Why We'll Take Longer Baths in the Future

Dead, but increasingly not forgotten

In the past, when you died there was very little of you left. One hundred years ago you might have left some letters or drawings. Fifty years ago you may have left some fading photographs. Currently you can seek or accidentally attain digital immortality through video clips, sound files, digital photographs, and emails on your own Website or sites belonging to others. There is even a website called mylastemail.com that promises to send out your last email once you've died and you can even check what date that might be at deathclock.com. But there are already problems. The tragic death of seventeen-year-old Anna Svidersky became problematic recently because she had a page on MySpace.

She is still there, unaware of her fate in the physical world. And because her MySpace page is protected by a password known only to her, the page -- her digital afterlife -- will stay there, potentially forever. Of course, there are counter-trends. Scrapbooking is phenomenally popular at the moment as a low-fi way of preserving memories and as a way of engaging in physical contact with other people across generations.

It might not be so low-tech either. Some people believe we are presently living in the digital dark ages because most of what we are currently preserving will be unreadable by future generations. I already have a stack of floppy discs from the early 1990s that I can't read, and it's entirely possible that the photographs of my children (4,753 at the last count) won't be readable or printable in twenty years' time.

You think I'm kidding? NASA can't read some of the records of its 1976 Viking Mars space landing, and the BBC can't read the digital copy of the Doomsday Book it produced in 1986 to celebrate the 900th anniversary of the original. Of course, the original paper copy remains perfectly readable.

In the not-too-distant future, everyday objects such as shoes, carpets, and toothbrushes will contain technology that will collect information about us. We will then be able to personalize objects, allowing them to change physical state (like color) or respond to our daily mood. They will also be able to exchange data with other objects and send information to other people. For example, your toothbrush will be able to analyze your breath, and book an appointment with your doctor if it detects the smell of lung cancer. In other words, what were once just ordinary objects will be increasingly networked and intelligent. Manufacturers will use the information generated by these smart products to sell us other services or enhance our 'ownership experience' -- although whether people will want such a relationship with their toothbrush remains to be seen.

In Japan you can already buy school blazers embedded with GPS tracking technology. This means that, as a parent, you can elect to receive an email or SMS alert when your child arrives safely at school each morning (or at least when the blazer does). This idea is no doubt linked to the rise in paranoid parenting and so-called 'stranger danger', but there will be other services linked to similar products in the future. For example, kitchen appliances will monitor their own performance, and order spare parts and service calls all by themselves -- much in the same way that the McLaren F1 supercar already alerts the factory when something goes wrong, thanks to onboard monitoring and GPS tracking.

Equally, ordinary clothes will be able to monitor their condition, arrange for dry-cleaning pick-ups, or alert their owner to new design upgrades. But what are some of the likely attitudinal and behavioral implications of these developments?

At the East Sutton Park Young Offenders Institution and Open Prison in Kent (UK), offenders with low self-esteem are encouraged to do gardening. Even something as simple as raking up fallen leaves has been shown to have an instant effect, delivering instant satisfaction. As twenty-year-old Leah says, 'If I'm angry I dig.' Gardening will enjoy a huge surge of popularity in the years ahead because it will be an antidote to the future. It will deliver the solitude and peace and quiet that will be so lacking in people's lives. It will be a way of dealing with too much technology. Washing dishes by hand and baking your own bread will similarly become popular for much the same reasons. They will provide physical results, and people will feel that they've achieved something by themselves.

One of the consequences of ubiquitous technology is that some of us will unplug some or, in extreme cases, all of our lives. In theory, new technologies will make our lives easier. Things will move faster saving us time and money. Things will also be more reliable. Technology will make things that were previously difficult or impossible easier and more affordable. But history suggests that the opposite is much more likely to happen.

Do you remember the predictions of the paperless office and the leisure society? Between 1999 and 2002 global use of paper increased by 22 percent and we now seem to have less spare time than ever. We are also sleeping less than we used to -- down from nine hours\ per day in 1900 to 6.9 hours today, and everything from computers to home-loan decisions are getting faster. Indeed, the benefits of the computer age can be seen everywhere except in the productivity statistics, because we are inventing new ways of making ourselves busy.