The Mediascape: 2015, 2025, 2060

In five years, we can be assured the way knowledge is presented and controlled will be different than it is today. If we can assume China is forward thinking (and indeed, they are), then the future looks dim. Google has been castrated already, while beheadings happen elsewhere when people present knowledge that isn't deemed fruitful to a culture. But the media, specifically. With the downfall of wikileaks, and the recently proposed yet overturned (this year, anyway) COICA bill (which would effectively do to us what China has done to Google) it's a scary sort of reality that we will be hushed. What this means is more advertisements, less freedom of thought, less tolerance for our first amendment, and, frankly, a more archaic outlook (violently?) shoved down the throats' of a population already so stomped on. Five years from now, I envision at the very least Google becoming a bad thing.

In fifteen years, my better guess, assuming control does become more... controlled, I think the thing most subject to change will be the way things are advertised. With the advance of technology, and new ways to view a glowing rectangle, advertisements will be inescapable. An Onion skit said it pretty well with a hypothetical phone that whispers products and businesses into your ear while on the phone. Funny, but not at all ignorable. [link] The military, I believe, will make itself more of a presence, coaxing people to join in newer ways than getting kids and adults alike hooked on Call of Duty and Halo 3. So much money has already been invested in the development of weapons, armor, anything that will give 'us' an advantage over 'them.' The discussion in class today has shown us that if 'they' have any sort of leg up, we just bomb 'them.' New technologies to kill, new technologies to repress and subdue.

Fifty years from now, though I could never really say for sure, I see the world as a wildly different place. I imagine robots and humans existing together, I imagine people finding new ways to stay alive longer through gene manipulation [link] and robotic extensions, and who knows what else. I imagine advertisements being transmitted directly into our brains (or as Futurama postulates, directly into our brains). I think if religion as a whole hasn't collapsed, it will have surely taken over. I see eugenics on the cusp of being normal (or perhaps a fate like in Oryx and Crake, the media and corporations overthrowing society in favor of a 'better world'), I see repression, I see a clearer separation of the haves and the have-nots than ever before. I have no idea where I will be, what I will look like, what I will be doing, any of that. I almost feel like education will be something available to only the few, as with various cultures world-wide today, and I see entertainment being king (Mike Judge seemed to know this with his film Idiocracy, not to mention that it's something that always thrives during repressions, strangely). A best case scenario in fifty years, in my eyes, is that we will have colonized Mars and are given a second start on a planet that doesn't hate us (yet). Or maybe the predictions of the Georgia Guidestones will come to new light. Either way, I'm not too hopeful. But maybe we will find ways to be happy. That's all that is really important.