Until the present day, advertising has been driven by catching the eyes (or ears)  of captive audiences. Large billboards, television commercials slotted between shows and ads placed between songs on the radio. Advertisers increasingly see the need to improve engagement with ads. Vast volumes of data enable the likes of Twitter and Youtube to deliver content users may want to see on the basis of past activity.

Ad monetization has existed as a popular business model primarily because monetizing small sums (on the order of pennies and cents) is too costly: transaction costs quickly add up, making it almost impossible to charge users on the basis of page views. An innovation I look forward to is the (potential) proliferation of bitcoin & lower transaction fees. This infrastructure will enable content providers to charge per view instead of having to slot unwanted ads on a page (or even force costly subscription models). Medium lends to an aesthetic I imagine of websites of the future: content driven engagement.

As health concerns become a greater priority, I foresee that mindfulness will rise in importance. Societies will recognize the danger of cognitive fatigue and prefrontal overuse. Perhaps a greater number of people will speak to the woes of internet addiction and continue to advocate creative thinking – and wandering, detached from mobile devices. People will become more conscious of what media they are consuming – and even further, may have a greater ability to log this digestion and derive insights from new discoveries.

We live in an era where the proliferation of computers has magnified the realm of human potential. We do have access to vast amounts of data – the next step is deriving actionable insights associated with the data. Along the way, society may learn to restructure the way media is distributed and consumed.

In an unfortunate and tragic sequence of events, Philando Castille was shot dead by an officer in Minnesota yesterday, July 6, 2016. The shooting yielded immediate attention by social media outlets and the press, as the diseased’s girlfriend recorded and streamed the aftermath on Facebook Live.

Objectivity

Numerous accounts of faulty witness testimony are affected by traumatic events. Recollections of events are impacted by how questions are posed, and numerous biases may impact how a viewer may recollect an event. In the future – in an age where digital capture and distribution becomes increasingly accessible – witness testimony may no longer be subject to human memory, but rather, computer memory. As seen in the Treyvon Marvin case, witness accounts competed for confirmation of whose voice was heard when screaming “Help!” during the incidents that transpired on February 26, 2012 – which raised the question: who was the attacker here, Zimmerman, or Martin? In the future, data capture will be cheaper, as will data distribution, making available more data for objective review in future trials. and incidences.

Technology

• Access to data transfer and distribution technologies: data is becoming cheaper, and as a result, it’s possible to share more information at a faster rate. Innovations include: improved cell phone recording ability, improved data transfer speeds, and improved UI for user generated content communities (Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc).
• Type of data transfer: higher quality images and 360 video will transform how experiences are documented