In part 1 of my article on digital materialism I gave a little background on what got me thinking about the subject. What digital materialism really is, is the transition from buying/owning/using physical (material) media to a single digital library containing all of an individual’s media. Where once people’s media collection consisted of material items, soon it will become entirely digital. Your personal library then in turn follows you anywhere via an internet –connected device and is available instantly through streaming technologies.
Imagine that you live in Seattle, but you are traveling abroad in London. You carry with you a single touch-screen smart phone (yes, like an iPhone you Apple zombie). You arrive at London Heathrow and decide some music is in order while you wait for your luggage. You turn on your phone and associate to the wireless network. You then access, through secure web login, your personal digital library and instantly you see every song and movie you own. You pull up a favorite playlist and the music plays. You get on the train and decide you’d rather watch a movie to pass the time. So again you pull up your library and out of the 200 movies you own you choose your favorite and begin to watch. You’ve listened to what you want to listen to, watched what you want to watch, and you’ve never been nagged to purchase anything because it’s your library. You’ve used your media just as you would at home if you had loaded the discs into your DVD player – except you’re nowhere near home. Also, you’ve never had to worry about your device’s storage capacity or synchronizing your device with your computer because everything is streamed to you.
My family asks me technology questions all the time. Sometimes it’s about how their computer isn’t working right and other times they’re more general questions like, “What do you think will be the big tech trend this year”. A couple years ago I was asked the later and I remember saying that without a doubt, it would be the continuing development of convergence devices. Portable devices that served multiple functions. I was specifically talking about cell phones and in the time since, what used to be just a phone is now so much more. Cell phones are now capable of running almost any type of media; voice, images, video, internet connectivity, e-mail, and more. When I talk about digital materialism, I’m talking about the next step. The further evolution of these devices.
But there will eventually be a revolution, and I believe the revolution will be in the creation of personal digital libraries. So what would enable every person in world to have their own digital library? IPv6. IPv6 is the successor to the current internet protocol IPv4. As people and businesses continue to purchase internet addresses the pool of available IPv4 addresses in shrinking fast and will eventually run out. The IPv6 internet protocol however would allow for trillions of addresses to be given to each of the 6.5 billion people on Earth today. An internet infrastructure capable of supporting the traffic of the world’s population will be a revolution and a building block of personal internet media libraries.
There are certainly major obstacles to this scenario and I don’t think it’s going to happen in even the next two to three years – but it’s coming. Some of the biggest obstacles to personal internet media libraries will be in the form of security and licensing. If you read the news at all you know about the ongoing war between media houses and recording associations vs. P2P file-sharing over licensing issues. The key to personal internet media libraries is that you are recognized as an owner of the music/movies in your library, just as you are recognized as an owner of any CD or DVD in your collection. It’s yours and you can use it as much or as little as you want. Delving deeper into that would be an entire article itself and there are even entire websites devoted to the topic, so I won’t go into it here. The bottom line is, if security and licensing concerns can be adequately addressed and resolved, personal internet media libraries and digital materialism will be in our very near future.