Chapter 13: The Post-Information Age

In the post-information age, we often have an audience the size of one. Everything is made to order, and information is extremely personalized … In being digital I am me, not a statistical subset … Thinking of the post-information age as infinitesimal demographics or ultra-focused narrowcasting is about as personalized as Burger King’s “Have It Your Way.” True personalization is now upon us. It’s not just a matter of selecting relish over mustard once. The post-information age is about acquaintance over time: machines’ understanding individuals … The post-information age will remove the limitations of geography. Digital living will include less and less dependence upon being in a specific place at a specific time, and the transmission of place itself will start to become possible.

Chapter 7: Where People and Bits Meet

My dream for the interface is that computers will be more like people. This idea is vulnerable to criticism for being too romantic, vague, or unrealizable. If anything, I would criticize it for shooting too low … What we today call “agent-based interfaces” will emerge as the dominant means by which computers and people talk with one another. There will be specific points in space and time where bits get converted into atoms and the reverse. Whether that is the transmission of a liquid crystal or the reverberation of a speech generator, the interface will need size, shape, color, tone of voice, and all the other sensory paraphernalia.

Chapter 7: Where People and Bits Meet

A computer should know the difference between “Kissinger” and “kissing her,” not because it can find the small acoustic difference, but because it can understand the meaning. That’s good interface design. The burden of interaction today has been placed totally on the shoulders of the human party. Something as banal as printing a computer file can be a debilitating exercise that resembles voodoo more than respectable human behavior. As a result, many adults are turned off and claim to be hopelessly computer illiterate. This will change.