One portal to the entire world…

Consider the following scenario: sometime in the future, everything will be in digital format. Nothing will be printed at all -not your bills, not your contracts, nothing. Sometime in the near future, you won’t store anything on your own computer either. Your music collection, your pictures, your “newspaper”, your personal library -all of it will live in its own personal home in the Cloud.

Imagine carrying all of your personal information -absolutely EVERYTHING- in the palm of your hand or in your pocket and only needing a single passcode and ID to access it.

You take out your smartphone, open the main application, and enter your login information. One main login for everything. Your bank account is there, your mortgage contracts are there, every possible piece of information for your entire academic history is there (transcripts, records, report cards, term papers, etc), your travel history, your credit report, your personal library, your music collection, EVERYTHING. You take a class and the instructor uploads the class information. You automatically have it upon coming online. You don’t go to website and put in special login information to gain access to it. What if you only need a single ID and passcode to access all of this instead of fifty million different passwords that you somehow have to keep track of? Or what if there’s a built-in application that magically remembers every single password and instantly logs on to all the applications all at the same time, upon powering up?

Maybe Google and Apple have teamed up to make this happen. Maybe the government fits in here some place. Maybe not. With everything moving toward efficiency -mobile devices that serve as stereos, computers, phones, cameras, calendars, address books, televisions, and more- this notion can’t really be that far off. Do we trust whoever decides to put this into motion? Should we? Should we embrace the technology when it comes about or all vow to become Luddites?

Think about it -information is power and whoever has control over the information has power over the masses.