An Intelligent Environment

By Harry van Vliet on 22 October 2008

Anyone who thinks that the dust will soon be settling and the current turbulence in the media landscape will subside to a pleasant summer breeze has got it seriously wrong. Or at least if we should believe the gist of the many reflections on the future of the media in particular and the information society in general. We can look forward to broadly accessible products and services such as interactive television, 3D video conferencing, a semantic web, speech recognition in interfaces and virtual worlds, to cite just a few examples. This leads to terms such as paradigm change and revolution being used both appropriately and inappropriately. But mostly inappropriately, if truth be told. That is because all these innovations have a history, however short it may be ? and in many cases a longer one than many realise. Interactive television, for instance, has a history that goes back to the 19th century and it has already experienced several large-scale launches, such as in the 1970s in America. But they were all pretty unsuccessful. An awareness of this media history gives insights into conceptualization, economic feasibility and user reactions, and thus adds a realistic dimension to the current ?novelty?. And that is something that can help to put the regularly recurring hype about media developments into perspective.

What is the current tenor of the reflections on the future of media? To summarize these as briefly as possible: we will form part of an all encompassing, invisibly connected intelligence. Technical terms such as pervasive computing, ambient intelligence and ubiquitousness point to this ideas. The picture created here is of a digital ecosystem that surrounds us, knows who and where we are, what we are doing and what we want and feel, and that helps us without getting in our way. It is an ecosystem that is even more pervasive and invisible as the current electricity grid. It is an ecosystem that reflects natural ecosystems, so that a comparison between the workings of the Internet, social networks and our brains no longer exceeds the bounds of our imagination.

These ideas are also reflected in slogans such as ?the environment is the interface?, which expresses the ubiquity of computer processes and how they are merging with everyday objects; or in ?the Internet of things? which expresses the connectedness of people but also of objects. And of course we have the slogan ?anywhere, anytime, anything?. This indicates that location, time and information no longer constitute limiting conditions. This renders the use of application platforms agnostic and leads to such things as the ?three-screen phenomenon?: ?users consume media in a ?liquid? fashion, across television, computer and mobile device?. Actually one encounters minor variations in this ?Triple-A Principle?. Anything is sometimes replaced by ?anyhow?, putting a greater emphasis on the infrastructure and devices, while ?anything? puts more emphasis on the content. And sometimes the phrase is rendered as ?anywhere, anytime, anyplace?, although the ?anyplace? and ?anywhere? actually both refer to the same location value.