Epic Lifestyle Shifts
The Web dramatically alters many aspects of daily life, and tomorrow’s way of life will be radically different. The Web speeds up everything to real-time simultaneity. It erodes time and distance, and revives human communication on a planet-wide basis. It puts everybody and everything in touch and within reach. In sum, the Webolution flips life and society on its head.
In fact, the Webolution returns us to a family-based economy more like that of the Agricultural Era. Back then, people tended to live in large, close-knit, multi-generational families, with grandparents living under the same roof. Uncles, aunts, in-laws, and cousins lived at nearby cottages or neighboring farms. Each family grouping worked together as a self-sufficient economic production and consumption unit. They were prosumers but didn’t sell much to anybody else because most families were self-sufficient farm businesses.
Those skeptical of the Webolution and the coming Web Lifestyle are akin to the plodding ploughman who couldn’t see how the first steam engine chugging past his field was about to change the world – and his livelihood. Their eyes are transfixed on the linear furrows of an old way of life that will soon be washed away by a new one. Not even the village idiot would have forecast that the fields would one day be harvested with a combine – let alone be built over with factories and workers’ homes!
But the Industrial Revolution swiftly shifted work to factories, and later to factory-like office buildings. Kids went to factory-like schools, the sick were put in factory-like hospitals and the elderly were confined (or should that be consigned?) to nursing homes. Life was turned upside down.
Likewise today: few can imagine most of us spending our time at home – rather than commuting to offices, going to schools, or shopping in big box stores and supermarkets. Yet a whole set of webolutionary trends are converging to transfer life’s locus back into the home.
The book Future Living fully explains these “webified” activities and how they point to a brand new future for us all. Our way of life is completely changing again – and just as dramatically.
Everything gets reversed: the world comes to you. For example:
• You don’t go to work, work comes to you.
• You don’t go to the library, it comes to you.
• You don’t go to the bank, the bank comes to you.
• You don’t go to the shop, the shop comes to you.
• You don’t go to school, school comes to you.
• You don’t go to the doctor, he/she comes to you.
• You don’t go to the voting booth, it comes to you.
Rather than going out and wasting valuable time waiting “in line,” futuristic families simply stay home and go “online.” Web Life families allocate their time to various tasks almost on an as-needed or just-in-time basis. They blend all aspects of their lives, multi-tasking their time as the precious resource that it is.
Futuristic families look forward, eagerly and confidently. They readily and quickly change their life plans. They spot and benefit from trends that can “future-proof” their lives through a Web Lifestyle.
The Web creates a new pathway for life – for work, education, shopping, recreation, and much more. Each Web Lifestyle family will have the world at its fingertips – for children’s homework, for cross-border online shopping, for tele-working, for staying in constant touch with friends, relatives, and colleagues, for running a family business.
Many of us already use the Web in much the same way that old-fashioned folks still insist on:
• Sticking stamps on envelopes,
• Using payphones,
• Visiting bank tellers,
• Shopping in bookstores, or
• Renting videotapes.
Just as those activities were taken-for-granted parts of the fast-fading industrial lifestyle, most of us will take the Web for granted; we won’t even notice it.
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