http://www.portfolio.com/views/columns/dual-perspectives/2009/03/23/The-Participatory-Panopticon?print=true
Dual Perspectives
The Future of Broadband: The Participatory Panopticon
by Ryan Singel | See Archive
Wired.com reports on what happens when bandwidth becomes infinite, ubiquitous, and too cheap to meter.
In the future, everyone agrees, the internet’s pipes will be so thick that we will all live inside them—a fiber-to-the curb future where bandwidth is so cheap and available that no one bothers to meter it, with mobile devices usurping the desktop computer. But what will that future look like? Here, consensus collapses faster than AT&T's 3G network under the Twittering strain of the SXSW music conference in Austin.
The businessmen all point to Korea and Japan, where television already streams onto handsets at 30 frames per second. "We could have that kind of bandwidth in five or 10 years," says Ram Shriaram, a longtime venture capitalist and early investor in Google. "It depends on our investment." Others, including the telecom-oriented analysts at the Yankee Group, are less optimistic. Yankee Group estimates have the number of 2.5G and 3G connections in the US rising from today's 251 million to only 298 million in 2012. "Five years?" says Yankee analyst Vince Vittore. "I don't know." The business types are focused on the road ahead.
The futurists, on the other hand, are only interested in the final destination. Japan and Korea? The future of broadband is not "more and better ways to see America's Next Top Model," scoffs Eric Greenfield, the head of design direction for service and user-interface design at Nokia and the author of Everywhere: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing. It will be "live feeds from massively distributed embedded sensor networks, extraordinarily complex real-time data visualizations, fully social augmented-reality overlays...and a whole lot of things that we haven't even begun to imagine.”
Jamais Casicio, a senior fellow at the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, sees a future where cloud computing and thick bandwidth turns handheld devices into extensions of supercomputers, with users recording and sharing their lives and media in real time.
The beta version is Internet2, an experimental backbone connecting many of the world's universities and research centers. Normally it's used to let scientists around the world search and share images that can be tens of gigabytes in size. Physicists use it for distributed Large Haldron Collider research. Astronomers use it to combine radio telescope images from across the globe in near real-time. And theater types use it to put on a show.
Eighty-four years after it was first produced, 100 students from three universities revived the 1923 play The Adding Machine, a dsytopian comedy about "Mr. Zero," an accountant that loses his job to a mechanical calculator. It was staged at Bradley University in Illinois, but featured actors from Canada and Florida beamed in over the Internet2 backbone in uncompressed, high-def video at 120 megabytes per second.
"The question is not 'What should we do with all that bandwidth?'" says Cascio. "It's, 'What do we want to do?'" Scientists want to do science, actors want to act, and the rest of us, well, according to Cascio, what we will want is video Twitter—on steroids.
He calls the unlimited-bandwidth future the "participatory panopticon," and describes a world where many will broadcast every move of their lives. Everything will be its own broadcast station, its own TV channel: Each subway train, each building, every lamp will be linked in, updating status reports and even live video to the net. The world will be defined by a cacophony of narrow-cast information, all of it begging for attention and analysis.
Omniscience will no longer be an exclusively god-like quality. We all will be "minutely and intimately aware," predicts Greenfield, "of every Indian woman maimed by a spurned suitor in an acid attack, every Iranian kid stoned to death for having the temerity to be born gay, every destroyed textbook in the trashed cafeteria of an abandoned Detroit high school."
Unfortunately for us, says Greenfield, quoting the Buddha, "awareness is suffering."
The Future of Broadband
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