The Internet Age

There are strong indications that the Internet has already become the most pervasive factor in human life. By doing so, the first part of the 21st Century deserves to be named The Internet Age so it can be compared with other periods that have radically transformed human life such as the Agrarian Age and the Industrial Age.

The Internet has been called the Information Super Highway because it transmits billions of documents daily. It is the Internet as a super highway and how it competes with other forms of transportation that will be discussed in this article.

The Internet as Transportation

To get a better understanding of why the Internet is a form of transportation, consider the history of the Pony Express. It started in April 1860 to provide a fast mail service between the east and west coasts of the United States. It took about ten days to deliver its mail. The Pony Express announced its closure 18 months later in October 1861 just two days after the new Transcontinental Telegraph reached Salt Lake City, Utah.

The Pony Express came to an end because the telegraph was a new form of transportation that could deliver messages much faster (in just few minutes) and much cheaper.

Since the Pony Express and the telegraph both delivered messages, even though they did it in very different ways, both of them can be seen as competing forms of transportation.

Once it’s recognized that the telegraph is a form of transportation, it’s easy to see that the Internet is also a form of transportation. It delivers billions of messages, mail, documents, music, pictures and videos worldwide as fast as lightning wherever there are Internet connections, and it does it much cheaper than its slow moving competition—trucks, trains and planes. The Internet moves only digital information, but the problem is that this used to be non-digital information, which was moved by trucks, trains and planes. The Internet is in direct competition with them. The more digital media the Internet transports, the less non-digital media the others transport.

Print Media

eBooks

The promise of digital books, e Books as they are called, is that they can be delivered faster and cheaper and sold for significantly lower prices because they aren’t printed on expensive paper, stored in expensive warehouses and transported by gas guzzling trucks. Millions of acres of trees no longer have to be cut down to make paper. Millions of gallons of toxic ink no longer have to be manufactured to make printed documents. Millions of gallons of gas no longer have to be consumed to transport logs, paper and printed documents. Millions of tons of acid paper no longer need be dumped in landfills. Besides being much cheaper to produce and ship, eBooks are environmentally friendly.

The challenge of eBooks is that the industries that rely on the printed book will have to close their doors. Tens of thousands of print workers—booksellers, printers and truck drivers will lose their jobs and have to switch to other professions.

Some industry analysts believe that most bookstores will be out of business within five years.

Newspapers

Printed newspapers have all of the problems printed books have except they can go to press faster than books. Newspapers, however, have a big problem that books don’t have. Newspapers depend on getting a large part of their revenue from the advertising they print. As newspapers receive competition from TV, radio, blogs, twitters and online news, their advertising sales have declined but their costs have increased. Income from classified ads, once a major source of income for newspapers, has continued to decline as online companies take them over such as monster.com for jobs and eBay for products. Apartment rentals and real estate listings are increasingly be taking over by online companies that also have no newspaper affiliations. In the face of mounting print advertising costs, advertisers are taking advantage of the new online ad opportunities, an option they didn’t have before. They are finding that online advertising is not only cheaper but more successful.

The future of print newspapers is bleak. If newspapers are to survive, their only option is to develop a successful online operation as soon as possible so they can dump everything that involves printing newspapers—paper, ink, printing presses, employees who work with print media, delivery trucks, warehouses, etc. To survive online, newspapers must find a way to obtain enough ad revenues or they won’t be able to survive. The chance of finding enough online ad revenue is not encouraging. Those who hold out and try to make a go of it as a print operation will not survive. Most newspapers will be gone within five years.

Magazines and Journals

Magazines and Journals have all of the problems newspapers have except their article lead times are longer. They will continue to lose advertising revenue. Their choice is the same: switch to an online operation or go out of business. Unless they can carry over their print advertising in a downsized online publishing operation, they too are unlikely to survive.

Music, Pictures, Videos and Software—the Other Digital Media

Everything that applies to digital books applies to digital music, pictures and videos. Recorded music on CDs is coming to an end. Digital pictures have already replaced film prints. Videos can be downloaded from the Internet, and this trend will continue. Eventually Internet videos will replace video DVDs.

Software will become primarily available as Internet downloads.

The Internet as Teleportation

Just as the Internet is a form of transportation that threatens traditional transport companies, it’s also a form of teleportation that threatens many other traditional businesses.

The Internet has not yet reached the “Beam me up, Scottie” type of teleportation where humans are digitized, transported through space and reconstituted. Instead, live images of people are digitized and transported to some Internet cloud where they can transact in real time with other people’s digitized images. This is called videoconferencing. Cisco’s WebEx is one of many software packages that make online sales presentations and conferences possible.

The promise of Internet “teleportation” is that it means the millions of outside sales reps will be taken off the road so they can make online sales calls from offices and home. As online reps they will be able to make extra calls each day because they won’t have to spend time traveling between accounts. The geographical location of their accounts no longer matters because it’s just as easy to make sales calls in New York in the morning and San Francisco in the afternoon as it is to make several calls in the same city the same day.

This will take a million cars off the road and reduce gas consumption by millions of gallons a year. Companies will be able to reduce their sales expenses by tens of thousands of dollars per sales rep. Expensive weeklong semiannual conferences in major cities will be canceled because they can be replaced by inexpensive online video conferences where reps can attend from their offices and their homes.

The challenge of converting outside reps to online reps is that it will have a huge impact on world economies. These sales reps will no longer need company cars, airline tickets and car rentals. They will no longer stay in hotels and motels and eat at restaurants. All of these industries will be forced to downsize and lay off hundreds of thousands of workers as reps are taken off the road.

Virtual Visits

Free Internet phone calls such as those offered by SKYPE allow individuals to visit each other using VOIP (Voice Over Internet Protocol) no matter where they may be. This is just the beginning. As video conferencing systems come down in price, instead of getting in the family car to visit relatives and friends, many of these visits will take place over the Internet because they will be easier to make, cheaper and save time.

Virtual Vacations

If you want to see lions in Africa or Kodiak bears in Alaska, you can spend thousands of dollars to go there in person with the hope of encountering them, but if you choose to call up a video on the Internet, chances are you’ll see more animals and learn more about them because the photographers who prepare these videos often spend months and even years taking their pictures. It’s still more exciting to see these animals in person, but it’s likely that more and more people will see them over the Internet because it’s so much less expensive. You can expect to see a reduction in vacation travel because of this.

Telecommuting

As more people work at home by telecommuting, more two car families will become one car families as telecommuting families find they can get by with just one car. There will be less traffic on the road, and less office space will be required. People who work as telecommuters can live anyplace where they can get an Internet connection. Many of those who can afford it will leave the congested, expensive cities to live in cleaner, less crime ridden smaller communities.

Online Education

As education costs skyrocket, there is no choice but to develop an inexpensive system of online education to grant degrees and offer retraining to the millions of people who will find themselves unemployed as the Internet eliminates jobs in competitive industries.

Schools such as MIT and Stanford have already put most of their classes online where anyone can read the lectures and study materials. Online schools such as the University of Phoenix have offered online degrees for several years. Now, Stanford and several other universities are offering online master’s degree programs that they claim match the quality of education found on their campuses. It’s only a matter of time before more universities offer similar online degrees.

With technology changing our world so rapidly, most people will have to receive constant Internet training to update their skills so they can keep their current jobs or switch to new professions. From now on, continuing education will be a lifelong activity. Our current campus based educational system simply cannot handle this increased volume of educational traffic.

The Age of the Automobile Is No More

Even though cars, trucks and planes will continue to be an important part of our lives for the foreseeable future, their role will be diminished as billions of digital products are shipped via the Internet instead of by FedEx, UPS and USPS and as millions of workers no longer need cars for their jobs. To survive, the auto industry will have to downsize. There is simply no way that the auto industry can regain the sales of yesterday. The Age of the Automobile is over.

We Ain’t Seen Nuthin’ Yet

Artificial Intelligence expert Ray Kurzweil suggests that towards the end of the 21st Century it will be possible to create digital copies of human beings and upload them onto a computer. Once this happens, people will be able to live virtual lives that they will not be able to distinguish from life in the physical world. After people are converted to digital entities, it will eventually be possible to create android and “blank” human bodies that can receive the digital copies so that people can move between virtual and real life existences indefinitely.

There are quite a few advantages in having a system like this.

Space Exploration Instead of the huge cost of transporting human bodies through space and keeping them alive in some form of stasis for hundreds, thousands, maybe even hundreds of thousands of years, it will be much cheaper and more efficient to put copies of people onto a computer, turn off the power for the length of the trip and turn it on when the spaceship lands on a planet suitable for human habitation. Once landed, robots can reconstitute the people in physical bodies, perhaps android bodies to start with, so they can populate it. Since space travel is very dangerous, only copies of living people need be sent into space. The originals can remain at home where they can live normal lives—whatever “normal” might be one hundred years from now.

Once people are copied onto a computer, their digital folders can be sent over the Internet to places on earth as well as to locations in near space such as the moon’s spacecraft launching station. When this happens, it will be a real form of teleportation. Once a new planet has been colonized by the first spaceship, the fastest way to transport more colonists to that planet will, of course, be over the Internet.

Prison Reform Rather than maintain prisons where it costs five to ten times as much to house a prisoner as it does to send a child to public school, governments can use tax dollars more effectively by sentencing people who are convicted of crimes to virtual lives where they can serve out their sentences in inexpensive-to-maintain virtual worlds. For those whose sentences are not for life, they can be reconstituted in physical bodies at the end of their sentences and allowed to live in the real world again. Some prisoners, however, may prefer to remain in their new virtual world where they will have freedom to do things they could never do in the real world.

War and Other Dangerous Occupations Rather than send people to war as soldiers or put them in a dangerous environment, it will be easier to make physical copies of each person loaded into androids so that if the physical copy is destroyed, the original person will remain unharmed. Since the experience gained performing dangerous occupations can provide people with valuable professional experience, at the end of these assignments, these experiences can be merged electronically with their originals so the originals can continue to advance in their careers.

No Turning Back

There is no turning back. If we choose to return to the “good old days” by getting rid of the Internet, we shall simply empower other countries to develop superior technologies that they will use to compete against us. A refusal to utilize new technologies can only lead to greater unemployment and economic hardship.

The Internet is in some ways like Pandora’s Box. Even though it brings wonderful gifts to the human race, it does so at the cost by depriving millions of people of the old jobs that were created during the Industrial and Post-Industrial Ages. This will create poverty and major economic problems unless nations prepare proactively to provide top quality, inexpensive education so the unemployed can begin new careers. To solve the problems created by technology and to reap the benefits it brings, we have no choice but to use technology to facilitate our transition to a new, more environmentally friendly world.

The Internet is already making revolutionary changes in our lives. It is dominant technology of our time. In recognition of these changes, this era should be called the Internet Age.

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About

This article was written by Russell Dauterman. His career has covered teaching (philosophy with a specialty in logic), publishing (working for bookstores, book wholesalers and publishers) and computers (retailing and database design). He is also Caseorganic’s Uncle.

Russell Dauterman can be reached at dbtrees at gmail dot com.