Within the second part of my series on ideas regarding the future of digital media, i will try to take a deeper look on the hardware side of all things connected. In the first part, i have defined the internet as a digital universal transmission platform, which Kevin Kelly views as the ultimate machine mankind has ever built. Being connected to the ’net is imperative already and the pressure to be always on will become even stronger. But with what kind of device and for what purpose are we gonna be connected? Classifying Devices For the moment, four specific always connected device classes are to be defined: Phones Tablets Laptops Desktops These four classes can be parallelized in parts by a categorization provided in this article by Mark Segal on O’Reilly Radar. He defines devices by their portability as Wearables Pocketables Bagables Portables Wearables are smaller than phones – at least for the moment – and desktops no longer portable. Desktops could be considered as moveable. The less portable a device gets, less people will own one of these devices, as usage scenarios of Portables or Non-Portables will become more and more specialized. According to Gartner, 1.2 billion mobile phones were sold in 2009. Compared to the 306 million computers (laptops and desktops combined), portability has already won by far over functionality, but the latter is moving fast into the former. Individualization Additional individualization of entertainment will be driven by devices like tablets. Everyone can view the content she or he …
Musings on the Future of Digital Media – Internet or Establishing connections
It’s been quite a while now since Richie Pettauer announced the World Blogging Forum 2010 in Vienna, Austria and provided the conference topic: “The Future of Digital Media”. Since this topic gives a multitude of opportunities to express my own thoughts on how digital media will develop or evolve in the near future, i want to do just that within this three part series of posts. The second part will cover my thoughts on the development of hardware to access the net, the third part will discuss the topics of social media and blogging. As this article is to be seen in conjunction with the World Blogging Forum, i’ll use English as the lingua franca for this post, as English will be the main communication language for all participants at the WBF or in the adjacent online discussions. And since this is the case, please accept my apologies, my English got a bit rusty lately. I have disabled comments for all three posts. For discussion of all three articles, please head over to wbf2010.at. I have reopened comments on all the articles again, since WBF2010 has come and gone and centralized discussion is no longer of utmost importance. Please always read “In my humble opinion” in front of every sentence. What is to be defined as digital media? To talk about digital media is to talk about media in general. Mass media is in the process of being broadcasted digitally only, the internet never new a state other than that …