Future Shock!

I think in the future at some stage the net will be so ingrained in daily life that it is totally taken for granted, in much the same way as electricity is taken for granted at the moment in developed countries. People will eventually have easily portable Internet access that can be utilised at any time. This will lead to a more global education system that is individually tailored to each student, and a classroom for the teacher will be kids from different countries and ages, who all have the prerequisite abilities for the course on offer. Access to various forms of media will be instant and totally personalised. Social networking will be taken further so that all planning for social interaction will take place online, and indeed many social interactions in themselves will also happen online in virtual environments.... this is all obviously a long way off in the future, though some of the technologies to enable this are probably not that far away.

For this fort of environment to occur, there needs to be developments in hardware and software. Hardware needs to become even more portable, this is sort of happening, for example look at mobile/phone/organiser type devises, though in the future this will go even further. Software developments in the form of improved interfacing and multi purpose software will need to occur and also bandwidth and other networking aspects would need to be improves.

Development will be continuous and incremental, rather than overnight dramatic changes - based on historical changes in online environments. As such, keeping up with new developments should not be an issue for anyone that trials and tests out new applications and devices as the become available. However for those that don't try and keep up, the day will happen when they find themselves unable to participate in aspects of society without first facing an extremely steep learning curve!