The Reality Network

Imagine you are standing in front of a restaurant with a friend, trying to decide whether you want to eat there or not. You pull out your phone and point it at the building and instantly you have hundreds of reviews from critics, patrons, and friends available to help make your decision. Reading the reviews you learn about the restaurant from people who have stood exactly where you stand now, and you can actually look up and see the suspicious mold around the bottom corner of the front window that some of the writers complain about. You can also look to your left to see the better-recommended restaurant that your phone tipped you off to.

In the very near future writing will become less about our world and more a part of it, as it is attached to objects and people and places instead of intangible websites that symbolize them. Writing will be more challenging but much more powerful, as it will now enable the writer to direct their audience to sense the subject on their own. This will require more research and knowledge on the part of the writer, but it will allow them to skip needless physical description and get straight to the important information.

This new information will facilitate the creation of an interest and media genome that will help researchers and users alike to learn about their interests and the way they think, and will help humans to interface more effectively with computers. A new category will have to be created for this type of writing, and it will allow for faster, more accurate gathering of information, something that has become central to modern life, but all this advancement won't be without problems.

With futuristic devices like RFID tags and GPS receivers, we will be able to tack writing to tangible objects. Wait, did I just say futuristic? I meant commonplace: these technologies not only exist currently, but are already mainstream and becoming very refined. GPS capabilities are already integrated into almost all new cell phones and dedicated vehicle units are incredibly popular. Patients with very serious conditions can have RFID tags implanted in them that hold their entire medical history, making it very easy for paramedics to get that vital information. It's even becoming popular for people to tag their pets so that they can easily be identified and returned if lost.

In the (near) future we will be able to point our phones at people and find their facebook page and whatever they have chosen to let us know about them. This is already a reality at w-41.com, which sells shirts that are physical links to facebook pages, provided you have the phone and software for it. We will also drive through a city and be treated to an interactive tour filled with pictures and histories and sound bites and any information that we could ever want. And anytime we add our own writing into the mix, it will be automatically tagged to an object or location for future users to enjoy, much like we tag an article with specific keywords today to help people find that information. Electronic writing and the world around us will become a part of each other, linked through the capabilities of our computers and phones (which will likely be one and the same very soon). Every object and place will have, in essence, an invisible cloud of information surrounding it, as though it were covered in post-it notes and pictures and videos.

Writing for this cloud will mean new challenges but new power for authors and contributors. In an article about a specific site in the grand canyon, the writer will no longer say “there is an outcropping of rock that resembles an owl known appropriately as 'owl rock,'” but “if you look to your left you will see 'owl rock.'” In the first example the author must describe the formation if he wants his audience to know what it looks like, and even then there is a huge margin of error. In the second situation, the reader is immediately sensing it with all five abilities and knows it by its appearance, feel, smell, sound, even taste. Without having to waste time on description, the second writer's audience is already far more educated on the subject, and the writer can go straight to the information that he wants to impart, historical or otherwise intangible. He can even guide the reader's senses to experience exactly what he wants them to by saying 'feel here' or 'listen for a few seconds'.

A writer must also be well researched, because his mistakes will be all the more obvious, and he had better have something important and interesting to say about his topic—he can't buoy himself on excessive description anymore. Writing will become less about imparting knowledge and more about experiencing something in it's utmost, guided by someone who knows more than you. And the whole world will become an encyclopedia open to everyone and fleshed out with the information provided by others and delivered by our devices.

Obviously, location/situation specific writing will not entirely replace all other electronic writing. People will still want to read about things that they have not experienced or learn about things that they will never actually interact with, and there is still the entirety of fictional writing. Impartation of knowledge and education in foreign subjects are some of the main reasons that people read books in the first place. But the new style of writing for its new purpose will be different enough that it will at least need its own category and authors who specialize in it, as it requires a different knowledge and viewpoint of the subject matter. Reviewers are an obvious category of writer that will have to specialize in the new type of writing, but they will be rewarded with increased interest and the specific advantages of new electronic writing. This split will not weaken writing, but will be yet another choice that will present just one more possible advantage to those writers.

Not only will readers and writers benefit from this new form of writing but researchers in many areas will find an incredible new wealth of knowledge to be gleaned from it. With all of this information residing conveniently online, researchers will be able to profile writing by location or geography, or by the type of place or object that it represents. They will be able to create gradients of interest across maps or categories of objects, and research like this is already wielding some impressive results.

Most excitingly, though, will be the creation of an interest and media genome. Experts for Imagining the Internet write about “the idea of "IP on everything," which network engineers use to explain that nearly all material items will be networked in the future, from shoes to toasters.” Much like sites such as Pandora radio, the media genome will be able to find keywords and tags from users and compare them in order to create a map of human interests, like a DNA sequence who's individual parts define a unique personality. All the sites and articles and media that you have visited or shown interest in are the pieces that make up your particular genome, and can be used by a computer to recognize and understand you, in a computer-y way.

Now, a program utilizing the genome can look at the things that you are interested in and can suggest with great accuracy other possible points of interest, and return more relevant results to anything you search for. The computer can understand you better and can use this as yet another filter or keyword to tailor results and information to you. There are so many possible ways to use something like this, just like Pandora radio. And hell, if it works with musical taste, it should work with anything.

Currently when we search for something, we must try to choose keywords that will best match up with the results we want, which can be very hard to do. We know exactly what we want to find, but the computer doesn't—it only knows which pages have the same words in them that you just typed into the search box. And that is what the results of the search will be: matched words, not ideas or answers.

Thus the genome will not only create more chances for valuable research, but will also be a powerful tool for the home user who no longer has to translate what they are looking for into computer language and can trust that their computer itself now has its own idea of the user and their interests. The computer will easily be able to match you up with other people who have exactly the same interests as you, or certain ones that you specify, and through the internet you can make friends; myspace and facebook will never be the same. Dating sites may actually work.

What makes this important and likely is that all of this is consistent with the past few decades' strengthening theme of more comprehensive information faster. The advent of the internet and most technological advances since have furthered this cause, and companies like Google who's specific task is to deliver information have thrived as they constantly come up with faster, more accurate ways of operating. Because my predicted developments can easily be accomplished and would appeal so well to this trend, it seems likely that they will come to pass.

The meshing of the real world with our man-made digital one could have consequences as well. One expert writing for a Pew Internet report warns “We may see a vast blurring of virtual/real reality with many participants living an in-effect secluded lifestyle. Only in the online world will they participate in any form of human interaction. (Page 7)” Already we have internet addiction seminars for people who have stopped living in the real world and have committed themselves to forums or chatrooms. The more the digital and real worlds merge, as they are continuing to do, the more the line between them will blur and allow more users to cross over entirely.

The question is, will this be a bad thing? Is a life in the digital world really less valuable than one in the real world? If someone is happier in their internet life than their real world life than maybe that is where they should reside.

The future of electronic writing and the way that we interact with it holds so much possibility and potential that it is almost impossible to predict with any accuracy exactly how it will end up. Beyond the things that I have written about there is sure to be so much more advancement in this area, and the outcomes that I have posited may not come true. It is important to note, however, that all of the technology in this paper is possible with current advances, and all that remains to be seen is whether it will be viable and desired by consumers. Certainly though, it is an exciting time for writing as new mediums appear and old ones are swallowed up and great changes are becoming possible. It will not be without risk that we push this new media forward, but it will certainly be with great reward, and we can all look forward to a new era in information and an even more digital age.