It Won’t Be Long And Even Santa Will Be On-Line

The future of Christmas has been sighted at the corner of Sprague and Sullivan in the Spokane Valley.

Other places, of course, also will be used to stock Santa’s sleigh with computers, software, modems, scanners, joy sticks and printers.

But the new Future Shop store in the Spokane suburbs showcases what this Christmas, and many others in the future likely will become - the day digital technology spreads out from the office and away from the techies, to a place in the home for ma, pa and the kids.

Dorothy and James Watkins, for example, were looking for a seasonal gift at Future Shop on Friday.

“Our grandkids already talk back and forth with their cousins in San Francisco using the computer,” Dorothy said as she looked at a color monitor with the telltale Windows icons flying past.

Her husband, retired after more than 30 years with Kaiser Aluminum, said a computer would be a toy, or tool, or at least a point of conversation for his family when they came to visit. It wasn’t as if necessity were at work. Dorothy has never typed a letter on a computer. Her interest and hope was that the computer would help keep the family home modern, up-to-date and interesting to the next generation.

A few feet away, Alicia McFadden, 19, was Christmas shopping with her boyfriend.

Did she really need a computer for her business or personal pursuits?

“No, it’s about keeping up with the times,” said the Coeur d’Alene teenager.

“I had a friend show me Myst. We talked about it. I’ve heard about the Internet. I need to get to the basis of all of it.”

Here is the difference between the Future Shop Christmas crowd, and those folks in the early years who bought computers.

The early adopters were obsessed, fascinated, willing to invest their whole lives into the microchip.

Now it’s become a Christmas deal, shopping to keep up, not much different from what happened with Cabbage Patch dolls.

Will this consumer-driven rage for computers change the world?

John Petersen thinks so.

“The digitization of everything will mean that our everyday lives won’t work the same,” Petersen said a few days ago when I sought him out for a futurist’s view of the computer’s impact on everyday life in the next 15 years.

Petersen is paid by the military to develop long-range scenarios for how the world will operate years from now. Scenarios aren’t predictions, but extensions of trends and developments in the pipeline now.

To Petersen, the movement of computer technology from the current level of 30 percent of American households to 90 percent of American households within 15 years will ignite a more profound engine of change than the development of movable type or the television.

“This is far more powerful technology than the world has ever experienced before — with profound capability for both good and bad,” he said. And what will it all mean for Christmas?

Greg Riker of Microsoft has a few ideas.

“We’re into the age of wearable technology,” said Microsoft’s guru of consumer technology at a recent conference on new media.

“The hip thing to do will be to show off the number of microprocessors you are wearing: a pager, a cell phone, eventually your glasses and maybe a computer in your ear.”

At Microsoft, Riker has charted the pathway whereby technology becomes socially acceptable.

He notes people decide whether to bring new technology into their personal lives by asking three questions: Does this technology make me more capable? Does it enhance my self-image? Does it make me happier?

When the answer is yes to all three, the technology begins to show up in design colors under the tree.

A computer in every home, in every purse and on on every belt opens up unparalleled opportunities for global communications, accessing new knowledge, educating future generations.

As futurist Petersen notes, the computer is now doubling the amount of information available to humankind every 18 months.

This incredible increase in knowledge could educate a new generation of scientists, solve world problems, and in time probably will.

But at Future Shop, that’s not the reason people are buying.

Christmas is only 17 days away.

“I really wanted a Mickey Mouse phone,” laughed Dorothy Watkins as she gingerly fingered the computer keyboard, “but they are out of the phones.”

, DataTimes