Photo by Chrys Wu
Today at the MIT/Knight Civic Media Conference, I led an unconference session called “Our sci-fi future, news in 20 years”. Chrys Wu was kind enough to transcribe the concepts we discussed and help me annotate the list with related works of science fiction. Here’s what we wrote down:
Influencing factors are in italics, related books and films are in bold:
All your data in the cloud
sukey.org
Instantaneous backstory (I want the machine to know what I know and only give me what’s news to me)
Diamond Age
Worldview mapping
Conversion tracking (like in advertising) for information, track the impact of the reporting
Virtual connections w/ physical stimuli
Implants for sensory input
Accellerando
Altered Carbon
Heads up displays
Mona Lisa Overdrive
Real-time maps of information spread
Millions of little flying cameras, ubiquitous surveillance
Counting Heads
Infinite bandwidth, infinite processing
Machine translation/transcription (babelfish)
Hitchhikers Guide
Computer Q&A
More ambient experiences (like the radio, not the radio)
Air
Individually relevant metrics (Mint, Bedpost)
Gargoyles (permanently plugged in)
Snow Crash
The singularity (when human and machine become indistinguishable)
The Way of All Flesh
House of Suns
Info valet / personal information assistant
Counting Heads
The map of information consumption
Augmented Reality
Rainbows End
Pervasive advertising
Jennifer Government
Attention markets (trade your attention, certain people’s time worth more than others)
Crystal Express
Little Brother
Embodied news narratives
Authentication/authority systems
A Fire Upon the Deep
Other reads, unassociated with a particular topic listed above:
Maul, Tricia Sullivan
Summer Wars
Daemon
Ghost in the Shell
Iron Sunrise
Marq’ssnan Cycle
The Information
Photo by Waldo Jaquith
