p2pnet.net View:-It’s the school holidays, and I’m at home in Cambridge with my children enjoying what passes for a hot summer day. Yesterday we went punting, and today Lili’s off to a theatre workshop while Max and I chill out.

We’re planning various activities to fill the time and some of them may even be vaguely educational or involve moderate physical exercise in the traditional middle-class aspirational manner.

There will be space for messing about too and I’d be very surprised if computer gaming wasn’t involved. I’m with Steven Johnson, the author of ‘Everything Bad is Good for You’, when he argues that the complex narratives and problem-solving requirements of modern video games make them as intellectually stimulating as reading novels, so I won’t be unplugging the Xbox or hiding the Nintendo DS.

Away from gaming we’ll be taking full advantage of the other digital technologies that have seeped into our daily lives.

First, there’s going to be some movie-making, using a digital video camera and the editing software that came as standard with my desktop computer.

We’ll also get out the webcam and use that to make stop-motion animation with Lego figures. Once you’ve generated the animation it’s easy to import it into a basic video-editing program to make cuts, add sound effects and a soundtrack and then burn it to DVD.

And I’ve no doubt that we’ll have the guitar and keyboard plugged into the Powerbook to create some more tracks with Garageband. Earlier this year Max began using pre-installed loops to build up a beat, but now he’s discovered how to get his own keyboard samples into the library and work with them.

Finally, I’ve bought a copy of ‘Game Programming for Teens’, which comes complete with a copy of Blitz Basic, and I plan to teach Max how to write his own programs before the holidays are over. He’s nearly 13, and although I’m not one of the programming diehards who believes that every sentient being on the planet should know how to write their own code, I do think it’s a useful skill and one he’ll find worth having. Since Lili’s out of the house, she’ll have to learn another time.

All in all, it’s going to be a pretty digital summer, if we add in the digital camera and the Lego Mindstorms kit.

I’ve argued before that despite the massive shifts in the technological basis of modern society our daily lives have remained remarkably unaffected, but it seems that the changes are starting to show.

A big part of the difference comes from connectivity and the ease with which we can get in touch both with each other and with network-based resources.

Both kids have mobile phones, and as a result they get more freedom to wander than I would otherwise feel happy with. The videos and music we make will be emailed to friends and family, or posted onto the Web for them to download. And of course there will be a constant stream of holiday photos online, replacing photo albums just as text messages have replaced postcards for many of us.

At the moment I’m aware of the many digital devices that we’re using, but over the next few years digital data, processing power and connectivity will join water and electricity among the givens of the western industrial world: we simply won’t see them anymore.

So perhaps we’ll only actually notice these new technologies for a very brief period of time, as they make the transition from innovative to commonplace.

After all, if you go into a café you still tend to notice how many people are using laptops but don’t see the mobile phones any more, and I barely take any notice if someone is tapping on the screen of a PDA. It won’t be long before the devices we use in everyday life, the ones that really shape our social interactions or determine our business effectiveness, start to vanish from sight.

Yet even if we don’t see the toys any more we’ll be exploiting their capabilities, and the results will be widespread and perhaps unexpected.

For example it seems very unlikely to me that Lili, now aged 14, will ever buy a television. By the time she leaves home TV will be available over her Internet connection and will be displayed on whatever screen happens to be most convenient, either in a window or as a full-screen video.

Television will be a screen mode, and she will neither need nor want specialised hardware for receiving or displaying it.

This should worry the TV manufacturers. It should also worry the BBC, since the UK population which accepts a license fee for its ownership of a television set is not going to accept a tax on streaming video feeds.

It would be easy to talk about ‘tipping points’ and ‘emergent behaviours’ at this point, but that sort of technobabble is just a way of dressing up straightforward observations as deep insights, usually in support of a book deal.

What is really going on is far simpler, and far more frightening for those of my age who can remenber the launch of CDs, the birth of the Internet and our first call on a mobile phone. The next generation is growing up into a world where the inventions that surprised and excited us are simply part of the given, and they are well on their way to using them in cool ways that never occurred to us.

I just hope that they’ll remember to show us how to use the new stuff they come up with.

Bill Thompson - andfinally.com
[Thompson is a UK-based writer and broadcaster.]

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This entry was posted on Saturday, August 13th, 2005 at 4:31 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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