Roller Coaster of the Future… Technically Speaking.
By Nupur Basu
An interesting article-reading attempted by my classmates and I in our rhetoric class turned into a prolonged thought process that I quite wasn’t expecting. How would you feel if someone were to ask you to summarize into one page your theory of how the world will merge, or has already started to merge, into the open arms of the never-ending patchwork of technical devices? Exhausted, I know. Thank-god it was single-spaced! Nevertheless, it made me think about what is coming for us in the near future and I felt that funny feeling in my tummy… you know, the feeling you get in your stomach right before the first deep plunge of a roller coaster ride? Well, think of the Infosphere as the roller coaster, and soon enough you’ll know what I mean.
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The author of “Entering the Infosphere”, Michael Vlahos, describes the Infosphere as a new cyberspace place that must be adapted by us because our future continues to change into a more technologically advanced place. This is why migration to the Infosphere is continuously necessary to adapt to new situations coming toward us, migration being a feat that humans have been achieving throughout history. Vlahos describes the Infosphere as a “fusion of all the world’s communication networks, databases and sources of information into a vast, intertwined and heterogeneous tapestry of electronic interchange” (498). He also explains that this new place has the ability to gather many different types of people on the internet into the same place, binding lots of knowledge together.
The reason that the Infosphere is such a compelling place is because “it gives people the ability to meet and access information anywhere, all the time” (Vlahos 498). This new global marketplace can be thought of not only as a marketplace, but a city, since it has the spirit of a city and has the “venue of bringing people together” just like a city does (Vlahos 501). Vlahos explains the evolution of the word ‘place’ from the hearth of a home, to the walls of a town, and finally to the networks of a city. He then compares and predicts the evolution of the Infosphere as something that is similar to what we define as a place. This place will have knowledge workers who will help “take many traditional retail services, from sales to marketing to customer support, into the Infosphere” (Vlahos 521). Many government services would be provided more effectively through the social assistance provided by the knowledge workers. The Infosphere would also help people search and find information in a whole new level. By creating fluid searches, people “would have the opportunity to see better the whole of human thought in a single knowledge niche” (Vlahos 507).
Many people around the world are already involved in the internet through games and other social networking sites. Vlahos explains the gaming experiences of millions of online gamers around the world and describes that the “ease with which the players inhabit cyberspace” is one of the things that really stands out (511). However, humans fear “losing the things that define us, the things we have lived for and the things that make life meaningful” (Vlahos 513). This fear of loss, of living in a unfamiliar place, is often a barrier and resistance to the adaptation of the new world of Infosphere. People are often afraid of losing the bond to the things that define them and their identity. Americans see the Infosphere as something that can only be worse than the regular declining spirit of the life in the United States. Vlahos explains that “Americans have identified the downside of progress… they earn more money, they live longer, but life itself is somehow inestimably poorer” (515). However, the good news of any new place only comes after the bad. Migrating to the Infosphere will have its problems, as any new place does before people indulge and make it their home. Vlahos explains that people will never be able to “witness the possibilities of a new world without shirking the truth about the hard times and struggle to come” (516). The infosphere, according to Vlahos, is something that is bound to come to us in the near future. What we make of it depends on our readiness to accept and migrate to it, taking with us our knowledge of the old world and putting forth our efforts to make our new dreams a reality.
