There is an interesting technological dream that is coming up, building towards TheSingularity (isn't everything?).

The effect would be that anywhere you would be in a city or someplace with buildings, you could activate a laptop, cellphone, PDA, implant, headset, whatever and have acess to a highspeed Internet with no access cost.  The cost for you is that in any building you live in or own, it has to have a certain amount of wireless access points for an amount of area.  Thats it.   This wireless Internet would circumvent the entire wired Internet.  A new Internet would be built from this, not controlled by anybody really.  Made into a public utility in a sense. For the users by the users. 

Of course there would be some technological and social challenges for this, such as distances between large expanses of populated centers, upgrades, vandals, those who don't contribute their weight, the language barrier.  But you might as well say this for about any other sort of telecommunications/public utility efforts.

In case you couldn't realize the potential of such a thing, imagine a ubiquitous, hyper-flexible, basically-free, anywhere in the the world, not chained to a particular spot communications medium that can instantly communicate with anyone in the world. 

Some ideas for this PervasiveComputing WirelessNetwork might be:

*A telepathic kind of way of communication.  You mutter in very soft, unhearable voices in some sort of microphone and whoever you want (be they across the room or a million miles away) would receive it.  They could talk back to you. 

*A really cheap, easy way to communicate with anyone.

*A way to access all of mankind's information anywhere you are.  Once ubiquitous enough, it could be funded like public education.

The socio-linguistic effects of such a thing (there are no barriers to communication, no geographic isolation)  would be far reaching once it has matured to a point that a basic access unit would cost $10, somewhat like how you can buy a $5 dollar land-line phone device today.  

But ''sigh'', it feel like this true, telepathic-like ability to communicate with anyone and to be able to access all of mankind's information would only happen once an international auxilliary langugage would be developed.   But hey, it will happen one day, maybe in this lifetime or farther.  It will come up in some form or another.

CategoryPervasiveComputing CategoryFuturology