Telepocalypse

Telepocalypse later?

Over Christmas, I was visiting my family back in the UK. A few years ago, I clubbed together with my brother and bought my parents a PC. To our combined surprise, the oldies managed to get online, and have slowly mastered email, instant messaging and web browsing. To move them into the 21st century, I recently foised a broadband connection on them (goodbye international call charges, hello Skype).

I flew back to the US yesterday. This morning, I was having the usual “yes, I managed to get myself home safely from London to Kansas City despite being only 32 years old” conversation. They were telling me that they’ve phoned up their old dial-up ISP to cancel the account, now that the broadband connection is working fine. But they were worried: would they still be able to set their home page to their old ISP? They constantly use its portal for news, search and retirement property hunting.

Now, you and I know that the default web page is merely a browser setting (the end point) and not a feature of the access network. Hurah for end-to-end! But that isn’t obvious to the intelligent casual observer. Just as, over time, I’ve come to see things like right-clicking and file shortcuts as deeply confusing concepts when you have to explain the rationale about them to a newcomer.

I’m wondering if the end of telecom-as-we-know-it will take longer than expected. Does it require generational and demographic change? Does is matter that we are in short supply of cash-stapped young people in most western economies, and have an excess of (smart but not techno-clairvoyant) silver surfers?

It would be an interesting exercise (which I’m too lazy to perform) to gather the following information:
- A list of major technology innovations that transformed society and the economy (e.g. railroad, telegraph, automobile, birth control pill).
- Identify key social and economic metrics associated with the above. For instance, the percentage of goods bought remotely, or the participaton of women in the workforce.
- Map out how the lag between technology introduction and structural change has varied with time. Presumably it has shortened.
- Extrapolate to the Internet. Use some baseline (e.g. reaching 10% of eventual market saturation penetration) as your “year zero” for each technology.

I’m wondering if increasing life expectancy will eventually make this into a ‘reverse-J’ curve. Initially new technologies diffuse increasing rapidly into the economy and cause structural change. Automobiles killed off the pony and trap quicker than railroads killed the horse-drawn canal boat. But new technology is increasingly complex to use. The Windows paradigm is harder to learn than buying a train ticket, poping a pill or driving a car. The ability of us moderately befuddled old people (i.e. anyone over 25) to adopt it is relatively fixed. And we’re an increasing proportion of the population, and the trend to having children later increases the generational cycle time. Structural change may eventually take more, not less, time.

Will demographics dampen the fires of change? I wish I knew.