In the future, your living room may function as a standing portal to the houses of relatives and friends across the country.
Despite public concerns, Internet and cellphone use coincide with stronger family relationships. In a recent Pew Internet Project report, 72 percent of Internet users said that the Internet had improved connections with family members. Fifty-three percent of users said that the Internet improved communication with family members who do not live with them.
These “networked families” are maximizing use of new technologies to coordinate and connect, despite busy schedules, across barriers of time and distance. In fact, married couples with children have higher Internet and cellphone adoption rates than other household types.
Internet access technologies are evolving that will eventually take the Internet’s “family” side to the next level. Dissatisfaction with jerk-motion, small-screen videoconferencing has given rise to telepresence systems that use higher-end video and human-factors design to create a more “real” experience of interacting with the people on the screen. They are life-sized (or near it) and you can make eye contact with the person that’s telepresent.
Is it better? Yes. Business users given the option of telepresence have used it at a higher rate than teleconferencing. But systems have been cost-prohibitive for all but the highest-end users, with the highest-end systems, featuring lifelike HDTV displays, approaching $30,000 apiece.
Over time, however, the technology for telepresence is moving toward the consumer market. Wide-screen television displays featuring lifelike 1080-pixel resolution HD are falling in price. More households have access to high-definition TV and broadband Internet at ever-lower prices.
So what should we expect as consumers discover telepresence connections?
Picture this: Homes might feature a new-concept “living room” with always-on connections to living rooms in the homes of friends or relatives in other locations.
In your house in suburban Virginia, you might walk into your living room and have a conversation with a cousin in her living room in Florida, and another cousin in his living room in Illinois.
You might set up a panel for each connection you wish to have, or you might alternate connections on the fly. In either case, the effect will be to “live” side by side in a very real way with people who are actually located across town or across the state or across the country.
Each home would have its own selection of connections. You might be connected to your parents, to your in-laws, to your brother and sister, and to your spouse’s brother and sister. Your spouse’s brother might be connected to you, to his sister, to his parents (your in-laws), his wife’s parents, and his wife’s sister.
Each home would feature the connections of the family that lives in it. Those could change over time.
Businesses would arise to serve these connected families or circles. A restaurant chain might provide coordinated family meals. Family members in New York, Cleveland, and Dallas could sit down in rooms with matching decor, with screens that create the impression of sitting together at the same table.
Too far fetched? Not at all. One firm, Digital Video Enterprises, which has pioneered “immersive meeting room” connections between business locations, is now developing a plan to license its technology to coffee shops, private clubs, high-end restaurants, and other family-friendly venues.
This is just another step in the remaking of life. Information conquers distance. Soon, we will be able to look one another in the eye from anywhere in the world.
— John O'Connor is a Principal with Toffler Associates.
While in favor of video - I think that there should be filters that block - births, circumcisions and even kidney removals via the vagina (a first this week). This just proves that any idea can be taken beyond the bounds of reason!
Thanks for your comment! You raise of the great questions about the social mores we will need to develop. How do you decline to "invite" someone into your home (even if they are only telepresent)? Do you say "I don't share my living room" the way you might decline to give someone your cell phone number? We will figure this out the way we are figuring out that there should be a law against unwanted telephone solicitations, and the way we manage our personal relationships today: sometimes with difficulty, sometimes not. Long distance relationships will be more immediately "real" with images, but in the end people will be the same.
Thanks for your comment! I am not passing judgment on the relative value of net families or non-net families. I think that if people can use technology to improve the quality of their lives - whether "improve" means keep closer contact with family or not - that is a good thing. If we must follow careers and other necessities away from friends and family, why not find new ways to keep in touch? Yes, the intimacy of having close always-on connections will be decided on a day-by-day, relationship-by-relationship level. And yes, social conventions will arise, as they always do, to manage the awkwardnesses.
Think back to the time when postcards and letters were the best we could do in maintaining relationships over long distance. Then came expensive long distance calls. Now we have email, videoconferencing, and Facebook. More options are coming, and they will keep getting better.
To me, this is a good thing. No one has to do it. Remember, you can always turn it off.
In the pre-Internet era, when I went somewhere, I called my parents once a week, for a half an hour.Now, we are a true Net family. We talk to each other almost everyday, we follow on the facebook, read each other's blogs. I can show my mom new hair cut by the web-cam, I can easily see my sister's pictures from her Amsterdam vacation and last June, on our grandmother's birthday, we all skyped her in Russia at the same moment: my parents -from Germany, my sister -from Austria and I - from California. I think this is one of the best advantages of the Internet- a chance to be closer to your family
I think, as with all technology, that it is not an either/or. Like with videoconferencing, you can control the access and features to enhance your desire to communicate with audio/video.
The internet has made ongoing communication with those we desire more accessible and has enhanced the communication, beyond a period phone call or the old fashioned letter. Clearly, it is the preferred channel with the younger generation. Or the use and distribution of digital pictures.
The ability to integrate interactive video communications with those we choose, when managed appropriately, sounds like a great addition. Don't forget, even when visiting with relatives the 3-day rule - after 3 days nothing is a good idea!
Right now, it's kind of nice to keep certain family gatherings limited. And there are certain acquaintances I'd like to check in on while maintaining a safe distance on the phone or email. If I've got this kind of rig in my home, it opens me up to potential resentment from anyone I'm not willing to engage with in telepresence.
I foresee all kinds of problems stemming from this.
Then again, phone communication can lead to misunderstandings too if not handled carefully. Perhaps having a view of the person with whom you're speaking could eliminate some of that potential wire-crossing.
Sounds like all we have to do is just live our lives and no matter where we go - there we are! Telepresence is an awesome tool when not seen as something "special" that only happens in the Boardrooms across the world but from the Lunchroom, so to speak. I mean, in the time it takes for me to write this, i could have had a conversation and even pulled clips from Farenheit 451, or any other sci-fi from the past to say "see? it was quite a strong thought in the late 60s."
at some point, we turned left, not right or vice vera - but it is so very possible and something whose time is long overdue.
And inexpensive multi=point web conferencing? it's there. video email? there too.
Love the idea...but not so crazy about the reality. I've seen one grandchlld totally ignore the webcam time and time again. We end up videochatting with Mom, but I'm guessing both sides would rather be free to be flipping through a magazine or some other multi-tasking as we can do via phone, with some shred of privacy left.
Wow...some really scarry ideas flow through my head when I imagine this... Why do we assume that a net family is or may be better than the normal one, that is a nuclear one (the expression seems very biased to me)? I am a great enthustiast of new technologies entering our lives and making them easier and richer. And I am not a Baudrillard-like cathastrophist and prophet of technological apocalypse and matrix enslaving our minds. However, your article andother comments on it made me feel really unsecure. Howcome is there no reflection on how such a reformulation of our social and personal lives will affect its shape and quality? Don't you think that it's relevant to address this issue while praising telepresence? I agree with most of your opinions, but there is really something important missing in your article: a doubt, or better: a question. We should ask ourselves whether a net family with all its indisputably fantastic features can be something that we actually expect from a family in fullfilling its basic functions. Do we want to dine with our distant relatives in a simulacrum of our own restaurant and stay under permanent observation of cameras? Do we actually want to be telepresent in every aspect of our lives? And if not, then where is the boarder?
Wow, some really great ideas flow through my head when I imagine this. Webcams always on in every room. Basically your house is like Real World (if you choose it to be), Even a giant Super Bowl party in virtual world. And when TV screen leave the 2-D world and start to be 3-D world, then we can have the show virtually in the middle of the room. Bill Gates wrote about his house in one of his earlier books about some ideas like the ones you were describing. But, it looks like even his farfetched ideas have leapt forward. Entire walls are screens, other people can control the digital images in your house, in fact, and you could subscribe to an art gallery. Meetings would not need to be held in any one room, you could all be in a meeting while you move around from room to room in your business or home. hmm....
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