Future Now
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Jake Dunagan: Who is the Internet Human and what is the Human Internet?
For most of its history, using the Internet has involved conforming and contorting to the logic, architecture, and input/output mechanisms of machine networks. Humans have bent before immobile computer screens, tethered our limbs to mice and keyboards, and craned our necks to see the smartphone screens in our hands. The human experience of the Internet, however, will change dramatically over the next decade. Technical and network foundations are being laid that will allow humans to interface with the network much more naturally and effectively.
The new Internet geometry will allow permeability, flexibility, and the capacity for learning. It will place humans at the center—redrawing our networked worlds to fit our native dimensions. And while it will continue to extend human capacities, it will do so in a way that retains human proportions.
This new human Internet will enhance and amplify rather than contain and contort our minds and bodies. “Just as Leonardo da Vinci beautifully captured human proportions in his Vitruvian Man,” notes IFTF Research Director Jake Dunagan, “today we must aspire to designing our Internet experience with the same attention to human proportionality and elegance.”
IFTF's Technology Horizons Program is pleased is announce the public release of its Internet Human | Human Internet map, which highlights the technologies and combinatorial innovation that will give rise to a more human web—with new kinds of experiences in our homes, our workplaces, and in other contexts of our daily lives.
The map not only orients you to the technological building blocks of Internet experience, but also serves as a guide to help you think systematically about the future as you explore how these technologies in combination produce new capacities for productivity, connectivity, communication, and participation.
PayPal TechXploration: May 22, 2013
To hear more about this research, join Jake Dunagan at the free PayPal TechXploration in San Jose on May 22, 2013. Make sure to RSVP to guarantee a ticket!
Our Technology Horizons Program
To learn more about IFTF's Technology Horizons program, contact Sean Ness ([email protected]).