1.21 Gigawatts!

This time I will send you back… back to the future!

First of all, let’s set the time travel coordinates; born in 1981, we’re in 2017 right now, here it goes, aaaaand we set the destination date: 10 years from now, 2027!

This is not my personal story only, but it’s the story of everyone of us. Maybe you’re as old (!) as I am, and you can be surprised watching kids reacting to a so called “rotary” phone (c’mon, that’s a phone, period!). Take a look at the following video for example:

Things have changed a lot only in the last 10 years, and let’s not think about how they have changed during our entire lifetime! Technology continues to revolutionize our lives in terms of style, behaviours, how we socialize, how we buy products and services and how we perceive the whole society.

We didn’t have Facebook when waking up; we were not looking at the phone first thing in the morning right after opening our eyes; we were not sending text messages to organize a dinner or a basketball game down at the court. We had to call, I mean, make a phone call using the landline network; usually the parents were answering the phone, and we had to ask if our friend was there.

When you liked a girl, and you were so lucky to get her phone number, you had to immediately pass the first test: find a good story to tell her father when he answered the phone! If the story was not good enough, or at least credible, the answer would have been something like: “she’s studying now, she cannot take the phone”. True story.

But the good thing is that, for us, it was not the end of the World. There was always another chance, another way to approach your loved one, another story to invent; creativity at its best!

And when you wanted to meet with your friends, you were simply getting out, going (walking) to where they lived, and ringing the intercom: “are you coming with us?”. Simple as that.

By the way, things didn’t become worst, they simply changed. I don’t want to sound like an old man that recalls “the good old times”. Everyone will have their own “good times” and for us, I guess, these were the ’90s, but every generation will have their own. And that’s the good part of it.

Things change, and that’s not a bad thing at all. Personally, being interested in technologies I always see this as an opportunity to learn new things, to embrace new behaviours, to start new way of doing things. I think that, the majority of the times, all of those innovations help me with my common tasks - as far as I will use them as tools to tend to my needs, and not as main source of happiness.

Let me show you how browsing the Internet looked like only 10 years ago:

Yes, we used Google, but Yahoo was pretty popular, among several other solutions, usually released by local landline network providers; to name a few, in Italy we had: Virgilio, Telecom, Dada SuperEva.

And connecting to the Internet was a completely different story. I was not always “on-the-line”; I remember I had to connect and disconnect. When someone simply took the phone, any phone of the house, the line was disconnecting automatically. Shouts were starting: “I was on Internet”, “I need the phone!”. Someone always needed the phone…

Downloading was also a very different experience; the main thing to download was .mp3 (if some porn files were there it had to be a virus for sure!). One single .mp3 file, let’s say around 4–5MB, took around 20/30 mins to download… I spent evenings only to download one album. Of course legally, of course… ask Napster…

Around 10 years ago, these service saw the light for the very first time:

Skype — 2003

Wordpress — 2003

Amazon Prime — 2005

Youtube — 2005

Facebook (Public) — 2006

Twitter — 2006

Tumblr — 2007

but forget we had something like this 10 years ago:

iPhone — 2007

Android — unveiled in 2007, first commercial Android device in 2008

App Store — 2008

Android Market (Now Google Play Store) — 2008

Chrome — 2008

Pinterest — 2010

Instagram — 2010

Snapchat — 2011

And when we had it, it looked something like this:

As you can see, we have been without Youtube, Facebook, Twitter for a long time, and I remember everything was ok also without it. The Social Networks for sure made our life easier in several ways; they help when disaster happens, they make it easier for people to reconnect from all over the World; they give us all the possibilities to search for real news in a better way.

But it’s all on us; if we wait for the correct information to reach us, the risk is to become more ignorant and not more powerful (because knowledge IS power). The good thing about having so many data in our pocket is that we can search for the correct information, we can listen to different sources and we can have a better idea on what really is happening.

So, what it will be in 10 years from now? Well, the only thing that I can say is that great things will happen. Just take a look at the past 10 years and how things have been changed. 

We will have jobs that we cannot even imagine right now; the nowadays kids will have ideas about how to solve problems that we don’t even realize we have in ways we cannot think are even possible.

The technology will help us, or kill us; but it’s all in our hands. We have the power to take one direction or the other; and I don’t mean the “big corporations” or “governments”, I’m referring to ourselves. 

We have a great responsibility that our parents didn’t have: we have to manage this technology and choose how to use it. When you see a single news, search for other source of the same information. When you want to learn something new, search for it on Google (you don’t need to spend time only in a Library to be able to learn new things).

These are great times to be alive. Think only about this: we have Oreo and Nutella at the same time! :)

I want to reserve a Special Mention to the Amazon layout of the early 2000’s. That menu is still marked somewhere inside my brain, and I’m afraid it will stay there forever!

About me: I’m the Chief Technology Officer at Fleka; former Professor at Istituto Europeo di Design in Milan; Pixel Art lover, posting experiments on Twitter; I write about technology related to business topics here on Linkedin Pulse and on my Medium account. Check instead my Instagram profile for a sneak peek of my private life ;)