Not long ago, I wrote about a trend in the younger generation the US military dubbed “continuous partial attention:” the habit of mentally being two places at once.  For people who have grown up with cyberspace (essentially a multivalent two-way communication tool), dividing the world into two different but equal halves (the physical and the virtual) is not hard; it’s even possible to divide one’s attention to participate in both worlds at once.

Some people take the concept of a “virtual world” too literally.  While services like Second Life and Lively do exist, they don’t attempt to visualise the infinite set of information the Internet represents; instead, they create a simulacrum of reality in such a literal and mundane way, they basically substitute one sterile landscape populated with cretins for another.  While the Internet is a resource of information in different forms (but mostly text), how one conceives one’s identity as one navigates the information set varies; for some people, no concrete conception of self is necessary; for others, a visual identifier in the form of an avatar is important; for still others, fussing about over a visual identifier is pretty much the whole point of cyberspace.  Some people don’t care about fashion, and some do — and some people like playing around dressing up dolls.  Chacun à son goût.

But that’s not quite what I mean when I talk about cyberspace, or a virtual world; what I mean is the ability to access content of all kinds, and provide others with access to content of one’s own — content like bus schedules and maps, of course, but also personal information, like friends’ photos and Emails.  It’s not organised into a simulacrum of reality; it’s open and adaptable, providing ways of consuming information that are immersive or not as context warrants.  It’s accessible in different ways — sometimes, it means watching a movie on a TV hooked up to the Internet, sometimes it means checking an Email on your phone, sometimes it means downloading a song or article to a laptop while riding the bus.  What all of these actions have in common is that information is being accessed from a network that surrounds us all the time, providing us with content that can be plucked from the air whenever it’s needed, like Adam and Eve plucked the fruity bounty of Eden whenever they felt peckish.

The physical space around us has become a carrier for information; 3G and WiFi networks blanket our cities, meaning whatever we’re looking for is conceivably just a few keystrokes away.  This is getting more pronounced by the day; not only is the infrastructure growing, so is the demand: global bandwidth consumption rose 63% last year alone.  The basic structure is already in place — all that remains now is to expand and improve service so people can actually take advantage of it — and new devices and applications are being announced every day.

There’s a term for the cloud of information saturating the air around us: the information cloud.  In fact, “information cloud” can refer to a number of different things, including this ubiquitous wireless Internet (the “global cloud;” this is the one most people are referring to when they say simply “the cloud”), or the cloud of personal information we each carry around with us wherever we go (think, for example, of the information accessible only to you that you carry on your person, in a USB flash drive, on your phone, or even on a laptop).  There’s also information that exists everywhere but is protected behind a firewall or membership; it’s a limited version of the global cloud.  And then there’s the cloud formed by networked computers accessible on a LAN.  All of these are used in different ways, and represent interesting areas for new growth, but none like the global information cloud.

The cloud already exists — all that remains is to develop it and exploit it.  One of the reasons the iPhone is such a revolutionary device is that it brings access to the cloud to a new level; we’ve been able to tap into an information network using cellphones for years, using crappy little screens and ten-button keypads to check the weather or movie listings our cellphone carriers allow us to check, but the iPhone was the first device to allow us to access the actual Internet, seeing the same thing one would see from a desktop computer.  Various new devices, and (hopefully) service providers will allow us the same access to the Internet — anytime, anywhere.  If you have an iPhone or Android phone, and happen to wonder what the opening lines of Ulysses are while paddling down the Rideau Canal, finding the answer is a snap.  I can’t help but think that in the future, more and more of the information we need will be pulled from the cloud as we need it, and in some innovative ways.

To wit: get a load of these.  Combining Internet-based or user-generated content with GPS to encode it with metadata is a hot trend right now; you can upload pictures to your flickr account that actually plot on a map where the picture was taken — this actually surpasses what you can do with a desktop.  But the one that really blows my mind is the barcode scanner: while you’re shopping, you can use the camera built into every smartphone to take a picture of the barcode of the product you want to research, and the program will find the product online, then provide you with reviews and even check competitor’s prices.  I can’t think of a better example of the cloud: it’s instant, it’s easy, and it provides you with all the information you need when and where you need it.

It won’t be long until everyone has all the information and entertainment the Internet has to offer at their fingertips all the time.  Which begs the question: what’s the point of learning anything?

[Jump to Part II.]