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Imagining Social Media in the Future (2014)

Once upon a time in our not so distant past, there was no social media and people have to physically meet to engage and communicate. Im...


Once upon a time in our not so distant past, there was no social media and people have to physically meet to engage and communicate. Imagine a world without Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or Youtube. But what about a world with social media a century from now?

It was only a decade ago when our daily lives are now intertwined with the virtual world. We can't seem to get away what's happening around us in a stream of status updates, chat messages, food porn photos and viral cat videos.

Ever since Mark Zuckerberg launched Facebook in 2004, social media has evolved from just a geeky fad to a phenomenon that changed how we communicate. Traditional media is no longer the king of information as social media has empowered ordinary individuals to change the world by electing leaders and unseating dictators from power.

There is an exponential growth of this technology to the point that is now become an essential in modern life. A world of social media in the future would become so integrated so that I will become a part of who we are. We will be soon governed by algorithms and big data so that everything we want to do will be predicted before we do what we want to do. We will soon be bombarded with information based on our online persona, predispositions, patterns and every predictable things about us.


Nowadays, news and social media goes hand in hand so that discerning the real and the fake is now challenging even though breaking news are reported as it happens. In the future, any news event will now be covered by a multitude of live video feed from embedded cameras to drones. Your life could be streamed live every second of the day for the rest of your life.

In the year 2117, our social media will be like someone clinging to a typewriter when everyone is now communicating via text messaging. This time, a century later, we no longer have to do the egregious effort of typing when social media in future is now run by artificial intelligence with algorithms that predicts us before we do what we do. Everyone will be online 24 hours a day forever.

Mobile phones will no longer exist everything by now will be wearable or embedded technology. We can even upload our memories and consciousness on a cloud. If we get cloned or revived, the technology will allow it to restore and reboot us like we are a brand new mobile phone. Soon we will let sophisticated neural networks do all the thinking for us and by that time we have lost our sense of purpose and it will be inevitable that robots and androids will become a superior versions of our selves.


We can share a snapshot of a moment on Instagram, livestream an unfolding event on Youtube or write what's in our head on Twitter but what about we can share what we exactly small or what we exactly taste through telepathic communication or a shared cloud consciousness? By that time, physical keyboards, controls and even displays will all become obsolete as everything can be controlled through our thoughts and information are displayed through holographic projections.

When you go to a public space, billboards will now become customized to your online persona so that anything that interests you will be seen. Since you are now online all the time, the Internet will be just an invisible engine that runs your virtual life like electricity powering all your gadgets. Since we no longer decide for ourselves, all sort of information are personally curated for us.

Virtual and augmented reality will become the norm by now. We would likely meet other people by this means so that everyone will become connected virtually and not physically. No one would want to go to the mall anymore when you can come to a more idealized one.

What do you think about the social media of the future?

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