Davos: The Old and New; Eric Schmidt and Emma Watson

Despite the fact that most news headlines say "The Internet will Disappear" according to Eric Schmidt, Google's executive chairman was in fact elaborating on the fact that the internet will dramatically change from its current primitive state to becoming something of a technologically advanced seamless part of our lives Chris Matyszczyk CNet article here

http://i.huffpost.com/gen/2525914/thumbs/o-ERIC-SCHMIDT-570.jpg?5

Mashable explains that Eric Schmidt didn't predict the end of the internet, he instead said that “there will be so many IP addresses, so many devices, sensors, things that you are wearing, things that you are interacting with that you won’t even sense it". These statements were made by Google's Eric Schmidt on a panel titled "The Future of the Digital Economy." at the World Economic Forum at Davos. He also said: "It will be part of your presence all the time. Imagine you walk into a room, and the room is dynamic. And with your permission and all of that, you are interacting with the things going on in the room. A highly personalized, highly interactive and very, very interesting world emerges."

In "The Business Insider" Jim Edwards tells us that, according to Schmidt, Google's dominance as one of the main companies on the world wide web may also have to give way to new platforms, like the smaller tech businesses for apps in the mobile world. "On the question  of dominance, you now see so many strong tech platforms coming through and you're seeing a reordering, and a future reordering, of the leaders because of the rise of the app on the smartphone."

It seems the virtual world and the real world will be evolving into the one world of the future.

In the meantime, Emma Watson also made an appearance at Davos by addressing the leaders and continuing her "HeforShe" campaign for women's rights and gender equality. She was named Feminist Celebrity of 2014. For more details and photos see this Daily Mail article
 http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-2923317/This-bring-end-inequalities-girls-women-face-globally-Emma-Watson-addresses-leaders-World-Economic-Forum-new-Women-campaign.html

From the Clouds to the Earth

This is a short summary of a fascinating article on WIRED by Balaji Srinivasan http://www.wired.com/opinion/2013/11/software-is-reorganizing-the-world-and-cloud-formations-could-lead-to-physical-nations/ which discusses the already present and the possible future where virtual communities existing and coming into existence in the clouds are taking physical shape on the Earth in real-life communities, groups and will perhaps even form new nations. "Software *is* reorganizing the world."

I find it important to touch upon this subject now as, I believe, we will sooner than we think be quite caught by surprise by new communities and a new world surrounding us and springing forth, as it would seem, from nowhere.

As our generation is, unfortunately, getting poorer, Srinivasan tells us that we are taking our minds to the clouds and are sort of "emigrating" there to seek work opportunities, like-minded individuals and, being of a social nature, communities to which we may belong. We may not have the slightest clue as to who our neighbour is but we may know someone as far as thousands of kilometres away like the backs of our own hands. Srinivasan calls this process, which "starts out internationally distributed and ends up physically concentrated" the "reverse diaspora". But the definitive tangible form of this new frontier is, as of yet, unknown to us.

For the present, Stanford, MIT, and others present us available quantitative studies with "cloud cartographies" that, instead of "mapping nation states" map the "states of our minds" by using the newer metric "geodesic distance" instead of just using the physical measuring unit "geographical distance". The former shows us the "number of degrees of separation between two nodes in a social network". I suppose these will be able to predict where and how the new geographical communities will take shape.

Reading the full article is worth the time. I certainly have much to learn and to find in the online world and I would not be surprised if my virtual explorations took me to places I have never even dreamt of. So we don't get left out of this brave new world let us, with caution of course, venture to connect online.