I was in class recently to beef up my skills on open source intelligence (“OSINT”). That’s a fancy term for spy-want-to-be’s to find out anything about anything through the public domain. Although I hold a national security clearance, the majority of information I pull for research is through public sources. You just have to know where to go and what to do when you get there (funny, that’s true with life, too).
Every year the real “super spies” tell us the latest techniques for web surfing with future trends. For instance, did you know there are 100 hours of YouTube video uploaded every minute? That over 2.4 out of the 7 billion people on the planet use the Internet? That the internet is expanding at such a fast rate we are jumping from IPV4 (which has 3.4 billion IP addresses) to IPV6 (which has 4.3×1038 number of IP addresses) (my calculator won’t even compute that high). I was not surprised that social media ranked as the #1 activity on the Web. The use of social media (with Facebook as #1) is rapidly expanding beyond the personal realm for news, business and government.
Here’s what intrigued me. The future trends predict smaller, bendable screens, sensitive to touch, adapting to heat levels, using web gloves, web glasses, emitting aroma, recognizing voices. It sounds more and more like something living.
So this is what I learned in class. Despite all the fancy gadgets and toys we buy, nothing meets our human and social needs more than connecting to another in meaningful relationships. Babies have to have human contact to survive. Adults need human contact to thrive.
With 7 billion people in the world, that’s a lot of relating to do. I’d better get busy!
