( A twenty-one minute Brain storming read)

I have posted on this subject before with little reaction.

There is often an implicit connection between discourses of the future and notions of technology, so that if we see a television programme with a title such as Click or Tomorrow’s World we expect that the topic will be technology.

The single most astonishing point about technologies is that they can move from being emblematic of an almost unreachable future to becoming so taken for granted that it feels like a personal slight when they do not work.

In this way technology in and of itself becomes a symbol of being modern is one of the reasons it becomes expressive of, rather than distinct from, cultural values.

Perhaps this is the reason that the relationship between social media and the conceptualisation of the future is still blurred and will remain so.

New technology does not just change the manner in which people go about their everyday lives: It also facilitates our imagination of the future.

All the above speak to a new, imagined future that strives towards idealism. However within the vast field of technology the consequences of AI there are a few devices and algorithms that will battle it out over the next twenty odd years for supremacy.

Will it be Smartphones, or Smart Wearable or Cryptocurrency that will augment reality.

All need software in the form of algorithms to run.

AI algorithms will make the physical and digital world interchangeable.

Practically every non- iPhone smartphone relies on an Android operating system?

One way or the other we are entering an age where life stops giving us things and starts taking them away.

Not surprising.

So it’s not Social media technology platforms like Facebook or Twitter and the others ( that talks a lot about connectivity but not accountability) that will change the world but the power of ever where at once.

That requires total knowledge on all aspects of life.

Google or should I say the Google Cloud is trying to achieve this. 

Which is possibly both the best and the worst thing that could happen.

So let’s look at a few of the top combats in the world of technology in no particular order.

( Obviously it would take page after page to give a comprehensive insight so I am only going to give a few lines to each.)

 Microsoft Corporation:(LinkedIn -Skype – Mojang – Yammer- Hotmail)

 It operates through the following segments:

Productivity and Business Processes, Intelligent Cloud, and More Personal Computing.

• Market Cap As of May 2017
• $507.5 Billion
  

   Microsoft could be worth $1 trillion by 2020 — if not sooner. It is moving further and further into a digital landscape for everything from movies, music, books, games and software.

Twitter: Owned mostly by Venture Capitalist:

An online breaking news and social networking service. Using Twitter bots, (live streaming video.) With 450 million monthly active users it is ranked the eleventh most visited website. It has mobile apps for iPhone, iPad, Android, Windows 10, Windows Phone,BlackBerry, and Nokia S40.

Capable of influencing public opinion about culture, products and political agendas by automatically generating mass amounts of tweets through imitating human communication. World leaders and their diplomats have taken note of Twitter’s rapid expansion and have been increasingly utilizing Twitter diplomacy. Television programs use it to amplify their programs.

It could become the emergency communication system for track epidemics or sensor for automatic response to natural disasters.

Amazon:

The largest Internet retailer in the world. The company is now worth more than $560 billion. Electronic commerce and cloud computing company.

Amazon announced that it would acquire Whole Foods, a high-end supermarket chain with over 400 stores, for $13.4 billion.

eBay Inc: (PayPal) 

There are now literally millions of items bought and sold every day on eBay, all over the world. For every $100 spent online worldwide, it is estimated that $14 is spent on eBay. What’s more, eBay doesn’t care who you are, where you live, or what you look like:

The race is on to control mobile payments and the upside remains enormous:

Apple:(Shazam – Emagic- Siri – Beats Electronics – Next Inc.- Novauris-PrimeSense -The Bottom Line – Invest in Yourself.)

Quarterly revenue of $52.6 billion 2017.

Today, Apple leads the world in innovation with iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch and Apple TV. Apple’s four software platforms — iOS, macOS, watchOS and tvOS.

Facebook:(Whats App and Instagram Oculus VR.) 

A publicly traded company worth more than $500 billion.

More than two billion monthly users. It is developing a new social platform in virtual reality called Facebook Spaces, which it believes will form the foundation for the future of communication.

Tencent and Alibaba: aren’t far from the half-trillion dollar mark either.

These are the main contenders as we know them to-day

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So the Question is:

Which one if any of the above will be the top dog by 2025.

Will it be : ( All knowledge, All Gossip, All purchases, All Apps/ Software)

At this point you will have noticed that I have left out the company mentioned in Title of this posting.

While in the future devices may be more ubiquitous in all corners
of the globe, inequality will therefore remain in terms of the services
available in certain locations and the lack of attention paid to the needs
and desires of certain populations.

Companies like Amazon and Google will be fighting to lock you into one voice ecosystem. You may have to declare your allegiance for Alexa, Siri, Cortana or Google Assistant.

One could say that:

Amazon represents de-socialising of commerce. Face book represents self ego. Twitter represents myths and gossip. Apple represents profit. E bay represents selling and buying of stuff,  Google represents doming down.

All are represented on Social Media which is being used in ways that shape politics, business, world culture, education, careers, innovation, and more.

Social media applications such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube have increasingly been adopted by politicians, political activists and social movements as a means to engage, organize and communicate with citizens.

So is the power and the winner going to be Social Media which is owned by the Internet.

I think Not.

In short, one consequence of this prediction is that the very idea of ‘social media’ might gradually disappear; instead we simply have an increasingly diverse set of media and increasingly sophisticated exploitation of the possibilities these media have created, including other trends such as obtaining information, sharing information or making communication more visual.

Social media is slowly killing real activism and replacing it with ‘slacktivism, and we all know where that might lead us.  Awareness is not translating into real change. Support is limited to pressing the ‘Like’ button or sharing content which absolve them from responsibility to act.

The role of social media as symbolic of the future may already be in decline.

“The election of Donald J. Trump is perhaps the starkest illustration yet that across the planet, social networks are helping to fundamentally rewire human society.”

The one I left out, with 65% of all online searches –  is Google.

Google has expanded far beyond its original claim to fame as a search engine.

Google and their competitor platforms are programming the world for profit. The reach of this technology giant is so vast it is hard to imagine an area of modern life it has not touched.

Alphabet owns Google, as well as many other companies. However, Google itself owns companies.

Google has reorganized itself into multiple companies, separating its core Internet business from several of its most ambitious projects while continuing to run all of these operations under a new umbrella company called Alphabet.

Google owns more than 200 companies, including those involved in robotics, mapping, video broadcasting, telecommunications and advertising.

Simply put, the company has been visionary in recognizing the income potential for information products.

Their profit seeking algorithms ensuring that every recommendation, from whether you should buy this or that, stay here or there, fly or drive, connect to this or that, live or die, will earn them a few cents.

By 2025 all will be connected to the Cloud.  With one winner.

The Google Monopoly.

Once a Google client always a Google client.

How do you stop using Google?

Already impossible.

Move and your G Mail becomes blocked mail.

Say anything on you website that smacks about google, you site gets flooded with google ads.

It is becoming more and more difficult for anyone to extricate themselves from the clutches of any of its platforms as deactivating means little or nothing.

Social media apps ensure you are still engaged and if they don’t work your friends and family smartphones are searching for you nonstop supplying little hits of dopamine. ( Someone likes you photo or you are mentioned in their contact.  It’s a social validation feedback loop..exploiting a vulnerability in humans psychology.)

Will Social Media destroy or rain back Google dominance?

The whole Social media thing is turning into an addictive cancer effecting our brains and tearing our emotions and attentiveness a sunder which in turn is encouraging self-segregation and exacerbating social divides.

Every facet of our life is touched or being integrated by the social media today.

In this sense social media has become an instrument of democratic renewal.

On the other hand it is evident that this uncensored and unmonitored medium of communication is exposing us all to a gradual breakdown of social cohesion and the destruction of our traditional value systems.

Though the advantages of social media are emphasized quite often, as opposed to its negative aspects which are very rarely discussed.

I feel that this will change in the coming years.

All said, social media is here to stay. The power of social media is exponential. Numbers tell the story.

Just as difficult as forecasting the future is knowing the present.

After all not everything moves over time to become more functional
or efficient.

It is obviously going to be hard to predict the future for something as
dynamic as social media. How can we know what social media has already become for oil workers in Alaska, tribal people in Amazonia and the nouveau riche of Moscow?

Unless we take responsibility to ensure that our understanding of social media and its impacts are constantly evaluated with what’s happening in the world. Once we appreciate that knowing social media is not an exercise in delineating the properties of a set of platforms, but rather of acknowledging what the world has already turned these into, by way of content, the immensity of the problem is revealed.

So it will be important to continue monitoring and exploring the extent to which collective action is individualised through social media use.

= Can the use of social media for campaigning help to bring about genuine and lasting empowerment; or does it serve largely to re-inforce pre-existing relationships?

=  Is social media a means of building dialogue and consensus in diverse communities or does its use encourage increased fragmentation or, alternatively, a homogeneity of interests?

=  Can meaningful impact measures be developed that can be used by small, under-resourced organisations at local level (or indeed within larger voluntary organisations)?

Social media is seen in much of the literature as a means of promoting dialogue beyond the mainstream media. Voluntary and community groups have been criticized, however, for using social media as little more than a means of broadcasting.

Why might this be the case – and does it matter?

Social media expands our capacity but, it does not change our
essential humanity.

It is used to repair the rupture sustained by separated transnational families or for overcoming previously frustrated desires to share photographs more easily.

It allows couples living in different countries who ‘sort of’ live together online;

Soon, however, things move on to new realms.

Should a clear relationship be expected between the (apparently empowering) use of social media in mobilizing large national and global movements, and its use at the micro-political neighborhood level.

An increasing number of social media platforms can be aligned with the diversity of the social groups to which we might want to relate.

Social media however  has little impact on the overall outcomes in terms of empowerment, equalities or social justice.

However powerful and important the advent of social media has become, it would be hard to place it ahead of the impact and significance of smartphones, within which social media platforms may often be seen as just another kind of app.

It is smartphones that facilitate social media’s importance as a mix of polymedia, making clear the range of media possibilities as they lie side by side within one easily accessible device.

It is the Smartphone that drives social media input and out put.

Will that will be the One Winner, changing our sense of collective memory, creating a new form or combination of internal and external faculties for retaining information.

As Smartphones become smarter, they may well accelerate the dissolving of social media into this wider array of communicative possibilities.

The increasing ubiquity of the smart phone is the catalyst for more general usage of social media. Recognizing that this may not necessarily impact on any other aspect of inequality should not prevent us from recognizing that there is in one aspect an increasing and significant equality:

The more individuals live within culturally imposed constraints on communication, the more a new technology may mean that what was previously forbidden now becomes possible.

This fluid mix of communicative forms suits the way users flow between activities such as talking, gaming, texting, masturbating, learning and purchasing. The social connection is more important than how well a platform meets their needs.

Comparative anthropology creates particular varieties of knowledge of both breadth and depth. What makes these essential within the context of our complex modern world, however, is that these are forms of understanding based on empathy.

Merely having a smart phone provides a significant change with respect to the capacities of its owner.

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What happens to our online materials at death.

Finally:  Capitalism can never be ethical.

There are no laws requiring Google to be fair.

If we don’t open our eyes soon technology ( whether it’s Google, Twitter, Facebook, Amazon Inc or some equivalent service)  is going to F—k us all from some Cloud or other that is just over the horizon.

Just look at the annual release of new smartphones.

Of course there are other things in the long tall grass waiting to caught us by the short and hairy and most have being around for yonks. War, Natural Disasters, Greed, Inequality and the like.

My advice is to beware of the man with a smartphone. Because knowledge is not knowledge until someone else knows that one knows.

Google it.

All human comments much appreciated. All like clicks chucked in the bin.