latest music without even leaving my computer. A similar thing is bound to happen with our literature. Users can peruse a bookstore through the Internet and even preview a small chapter before the purchase. The prices will be unbeatable as well! As with iTunes, the convenience will be the deciding factor. Once you start clicking the mouse instead of turning the pages, the magical sense of being engrossed in a novel will take over, and you lose track: you forget that it is not a physical book you are reading off of.
5. The Home Phone. Provided you don’t have an incredibly large you have a large family and make tons of local calls, they are unnecessary. Most people have a home phone because they simply have always had one. In doing this though, you end up paying double fees on your phone bill. On top of this, cell phone companies are offering better rates than ever, so the need is driven even further down.
6. Music. This is perhaps the most tragic of these impending changes. The music business is having a very tough time, and not only due to Internet pirating. Indeed, it is the difficulty of having music heard and appreciated due to record label practices. Money-mongering and dishonesty is the true problem. The record companies and the radio organizations are going to pieces. Over 40% of the tunes bought now are “catalog items,” which means popular music most people would know, by artists who have been around for a while. Not just the recorded music, but concerts as well. To do some research into this downward spiral, read the book, “Appetite for Self-Destruction” by Steve Knopper, and the movie production, “Before the Music Dies.”
7. Television. Television networks are not making as much as they used to. This is not just due to the recent economic downturn. People are viewing TV and movies downloaded from their personal computers. Now we are playing online games and doing all sorts of other things in the time that used to be occupied by television. Prime time television shows are suffering, and people are getting the bad side of it: incredibly long commercials trying to make money. It is hard to want to keep it alive with great alternatives such as NetFlix and YouTube.
8. Your Possessions. You may own many things now in your house, but soon, perhaps they will not exist physically, but instead inside of a computer. On the computer’s hard drive you store all of your memories and things pertaining to your life. Also, your music and DVDs are there. Apple, Microsoft, and Google are polishing up their newest
“cloud services.” This means that when you store information on a computer, your data will be stored directly to the Internet, not on your hard drive. All of the major operating systems are converting to this type of storage. Anything you may want to save will be written on this “cloud”. Don’t be surprised if you see a monthly fee attached as well!
In this online universe, you can have access to your songs or your reading, or whatever you have from any computer or hand-held device. This could be very useful. The problem is, can you really own any of your documents, or can it all float away at any time in one large “Poof?” Will many of our possessions in our daily lives be losable and intangible? Such an idea makes you want to run and put all of your physical things away, hidden safely.
9. Privacy. One outstanding concept we will look back and long for is privacy. That is slowly fading though. It might scare you, but try a quick Google search with your name and see how many results are pulled about you. There are now surveillance cameras on street corners, in many buildings, and some even built right into your laptop and cell phone. Count on it that every day, “They” know who we are and where we are, with exact longitude and latitude. GPS does not lie! Your identity is filtered into millions of profiles all over the Internet. It seems all we really have are the memories in our head. Nobody can take those away…. But perhaps one day they could be downloaded into your computer for safe keeping!
