The Emergence of Real Time

Since 1995 the Information Age has become exponentially faster and more important. We have more access to data, it is easier to get information immediately, and we have the ability to tailor information based on our own needs. For all its messy greatness, there is a lot of white noise, however. Can the information flow get any faster? And will the white noise become clearer?

I think it will. In just thirteen years, we have changed how we process information and there seems to be a growing need for better filters, thus sites like Bing. There is also a frustration level: there are mechanisms to get certain information but institutional lethargy in providing it. The next movement in the Information Age will be the drive toward better filters and commercial real-time systems. There will be more flow and more transparency. For example, someday in the near future, voters could have the ability to see a Senator’s expense account on-line and know who he is having dinner with leading up to a big vote. And with more networked medical technology, physicians won’t simply have a patient sit in a room and recount their ailments, people will wear health monitoring devices and swallow digestible pills with microscopic monitoring chips that will tell the narrative of their health. (Transparency Alert: my wife runs an annual conference, called the Body Computing Conference, on networked medical technology, which will be held tomorrow at the University of Southern California, and it delves into the merging of the Information Age with medicine.)

The movement toward real-time has already happened with Twitter, but I believe “tweeting” is a rough approximation of what lies ahead. A new consulting company, The Realtime Project, based in London, is advising companies about real time strategy. Steve Overman, one of the firm’s founders, worked at Wired in its early days, and believes there is a shift in social values and a need for authenticity, a shift he compares to the early days of the Web. He points to President Obama’s presidential campaign as an example of using the Internet to react quickly and talk directly to people. But real time is more than email blasts and tweeting. For example, with the collapse of media platforms, industries are being forced to create their own media platforms that talk with their customers. As companies create their own real time systems, whether it is in marketing or in the guts of an operation, expect to see an even faster world that is (seemingly) more transparent.