For months, and maybe years, before the Y2K New Year’s celebration, companies and citizens alike were tensed and readying themselves. As the ball dropped, a collective breath was held, and then . . . nothing happened. There were no explosions, no power outages that engulfed the entire northern hemisphere; the utilities didn’t shut off, and the human race was not annihilated because of faulty coding attached to nuclear weapons. The best that anyone got was Grandma snoring on the couch and a few corporate execs pissed because they had spent countless hours and reams of cash hoping to “fix” the Y2K bug that had everyone terrified.

Maybe Grandma had it right. The relevance of Y2K—or rather, the fear that accompanied its arrival (and then passing)—had more to do with a superconscious dependence on the computers that we allow to run our lives and maintain our survival. Those who were less reliant on computers for their daily existence could sleep easily . . . but who, in today’s world, could snore soundly through another such episode?
The potential for crisis is always there, perhaps at the boundaries of our vision, whether it be a computer crash that angers patrons at a DMV in New Jersey (and if there is one state where you do not want angry drivers . . .) or a glitch on a system at your local hospital where you depend on the computer system to get patients’ health history—not to mention run the machines that keep them alive on a minute-to-minute basis.
Fine, computers are important—you win—Uncle! And perhaps you’re not worried about the DMV (you live in New York, where drivers are rational) and you’re not planning on checking into the hospital any time soon—but the very idea of trying to log onto Facebook to check out what Ted has replied to your “Your date is a skank” wall post, only to be turned away by a downed server? Now you know what real terror is.

We’ve all been there, whether it’s continually hitting the “refresh” button on our LiveJournal page or screaming at our screen when Vimeo takes too long to load. Seriously, don’t they know that you have a social life to take part in? What would happen if you had to go to bed tonight without checking in with your 1,393 friends?
The thought of our beloved Internet and computers not being there for us in the future is horrifying, true, but the thought of living for even a moment without our social networking sites? That’s death to the common man: how many others are having fun out there on the Net, without you, right now? Freelance graphic artist Nathan Lewis describes it as “The feeling is kind of akin to getting dumped by a chick. And then you get jealous thinking about all the people having fun with your ex.”
A joint Yahoo!/OMD (the media agency)-sponsored study innocuously entitled “Internet Deprivation Study” reminded us how dependent we are on being online to get our daily intake of socializing: nearly half of the respondents couldn’t go without the Net for more than two weeks, and the median time the subjects could go without being online was five days. This paragraph and the next two are brought to you by a very long, reasonably unwell-written press release by Yahoo! on September 22, 2004, about OMD and Yahoo! examining consumers’ media habits “and their emotional connection towards the Internet (whatever).” Its findings were in line to be discussed that day at the Harvard Club as part of Advertising Week, a yearly venture sponsored by Ad Agemagazine.
Again and again, respondents without access to the Internet complained of feeling “out of the loop”; irrespective of their demographic background, the subjects of Yahoo!/OMD’s study described feeling a sense “of loss, frustration and disconnectedness” when they had absolutely zip-o access. This not only demonstrates our reliance on computers for the, you know, life-threatening stuff, but once and for all demonstrates power the Internet has over our social lives.

Wenda Harris Millard, then Yahoo! Chief! Sales! Officer!, said: “Deep ethnographic research like this enables us to do much more than look at consumer trends, it allows a rare glimpse into the reasons consumers make the choices they do and how they are emotionally impacted. We can then help marketers apply these insights to reach their target audiences.”
We recognize that our target audience goes through withdrawal after a short period of time offline—in a way that they perhaps never felt about watching their television or attending a sports game in a highly sponsored arena. This recognition should serve as a conduit for establishing and maintaining a relationship with our target audience.
At the very least, we should know what makes our audience tick, and if six hours of Friendster will make them tear up like they are chopping onions, perhaps that emotional connection is something marketers should be aware of. If nothing else, a marketer’s job is to make buying and using its product/service an emotional venture—what can we learn (and take away) from how people engage one another on the Internet?
Today there are computers that are programmed to see and hear and react to other sensory stimuli. Nowadays, physical interaction with your computer is less than common. No more entering appointments into your calendar; you do it via a virtual assistant (call it BlackBerry), and information is checked for conflicts and entered in for you. Through all this syncing, it automatically notifies you that you have “something to do.” What it is is better management of life’s little annoyances like work and other frictions in life.
The phone is about to become a wand, thanks to a new acronym that you will be seeing everywhere. The near field communication system, or NFC, is a short-range wireless technology that enables communication between devices over a short distance (hand’s width). The technology is primarily aimed at usage in mobile phones, and it’s in test already, working by magnetic field induction and operating on an unlicensed radio-frequency band. You can use it for public transportation in several cities already—buses, baby.
Just like America (and so can you, Colbert!), there is no standard protocol in the world’s superpower for tech. In a funny, ironic, and just-deserts digression, the new entertainment format, the high-definition version of DVDs, also supported by no standard, was called a “yawn” (quotes mine) in a recent survey of consumers, who couldn’t be bothered deciding.
A patent licensing program for NFC is currently under development by Via Licensing Corp., part of Dolby Laboratories, which means unfortunately that there won’t be a standard, and it will be fought over by The New Cingular and an Asian mobile firm that owns the rights to a single “type” of NFC.
A firm with the too-subtle moniker Research Frontiers introduced SPD-Smart Glass Panes that really do eliminate the need, digitally, for blinds and drapes because, face it, the home has to be more easily managed and save you money rather than eat up the cash.
What’s amazing is that for 5,000 years, glass has remained prettymuch the same. Safety, sure, bulletproof glass I got, but glass was it until now. Much like the liquid crystal display of your digital watch, the product is really “electrochromic” glass. A thin layer of electric circuitry suspended underneath a glass layer enables you to control the characteristics of the window, making it either opaque or completely clear with the turn of a dial or through a sensor that adjusts it to changes in the weather or the number of people in a room. Your window, because it will have circuitry in it, could be turned into a computer monitor or an entertainment center for TVs and iPods. Wizardry, for real.
Food and household items ordered from kiosks—that’s happening thanks to everything being connected. In dozens of interviews, perky no kids, double-income family members (the lowly, über-admired DINKs) said that outside of work, 50 percent of their time was spent hanging in the kitchen area. To answer this, smart companies like Whirlpool have developed kitchen computers that absolutely divide the labor—between you and your device. Your S.O. (significant-o) may not be the one who does the shopping, but he sure will happily do the ordering of groceries on the kitchen appliance with you. It’s easier than changing diapers, for sure, and you get to do something… totally together.
Instead of taking a pill, such as an antidepressant, to alter your mood, microchip implantation has earnestly begun! Many things that were being handled chemically are now administered electronically. Instead of drinking coffee, we are now synthetically sending the desired sensation to the brain. And in the next few years, a person’s movement or sensory manipulation will lay the foundation for sending and receiving, yep, signals from brain to brain. Let’s call that mind reading via implant!

Imagine the next decade as we begin to monitor the better-operating workforce in less expensive countries: an implant in an employee transmits knowledge of the person’s heart rate, how many breaks the person takes, and what part of the office the person is really in! “Oh, what a world my parents gave me,” according to Rufus Wainright’s restless wink. “Life Is Beautiful” [splat] on the New York Times.
I am a-Twitter @laermerand also @howtofame, for the secretive details on the next project about to unleash.