Our media exposure past present and future.

Up to quite recently one of the topics that we would talk about as regularly as the weather and football results would be the incredible developments in technology. In my relatively short lifetime we have gone from; using a typewriter and licking a stamp to Twitter and from getting up from the sofa to change the t.v. channel to streaming on-demand video from our phone to our 52" led t.v. or indeed watching HD cinema on our tablet.

When we were young

I remember raising my eyebrows and grunting, like only an 13 year old can, because my grandparents could not grasp the concept of recording one of three channels on their VHS video recorder. And now I am equally frustrated when my 11 yr old son asks for a youtube account and I have to google whether (and how) I can set one up safely.

What technology has done between, let's say, 1960 and now, media has done in just the last 10 years. I believe the first real milestone was the iPod. And when you wonder why it took so long for the walkman to be replaced you have to look at the progression of the data storage used and the road from analogue to digital. Once we decided that we wanted to carry music around with us again we started looking at what other digital media we could store on mobile devices. This hunger for data to be portable and easily accessible cumulated into the smartphone of today.

The smartphone however added another dimension, that of communication of course, but not only the communication between people in the traditional sense of the phone, more importantly the transfer of data between portable devices. This meant that we no longer have to synchronise our iPod or smartphone at home but we could refresh and get the latest information on the go, wherever we are.

From Kilobytes to Terabytes

As a matter of fact behind a lot of these examples you need to understand the revolution of data storage in general. It is the economy of scale behind data storage that is driving the current trends. For example; today a 2TB drive the size of a pocket book would cost you 66 euro.  In 1995 the same amount of data would have to be stored on 2 million 3.5" floppy disks at, let's say, 1 euro each.

While getting incredibly more successful in cramming huge amount of data in tiny devices we also revolutionised the amount of data we can send over the airwaves at a very low cost.

We feed our own hunger

It is the industries ability to both increase our data efficiency and our drive to do so at an ever decreasing cost that we as consumers continue to grow hungrier and greedier for more. Besides the major changes in the technology itself we have also seen a seismic shift in the sociological aspects of how we use it. Where we used to rely on established media conglomerates to provide us with the information we received we now increasingly create and shape that media ourselves. Indeed we do this as part of our everyday lives by 'Liking', commenting, Plus 1'ing and tweeting.

Let's slow down and look up

We now use consume, create and share media in more ways than we could ever have predicted only a short few years ago. On a daily basis we continually re-invent our uses of media and technology and this has happened at such an (alarming) pace that, as a global community, we have not had the time to think or review how we feel about this revolution of sorts. I nearly wish we could slow ourselves down for a while so that we can review the good and the bad and create a roadmap for the future which is not only safe for our children but makes this digital age a better place for all of us.

This video says it quite well...

What are your thoughts?...