Topic: Getting

Computing corduroy, memory muslin, and solar silk might be the literal fabric of tomorrow’s digital dress. Instead of carrying your laptop, wear it … The important point is to recognize that the future of digital devices can include some very different shapes and sized from those that might naturally leap to mind … Computer retailing of equipment and supplies may not be limited to Radio Shack and Staples, but include the like of Saks and stores that sell produces from Nike, Levi’s, and Banana Republic. In the further future, computer displays may be sold by the gallon and painted on, CD-ROMs may be edible, and parallel processors may be applied like suntan lotion. Alternately, we might be living in our computers.

When a delivery system that looks more like the Internet is used in the general world of entertainment, the planet becomes a single media machine … In the next few decades, bits that describe other bits, tables of contents, indexes, and summaries will proliferate in digital broadcasting … The result will be a bit stream with so much header information that you computer really can help you deal with the massive amounts of content … The bits about the bits change broadcasting totally. They give you a handle by which to grab what interests you and provide the network with a means to ship them into any nook or cranny that wants them. The networks will finally learn what networking is about.

With the possible exception of sports and elections, technology suggests that TV and radio of the future will be delivered asynchronously … On-demand information will dominate digital life. We will ask explicitly and implicitly for what we want, when we want it. This is require a radical rethinking of advertiser-supported programing.