If you were to pick six words to describe the future of the Internet, which words would they be? The founder of the American magazine "Wired", nicknamed the "Veteran Maverick", Kevin Kelly, selected six key words at the annual NExTWORK technology conference to depict the main trends of the future of the Internet, and believed that the Internet is accelerating towards video, mobile, and cloud development. Below are the six keywords chosen by Kelly to describe the future development trends of the Internet.
1. Screening
Nowadays, screens are everywhere - on the backs of airplane seats, on the walls of buildings... Soon, screens will become a kind of reality filter - covering our glasses and overlaying the digital world on the real world. "We are no longer book readers," Kelly said, "but will become screen people."
2. Interacting
And all these screens will no longer just stare at static objects - they will require all our senses, including sound. Kelly narrated his experience of observing an infant trying to interact with a photo; the infant was confused because it couldn't grab the image of the object touched by its finger. "If interactivity is lost, the Internet cannot function," Kelly said. This interaction manifests in two aspects - just as we are watching the screen, the screen is also watching us. The content displayed on the screen is very much like a double-sided mirror, adapting to our actions as we interact with it.
3. Sharing
Kelly referred to sharing as "the main verb of this world." The Web is built on the foundation of sharing and will continue to develop in this direction. According to his speculation, at some point, we will have one big cloud - the cloud above all clouds - which will allow us to share everything. We are already sharing things we never thought possible: friends, investments, memories, expectations, etc. "Anything that can be shared can be shared," Kelly said. "And this is just the beginning." Although the development of sharing has raised concerns about privacy, Kelly believes that making personal information public has great value. In his view, privacy and transparency are on the same skateboard, with privacy and generalization on one end, and transparency and personalization on the other. "People are pushing this skateboard further towards transparency and personalization," Kelly said.
4. Flowing
We first had files, folders, desktops. Then we had pages and links. Now we have streams, tags, and clouds. And blogs, Twitter streams, RSS, Facebook walls, etc., are neither past nor future, but just a stream. "All these streams together actually form new media and new platforms," Kelly said.
5. Accessing
When all things are always online, accessing them is more important than owning them. Spotify, Amazon, Netflix, etc., are all pushing people towards "instant purchasing" because once you miss something, you just have to wait. "We will see that the burden of ownership and the benefits of accessibility are clearly opposed," Kelly said.
6. Generating
"The Internet is the largest copying machine in the world," Kelly said. Since copying is so easy, how do you create value? In such a new ecosystem, if something is not easily copyable and convenient for payment purchase, then it has value. We want to pay for personalization (such as editing music tracks to suit playing in your living room), searchability (Amazon is much more useful than compressing all the world's music into one file), and concreteness (for example, a concert is more attractive than an album). These and other "generatable things" are valuable because they have become the new basic economic units.
Although Kelly only took these six samples from the new network world, he believes that even so, we still have a long way to go. "No matter how the Internet develops, we know we are not late," he concluded. "We are all just getting started."
By Net World Network