Watch this cool video about the future of the Internet to 2015. The speculations are pretty close to the mark and entirely probable.
The video references Reason Magazine, which sent subscribers an issue with a satellite image of their houses/apartment buildings (with the address listed) on the cover. I was a subscriber at the time (I once flirted with libertarianism), and it threw me for a loop because I had no idea what was going on. It was bizarre. 
The video producers predict, among other things, that Google will merge with Amazon to become “Googlezon.” The power of Google’s search engine, combined with Amazon’s personal recommendations software, will personalize and deliver news to the point where the New York Times will cease its online edition. Bold. With tools like RSS, it could happen.
Based on the online revolution in general and paradigm-shifting changes wrought by social/new media (digital news, blogs [including rants and original reporting], podcasts, RSS, etc.), what are your predictions for the future of communication?
(Hat tip: The Blog Herald)
(Image from An Atlas of Cyberspaces)
Addendum: The video can be interpreted a few different ways. To me, it’s a prediction about the decline of mainstream media and rise of credible participatory journalism (a good thing). For someone else, it may portend the world domination of Google (a bad thing?) and participatory journalism without fact-checks and balances.
The video has been around for a while. I read this funny article about Google in The Onion (satire) last year. Still funny?
Another Addendum: I had the nagging feeling the video was a “mockumentary,” so I e-mailed the producers. I said I liked the video and wondered if it was “serious.” Matt Thompson replied:
Hi La Shawn,
Thanks for your compliment. EPIC may be provocative, but it’s definitely not serious. We talk a little more about its creation here…
Read the story at Poynter Online. I still think it’s clever and worth discussing. 
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World domination by Google would be a very bad thing. This is the same company that censors content at the request of the Chinese government, and had also expunged http://www.thepeoplescube.com/ from any Google search (it’s bad today??). When I have time, I’ll watch the link…..
I think Google and Amazon should pay hommage to the creator of the Internet and go with the name
“GOOGLE-GOREZON”
For someone else, it may portend the world domination of Google (a bad thing?) and participatory journalism without fact-checks and balances.
Right now, “fact-checking” has been replaced by “fact-inventing” in the MSM. That’s my worry - a media that lies with the same degree of hate and bigotry that the world saw in Nazi Germany and Rwanda. The MSM is not quite there yet, but in a few more years (I predict) it will be impossible to distinguish Bob Schieffer, Bryant Gumbel and the rest from Joseph Goebbels and Radio RTLM.
What worries me most about media-merging is the increased potential for fiction to be passed off as fact. With limited media sources, the public’s ability to gain additional perspective is also limted, is it not? The credibility of alternative sources is often suspect and the big players becoming moreso with time. By 2015, the big question won’t be, “What’s news?” but,”Who to believe?”
Clever video!
La Shawn:
The recent refusal of Google to release information on child pornography has one major motivation - the privacy of the porn suppliers, who provide a lot of profit to Google. They are amoral capitalists. These same people do not hesitate to violate the privacy of Chinese, for a profit from the Chinese Government.
But there is something more dangerous from these mega mergers; this leaves the Internet covered by only a few players - and this may undo the very nature of the Internet as an indestructable web - the presence of only a few players makes the Internet vulnerable to Government intervention - Google, Microsoft, Yahoo CAN and WILL be targets of Government interference. A few major players are much easier to interfere with than a lot of small ones.
BUYERS BEWARE
Future of communication? People will continue to spell more poorly and use less logic until the home-schooled more traditional education youth become the dominant force in western culture as the rest slack off into incompetent obscurity, or learn and grow to catch up.
Newspapers will have to become super local or die, nobody needs them for news outside their town any more. Network news shows will become 5-minute bits at the top of the hour, thus cheaper and opening up more broadcast time to lucrative programming.
Cell Phones will largely go the way of digital watches, ceasing to be the latest kewl gadget and becoming just a tool to be used.
(This is a comment on your post about segregation law pardons…) Those are fascinating arguments in the articles you linked to, I look foward to reading your future posts on the issue!
Of course, none of this will happen anyway since that massive solar tsunami will bombard the earth in 2011 and fry every transformer, computer, and ipod on the planet. Just something I heard in passing.
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