Let’s take a little trip back in time, say 20 years (don’t worry if you either can’t remember or weren’t born yet, I’ll take care of the actual details). You step out of the DeLorean (and if you don’t get that reference then I’ll definitely have to do all the work here) on to the footpath of your local shopping strip.
There’s not a lot of appreciable difference in the world you’re looking at. Sure, the cars and buses are boxier than they are today, there’s maybe a few different shops – less chain stores, more independent businesses – and there’s a billboard at the end of the street happily exhorting you to grab a pack of Winfiield Red 25′s, but otherwise things are fairly much the same. You can still walk in to the milk bar and order a potato cake with sauce or grab a copy of the paper.
My point here is that in the last 20 years the surface details of our everyday lives haven’t seemed to changed all that much. In fact, you could say the same about the last 50 years. We still eat, drink, go to work, watch the telly, sleep, go to the toilet, hang out with our mates and fall in love.
But the comparison with 20 years ago is relevant because it was a little more than 20 years ago that the World Wide Web (WWW) became a reality and started a process that has changed our lives irrevocably. Now, this piece is not going to be a history of the WWW or the Internet, so if you don’t know your facts this might be a good opportunity to go and do a bit of wiki-diving.
Right, done? Know about Sir Berners-Lee and his buddies at CERN? Good.
What they did in giving us the WWW is enable the development and evolution of new types of interpersonal and global communication and interaction that we will not live to see the natural end point of. It will be an ongoing process for ours, our children’s and their children’s lifetimes, and likely much longer. It’s kind of a big deal.
But portentous statements about the rest of history aside, there’s been a lot that’s happened in just the last two decades. Email, Facebook, Skype, YouTube, Blogging, online gaming, Twitter and all that damn pornography have changed the way we live, just for starters.
One thing that hasn’t changed though is that we still, for the most part, store our personal data and software on personal hardware. There’s something reassuring about knowing that all of your files, photos, movies and assorted digital flotsam are stored neatly (or not) on drives that exist right there in your own home and workplace. Sure, if the drive fails for whatever reason it can get a bit hairy, but that’s what backups are for. What is important is that all that personal info is, in a certain capacity, physically present in your personal space and thus access to it is controlled by you personally.
This is changing however, and cloud computing is set to be the one of the big digital growth areas over the next few years. If you’re reading this you’re probably sufficiently digi-literate to know what I mean when I refer to cloud computing, but if not this is another great learning opportunity, so don that wetsuit for a bit more wiki-diving (and I’ll grab a cup of tea).
Excellent, so:
Cloud computing is going to free us up from having to have personal storage capacity, and allow us to run a variety of software applications that will no longer have to be powered by our personal devices. The natural expectation is that this will lead to the further ascent of tablet-style devices over heavier, more hardware intensive devices like laptops and desktop pc’s; the emphasis will be on interface and network access rather than software-powering grunt. In essence, all we will need is the ability to connect and interact; the rest will be available to us, up there in the cloud.
Put like that, it sounds great. Convenient and streamlined.
But as I touched on earlier, there’s a certain psychological comfort that comes with having direct control of your storage and software that the cloud doesn’t give, despite the fact that your logical mind knows that the security and integrity of the data in the cloud is probably a lot greater than that contained in the old 500GB external drive that you bought cheaply at Officeworks a few years ago, and which is now sitting underneath a pile of papers and a half-empty coffee cup in the corner of your desk.
Whilst part of this sense of comfort lies in the exertion of personal control, another part of it lies in an inherent distrust of far away people and far away hardware doing far away things with your personal data. It is hard for our locally-raised minds to entrust our digital secrets in a non-local way.
That we already do this in a multitude of ways (every time we log in to Facebook for example) is irrelevant; it’s the commitment to allowing our data to exist in the ether that is the internet which is scary because it implies an accessibility to external prying which doesn’t exist when your 500GB external drive is unplugged from your laptop.
But this reticence will disappear, with time, and the driving factor that will lead this shift is cost. As the cost of cloud storage and software comes down, so will its uptake increase. Currently it is by no means prohibitive, and it will only continue to head south, as is the case with all things technological (want to buy 256MB of RAM? Nor do I, but if I did I might just be able to scrape together the 20c it would probably cost these days – if I could find somewhere that was selling memory in unusably small chunks).
A few years ago iPhones were the new kid on the block, iPods a few years before that; go back earlier to laptops, mobile phones and compact disc players and you start to see a pattern. Technologies develop, get picked up by the early adopters, gain a foothold in the wider market (at about the same time as they come down in price, strangely enough) and then all of a sudden are indispensable parts of the everyday landscape of our technological lives.
So it will be with the cloud. It’s already begun, and before you know it we will be happily giving over greater and greater chunks of our personal data to the big server in the sky, in return for the freedom to log in and continue working wherever and whenever we choose.
It’s inevitable and irresistible, and for the most part it is the logical next step in mass technology. It will certainly make life simpler and easier, for the most part, once its potential is actualised.
I just hope we’re not building another little piece of Skynet (look it up), and dooming u all to a future living underground and fighting killer robots. Monday already looks grim as it is.