I’m fascinated by the idea of technologies that outstrip a generation’s capacity to integrate them. We all know of gadgets that confounded our parents and grandparents, but what’s really interesting are the social shifts that result. My favorite recent example was coordinating a dinner meeting with a friend who’s in her eighties; her idea of planning included coming up with several plans B and C in case anyone was running late, the weather was bad, etc.

I pointed out, as politely as I know how, “We all have cell phones, so if anything comes up, we can coordinate then?” Of course she knew that, but cell phones came along too late to break a lifetime of habits and etiquette based on landlines.

So I’ve been on the lookout for the technologies that will confound my generation, the one that grew up with the first home computers and generally looked upon their pre-digital parents as Neanderthals. So far, I haven’t seen them; there are certainly technologies that are more popular among the younger crowd, but I haven’t heard of one yet that so fundamentally changes the landscape that we should expect to be left behind.

That said, these are my current candidates:

1. Ubiquitous mobile location. Projects like Google Latitude, and the general trend to put GPS chips into anything larger than a grain of rice, herald a future where every mobile object, living or inanimate, can have its location known. This shift is equivalent to the day Wikipedia passed its tipping point as a generally reliable source of universal trivia; how many things do you casually look up, which you would have previously ignored in the days before Wikipedia and Google existed to instantly satisfy your curiosity?

My personal examples: the last four things I looked up in Wikipedia were the minor DC comic book character Holly Robinson; the history of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac; the corporate ownership of PayPal; and the television production history of my fraternity brother Ron Moore. How many of these would I have researched if the friction involved, say, going to a library or picking up a phone? Precisely zero.

So I think the friction-free future of locating mobile objects (i.e., people) is going to be substantively different than our present. During the transition time between now and then, I expect all sorts of privacy nightmares while our legal and social systems scramble to catch up–those were built by people who weren’t used to being a data point in the global positioning wiki. But the generation that grows up with it will disregard physical location even more than we do, with our fancy “email and telecommuting” schemes; as cell phones killed the temporal aspect of advance planning, I expect this technology to kill the spatial aspect of it. Why plan when you can flash mob?

2. In the future, you will be a porn star for 15 minutes. Technology already breaks us up into two distinct generations: people who started getting naked with other people when cameras used film, and people who did so after cameras went digital. I suspect those two groups already have very different photographic records of their relationship history. But God help the first generation of kids who became sexually active when digital cameras met Internet upload.

Here in the early 21st century, cameras are widespread and easy to hide, so there are any number of ways you can unwittingly star in an online video, starting with trusting the wrong partner. I’m actually rather surprised that this isn’t already extremely common. My guess is that it is, but it’s just not yet particularly well-known or centralized… and it will be the next Internet scandal when some enterprising offshore website becomes the YouTube of semiconsented amateur porn, starring primarily American and European teens and 20somethings.

(Yes, I know that such amateur porn sites exist, but AFAIK there’s no centralized web site that allows someone to Google for whether they, or their friends and enemies, have been included. This seems like such an obvious extension of current technology and human vituperative nature that I expect it’s only a matter of time.)

The effects seem obvious to me: a few years of self-enforced sexual prudishness by people who think their lives will be ruined if they’re displayed online in flagrante, followed by a new normalcy when having been in an Internet porn video carries the same opprobrium that we feel when we think about how much we used to drink in college. (I.e., not much at all.) You’ll be held responsible for what you personally choose to post to your social networking sites, in much the same way that it’s unwise to post drunken bashes on LinkedIn portfolios today. But since none of us can control what other people post about us (and since most of us, in retrospect, have less than perfect track records selecting our intimate partners), those taboos will fade away.

Unsubstantiated corollary: since it seems to me that it is much more common that males will piggishly circulate revealing photos of their female sexual conquests than the reverse, I wonder if this might be the first time in history when naked pictures of women will be less damaging to their reputations than naked pictures of men? If so, it’s about damn time.

3. Forever friends. A new idea which I’m still developing, but which was inspired by a veritable tidal wave of people from my past showing up on Facebook. I think I’m in touch with around 100 people with whom I hadn’t talked in a decade or two; for some of these people, the question is literally, “so, what have you been up to since your bar mitzvah?”

I think there are some fascinating corollary questions that arise from this. For example, I’m generally amazed how large my network is; there were a lot of people, places, and events that faded until something else in the network jogs that memory. And as large as this network seems, it’s still only a fraction of my “Platonic network ideal”; I can think of several organizations I joined, and hundreds of dimly-remembered people, which aren’t yet represented in my online social network.

There are indications that Facebook, LinkedIn, and Googling your ex-girlfriends, as amusing as these can be, run contrary to long-standing human traits. There are biological theories that there are evolutionary constraints to the number of people we can have in our metaphorical tribes; I’ve heard the number 150 being the average upper limit of close friends you can have. Meanwhile, sociological theory states that reinvention is one of the cornerstones of the American mythos and culture; we each have a manifest destiny to blow off our friends, our family, and our existing self-image, and metaphorically go West to dig for gold. Or at least, we did.

So here at the dawn of the social networking age, I can tell you that an old friend from high school, whom I haven’t seen since 1988 or so, suffered from RSI on Sunday. Which is weirder: the idea that people from our past are no longer just memories? Or the certainty that people we meet today, no matter what age we are, run a high likelihood of being caught up in these online avatar nets, and quite likely will become a permanent fixture in our networks?

What does it mean to obsolesce the meaning of the phrase, “people from our past”? How important is it to be able to leave people behind, deliberately or otherwise? I’ve spent a fair amount of my activist life advocating for consciously living in a global community of six billion people, but that doesn’t mean I have any idea how, when we’re wired for numbers closer to six hundred.

Call this a social change for everyone, but I’d expect that the generation that is born into it is going to come up with radical solutions for understanding and solving it.

4. Personal soundscapes and holography. Another new idea, introduced to me by Woody Norris’ TEDTalk about his invention of a directional sound speaker. Essentially, he can point his speaker at a crowded audience, and only the people at the aural focal point of the speaker will hear the sound coming out of it; everyone else hears nothing. It seems very similar to the parabolic directional sound mirrors at the Franklin Institute, where you can speak into a metal ring and be heard on the other side of the room.

Except that Norris’ invention is industrial, handheld, and can be incorporated into anything that currently produces electronic sound, such as iPods, cell phones, megaphones, and military sonic weaponry.

The military just deployed some of these to Iraq, where you can put fake troop movements a quarter-mile away on a hillside. Or you can whisper in the ear of a supposed terrorist, some biblical verse. We put it on a turret, with a camera, so that when they shoot at you, you’re over there [points left] and it’s there [points right].

It seems to me that this technology is transformational in the same way that iPods and Walkmen were; many people think that the “bowling alone” culture is caused or correlated with our ability to live in our own virtual worlds even when we’re among a crowd. But at least headphones provide a visual cue that we’re off in our own world; invisible directed sound waves are less obvious.

This is something I’ve already been thinking about since silent electric cars started hitting the streets. I’m a pedestrian who, after years of exposure to internal combustion engines, has become acclimated to letting my ears do the “looking both ways” for me some of the time. It seems the more Priuses and Teslas that hit the street, the more this trait will become less common, for strictly Darwinian reasons.

I’m not sure what it will mean when the people around me may be seeing or hearing completely different things than I am, without any of us hallucinating. But I’m pretty sure that the younger you are, the more easily you’ll be able to deal with it.

Everyone once in a while I come up with a new categorization tree for this place, on the theory that it makes sense to give my readers a chance to filter out some of my posts and focus on what interests them. In the twelve years since I started this blog, I haven’t met anyone who actually uses these categories, but it pleases me anyway.

I just made some minor changes to the catalog tree here, which you can ignore if you’re happy skimming the sum total of my output. Unfortunately, I haven’t yet figured out how to turn these categories into separate RSS feeds, which I assume is a WordPress feature; if anyone wants it and knows what plugin turns that on, say so. Here’s my current taxonomy:

Conspiracy Theories: essay length and/or reasonably thought-out posts. I’m naming this after the overall title of the blog, but it could just as easily be called, “Jeff’s Self-Diagnosed Important Thinking.” Your mileage may vary.

Illuminatus: short blurbs and links to other web and mass media. Several incarnations of jeffporten.com ago, I had these broken out as a separate blog, but it still seems like that’s too much navel-gazing.

Mac Guru: technical diatribes about various Mac issues. I might add an Internet Guru category in the future, or I might rename this as a general catch-all for when I geek out about gadgets or the Internet.

Publications and Software: it’s rare, but when I publish words or bits, I generally want to highlight them here, and I’ll continue doing so.

I have a half-dozen other, older categories which I don’t use any more; those are now grouped under “Arcanum” in the right sidebar for anyone who’s interested. Chances are that if I revive an old category, I’ll promote it back out of this historical dustbin.

As I said, I strongly suspect that maybe two people on the planet other than me might care about this; if you do, and you have any input on making my site a more interesting way to procrastinate, feel free to let me know.