Wired on Friday/Mike Butcher: These days I sometimes get the feeling I'm living in the future. Aside from this being a pretty vain existential feeling, it is sometimes hard to fault. Consider the evidence.
I no longer use film. My camera is a digital one (Canon Ixus 400). I upload the photographs - via broadband internet - of my wife and baby son, directly to a website where I pay via credit card. Physical matter, in the form of film or hard cash, barely enters into the equation - apart from the printed pictures.
When I take video, I store the captured images on a flash-card or digital video tape and then upload them to my Apple Powerbook for editing. The result gets burnt to CD or DVD for later viewing.
To watch a movie, I can choose between a video-on-demand service from my cable TV company or a DVD ordered online from the Video Island service and automatically mailed to me.
Broadcast television is even disappearing from the household. Instead of watching live TV, I can set my personal video recorder's hard disc to download programmes I actually want to watch. Sky Plus offers this service, but other broadband providers, like HomeChoice and even BT, are waiting in the wings to capture market share. I now watch more of what I want - and I am not alone.
In Sky+ homes, researchers say people now watch more, not less, TV - up from 22 hours a week on average to 25.
In fact, even though, as the British Video Association reported last week, illegal UK downloads of films and TV via the internet have tripled over the past year, DVD sales increased by over 60 per cent during 2003 because people prefer quality. Our consumption of digital media seems to increase with greater access.
But they will have more to download if the BBC has its way. It's going ahead with a three-week pilot project to allow 500 of its staff to download any BBC TV show online. Programmes, available for a week, will be viewed on a PC or burned to DVD and watched on a TV set, or even a PDA. If successful, an external trial will be launched with 1,000 people selected from subscribers with broadband service providers AOL, BT and Tiscali.
Overall, the lines between the PC and the TV seem to be blurring. The laptop I use daily, whether via a broadband connection in an office or my wireless LAN, has in turn revolutionised my TV watching.
Now, instead of mutely watching a show I can "google" all sorts of relevant information as well as look up the show's website. I can even chat to the presenters afterwards online.
As well as my viewing habits, the digital world is even reducing the amount I actually talk. When I arrange meetings with colleagues or lunch dates with friends I almost always start the process off with an e-mail or a text message.
Usually the only time we end up conversing is either face to face at the meeting, or on the mobile when someone is lost and can't find the restaurant.
Even radio is not safe. Thanks to broadband, internet radio, via Apple's iTunes, is now part of my listening habits. Again, I am not alone.
According to the BBC, by offering radio shows on demand up to a week after transmission via the Net, radio consumption has increased by up to 30 per cent.
But am I truly representative of the population in my digital consumption habits? Some are content with just digital TV. Some just with mobile devices. Perhaps it's just weirdos like me that do them all at once?
Whatever the case, the future appears to have arrived early. Over half the UK adult population - some 22 million people - are now regular users of the internet. But back in the dotcom era four to five years ago, The Henley Centre, for example, predicted we would reach the 50 per cent penetration mark only by 2007.
With 3.2 million homes currently connected to broadband, and BT taking 45,000 new orders a week, the forecasters predict that broadband could reach over 50 per cent household penetration in the next five years.
But if they were wrong five years ago, could it conceivably take only take half that time? In the digital TV world, city analysts forecasted in 1997 that free-to-air digital TV would reach only 5 per cent of the population by 2003. In fact, it now reaches over double that amount, at 12.5 per cent. In the mobile world, few predicted that over 80 per cent of Brits would now have a mobile, but now handsets threaten to destroy the camera industry.
Samsung Electronics, for one, sees photographic-quality camera phones being launched next year, with the idea of owning a camera eventually becoming obsolete around 2006. Perhaps in three years, only professionals will actually use a "camera" - everyone else will just use their phones.
This proliferation of digital devices is turning ordinary people into producers of content, not just consumers. The effects can even be political.
At a conference in Italy last week, Nina Calarco, editor and publisher of southern Italy's Gazzetta del Sud, said the Aznar government in Spain "was unseated by a shower of telephone text messages".
These contradicted the traditional print media's line that the Madrid train bombings should be blamed on Basque terrorism instead of al-Qaida. The people got to the story before the journalists.
Pedro Ramirez, editor of Spain's El Mundo, said Spain's Socialist Party's call for a massive rally in Madrid the night before the election was spread by text message.
"It's as if every citizen had a printing press at home," he said.
To the techno-futurologists at least, we are actually living in a world which shouldn't have arrived for another three or four years.
Welcome to tomorrow?
Mike Butcher edits mbites.com
