| Chapter 1: | The Evolution of Mobile Internet Communications |
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Fernando Barrio, senior lecturer in business law at London Metropolitan University, went so far as to say Olpc may slow digital inclusion. “As soon as the content providers and governments start to produce phone-friendly pages, the phone will be the tool that will lead to an explosion in the number of Internet users and activities carried out by [the] Internet,” he wrote. “Initiatives like One Laptop Per Child, while extending the market of the current content providers without major investment from their part, have as a main result the delay in bridging the digital divide through the use of mobile phones.”
Some Say 2020 Will Offer a New Paradigm
Some survey participants said this scenario as written is shortsighted, and we will have moved into a different communications environment. “A new technology will blow all of this away,” wrote one anonymous respondent, and another wrote, “Another ‘killer app’ will emerge before 2020 that will change everything; communication will not achieve stability in the 21st century.”
Josh Quittner, executive editor of Fortune magazine and long-time technology journalist and editor, wrote, “The notion of a ‘mobile telephone’ in 2020 is quaint. Telephones in 2020 will be archaic, relics of a bygone era—like transistor radios are today. Telephony, which will be entirely Ip based by then, will be a standard communications chip on many devices. We’ll probably carry some kind of screen-based reading device that will perform this function, though I assume when we want to communicate verbally, we’ll do so through a tiny, earplug-based device.”
Several anonymous respondents wrote that we need to be inclusive of all ties, human and nonhuman, when we look to the future of connection. One wrote, “In 2020 the network will be a network of things (sensors, etc.), and people will interface with information from the network of things in many ways—including personal devices which may or may not look like cell phones.” Another wrote, “Just because a cell phone has the computing power of a PC does not make it a usable PC. A more believable scenario is that a person's phone is one of the