While we spend days, weeks and months molding and shaping the business strategy of our clients to fit the brave new digital world, we rarely stop to gaze at the starry sky of the digital medium itself. It’s easy to dismiss the universe when change is happening quickly and we are too consumed by the immediate.
The Web is less than 5,000 days old according Kevin Kelly, the founding executive editor of Wired magazine. It’s been here so long that a lot of us can’t remember ever plugging in a modem. In fact, many of us never used a computer without the Internet. Speaking at the TED Conference in December last year, Kelly compares the Web to the new alphabet, a technology that is inconceivable not to touch or be touched by in the next 5,000 days.
Some interesting and certainly debatable takeaways from this thought-provoking video on where we are headed in the near future:
New laws of media:
- Copy has no value
- Value is in the uncopyable
- Media wants to be liquid
- Network effects rule
- Attention is the currency
New codependent Web:
- Smarter
- More personalized
- More ubiquitous
Kevin Kelly’s action takeaways:
- There is only One machine
- The Web is its operating system
- All screens look into the One
- No bits will live outside the Web
- To share is to gain
- Let the One read it
- The One is us
Read more on Kevin Kelly’s blog