Alvin Toffler and the Word of the Decade, 30 Years Later

"The illiterate of the future are not those that cannot read or write. They are those that can not learn, unlearn, relearn." - Alvin Toffler, per a listing of his quotes on Ask.com

Thirty years ago, Toffler coined the term 'prosumer', meaning that the user of the future would be both a producer and a consumer of content. At the time he created that, it hadn't been three years since Kenneth Olsen declared that there'd never be a need for anyone to have a computer in their home. There was no such thing as a smart phone.  There was no internet.  There was no Cisco Systems, and Microsoft was spelled Micro-soft. The closest thing to YouTube was the rerunning of Candid Camera on one of the three national networks, and the only shared music at the time was via radio, on American Bandstand, or on Lawrence Welk.  Online meant that electricity was flowing.

As I reflect on the technology in use today, at the connectedness, at the removal of physical barriers to the storage and use of data, it's hard to imagine a time when we all WEREN'T prosumers.  What has happened is that we have removed the barriers to production and marketing that used to exist.  Where once a network of brick and mortar stores were needed to sell a large amount of stock, a listing of potential materials for sale can be placed on a website with ordering and production taking place simultaneously, taking some of the guesswork out of the manufacturing arena. 

We have gone past the physical layer into the logical layer of the way things work, going from being users of specific solutions to being users of services which we simultaneously provide to others in some way.  If you remember the widespread rollout of touch tone telephone service, many of the telephones in ue had a switch to be used to select whether the particular area where the phone was plugged in had pulse or tone service.  The process to move from pulse to tone service took decades, and may or may not have been hindered by the machinations within the telecommunications space, depending on the data you look at, and your personal bent.

Contrast that with the change a few years ago to digital only signal for cellular telephones.  There was no generation of phones where you manually selected which to use, the functionality was in a few circuits, but mostly there was a large-scale change, enabled by the fact that the phones themselves would generally be replaced within a couple of years, as opposed to the landline telephones, which lasted decades.  We went from the conventional, hands-off landlines to the more configurable cellular model, and all of a sudden there were more and more things that could be done, and offered to the consumers and by the consumers.

Now we are squarely in the age of the smartphone, which is where the thoughts here originated.  I think we are crossing the last frontier between the producers and the consumers, the final barrier to being able to do what we want to do in the way we want to do it, and I think there is a strong correlation between it and the way that computers themselves will be used.  We have crossed the barrier of the operating system from being a product in and of itself to being a means of doing what we need to do, malleable and useful instead of limiting and mostly there just to do things we don't understand.

I was a die hard Blackberry user ever since the forced switch from analog signal (truth be told I preferred the analog because the coverage seemed better - something not surprising since we know that analog signal has a more gradual decline than a digital signal, and your coverage now plummets at the edges), and the tools that were available for it were okay, for the most part.  It was a closed operating system, and though you could develop applications for it, it wasn't something that could be easily broached.

I watched the advent and ascension of the iPhone with more than a little interest, and was impressed by the breadth of applications available for it, but it was still a closed operating system, with tight controls over who was allowed to distribute applications for the dear old iOS.  Even so, just having an operating system that would allow innovation and creativity in development was appealing to say the least.  A closed system, though neat, and combined with the lack of features to support more worklike applications, was not enough to lure me away from the closed system I was already used to.  The hardware was impressive, as was the software, but the closedness was not to my liking.

Enter the Android operating system.  I watched with great interest the development of an open source operating system for a smartphone, as well as the corresponding hardware developments (not to mention Motorola's catchy Droid advertisements).  It finally seemed a choice was emerging that was both rich in features and open enough to offer flexibility in creating your own applications when others wouldn't do. 

One thing that was striking to me was the tone of several of the applications,  Instead of having things done for you already, several of them had a utility flavor to them to allow users to do a lot of the same things that they would on a regular computer.  As an example, I'm attaching a link to a ringtone I created to allow me to indulge a bit of gadget envy because I chose a Samsung phone instead of a Motorola, and so I couldn't really use the Droid ringtone, since it is a trademark, even though it is a great combination of feature and advertising.  So, for your amusement, should you be so inclined, and because my sister wanted a copy, here's the link to the Android ringtone: Android Ringtone  You'll need to download it and place it in the folder where your ringtones reside, and if it doesn't work for you shoot me an e-mail to charles.tuite@gmail.com and I'll send you a zipped file.

You'll notice that the file is sitting in a folder in Google Docs, which is something for later exploration.  You'll also notice that I was finally enabled to be a full prosumer, producing something I wanted via a tool that I consumed, but also providing what I produced to others.  The rub, if you're an old-style capitalist of the traditional ilk, is that I provided the tone to you for the same cost as the application I downloaded which allowed me to do it.  It was free.

The point is that only the old-style iron out the door, volume-based, quantity over quality capitalists find that to be a problem.  I propose that for a prosumer-based economy we need a prosumer-based capitalism system, where the value placed on a device or application is not derived from the ability of the producer to drive the market, not derived from the ability to achieve lock in in some way (such as the OS), and not derived from things accomplished decades ago.  Instead, I believe value that is delivered successfully should be the driver of capitalization, and that delivery of that value and the revenue streams may not need to be delivered from the same place.  This is a relatively new model and is ripe with risk until it gets fully figured out, and it is where the next innovation lies. 

With our feet leaving the ground as things move to the cloud, and the reduction of other barriers, it's time we had a new system anyway.  If we get out ahead of the curve and create that system, then we'll be on it when the rest of the traditional model is sent out to pasture, like the pulse dialing, analog cell phone, and whatever other examples there may be.  Consider this: you can find blacksmiths in almost any area of the United States, but carriage makers really don't exist anymore.Why? Because carriages were locked into a certain operating system, while blacksmiths made material for carriages, but also nails, and custom iron goods, and lamps, and fixtures, and equipment for Renaissance fairs, and, and, and...  Both of them used raw materials, only one of them used raw materials well and in a flexible manner.  Think about it.