Where do we go from here?

The advancement of technology always finds a way to surprise us. When I was young, we figured by the year 2000 we'd all be flying around in jet cars with our robot buddies at our side. But no one predicted the Internet and the ways it's being used today. Or the iPhone or GPS Navigation.

It's the nature of technological advancements that we don't often see the most important ones coming. In the 1800s people were trying to design better horse-drawn wagons and trains. Very few saw the automobile coming. In 1977, Ken Olson the Founder of Digital Equipment Company said "There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home." Oops.

It's difficult to look forward and predict where tomorrow's technology will take us. Do we need more than 40,000 songs on iPod? Where can TV go from here considering the human eye can't discern more than 1080 DPI? How many radio stations can we listen to? What will Web 3.0 look like? And perhaps more importantly, what current technology that we take for granted will soon become the next horse-drawn wagon?

"Open the pod bay door, Google."

Here's an interesting article that asks the question, "Is the Internet changing the way our brains work?"

The argument is that the web has rewired our brains and made us all a little ADD. I don't think it's true at all because...hey look at this!"

The digital shoe box

Many of us have a shoe box somewhere full of old photos, yellowing newspaper clippings, and postcards. Maybe letters from back when people used to write letters. Maybe a concert ticket stub or a diary.

These items serve as a bookmark in the passing of our lives. They mark a time and a place that we can revisit later. They help us remember how things were at the time, how everyone looked back then, what we thinking and how big our hair was.

You have to wonder how nostalgia will be affected by the digital age. Our "shoe box" is now vast, but that can mean disorganized. Our old e-mails might be saved as text files on a hard drive or archived in a folder. Our vast quantities of digital photos no longer yellow with age, but they are on Flickr and Webshots and on our hard drives or our cell phones. Great conversations in email or instant messenger, that may have been saved years ago had they been in written letters, are often lost forever.

It's worth thinking about... What you should save these days to mark the time? And how and where should you save it?

Here's a blog post with some tips to get started organizing your digital memories.

Fast Times

We should have plenty of leisure time, right? After all we have instant coffee, microwave cooking, drive through restaurants. We have Wikipedia instead of a trip to the library. We have online shopping instead of a trip to the mall. Speed dating, cell phones and Tivo. We have all of these time-saving devices and yet our lives seem busier than ever with no time to get everything done.

In this era of 8-Minute Abs and online banking, how can this be?

I point you to two good reads on the topic. Vince Poscente's book The Age of Speed. And yesterday USA Today had this article on our speeded up lives.

I would read them but I'm just too busy.

Follow-up on digital footprints

I wrote a couple weeks ago about our online tracks - the posts, pictures, quotes and mentions about a person that can be found through search engines and can influence everything from dating to employment.

Now the folks at the Pew Internet Center have released a report looking at this same issue. Here are some of the findings:

Internet users are becoming more aware of their digital footprint; 47% have searched for information about themselves online, up from just 22% five years ago. However, few monitor their online presence with great regularity. Just 3% of self-searchers report that they make a regular habit of it and 74% have checked up on their digital footprints only once or twice.

In addition to providing national telephone survey data, the full report (PDF) also includes quotes from online survey respondents as well as experts in the fields of privacy, online identity management and search.

Is pop culture dead?

A woman I work with was telling me the other day that she grew up in Idaho - near the Snake River. As a person who grew up in the 70s and 80s, I immediately thought of Evel Knieval and his attempted jump of the Snake River Canyon. I think it is an event that anyone who grew up in that era would remember. Sadly, Mr. Knievel passed away last week.

But this got me thinking. Do kids today have similar common pop-culture experiences? Or are they spread so thin across TV channels, radio, iPods, Wiis, and websites that they all are experiencing life differently? What will they "collectively remember" 20 years from now?

It used to be that, when our entertainment options were more limited, people all over the world were watching and worshipping the same cultural icons - Charlie Chaplin, Humphrey Bogart, Marilyn Monroe. Then television and radio gave us more choices and we started to go our separate ways.

Today, with more entertainment choices than ever before, are any of us watching and experiencing the same thing? We all want more options and more choices regarding how to spend our leisure time. So we've obvisously gained freedom and choice in this technological age. But part of me wonders if we've lost something too.

Digital footprints

Have you done it yet? Have you Googled yourself?

If you have, you're probably not alone. Potential employers. Your dates. Business competitors. They are all using Google and other search tools to research you.

Message board posts, blogs, photos, old jobs, MySpace pages, LinkedIn profiles - all kinds of information, some not even posted by you, can come up in searches and provide specific information (or misinformation) about you.

Employers are "Googling" potential employees for a possible checkered past. Executive job and networking firm ExecuNet found that 35 percent of executive recruiters have chosen not to hire applicants because of information found online, up from 26 percent in 2005.

College recruiters are even taking a peek in Facebook to see what they can find.

Any time you meet someone new, depending on the uniqueness of their name, you can often Google them and find out where they work or where they went to school, organizations they may belong to or even photographs of them on vacation.

So think twice before posting those racy photos or that controversial opinion. The Internet is not an anonymous playground. We all need to be cognizant of the digital tracks we leave behind and protect our online reputations.