2005 Looks At 2014 And The Future Is Google – December 1, 2005 – Past Daily After Hours Reference Room.

Googlemania in 2005 was an actual thing.

This episode of Background Briefing from ABC National in Australia was first broadcast on December 1, 2005; twenty years ago. Twenty years ago Background Briefing looked ahead some nine years to what the world was going to look like in 2014. And the future was Google. In 2005 Google was only seven years old, but in that short period of time, the world of Tech and the Internet were going through lightning changes.

The picture Background Briefing paints is somewhat dystopian, predicting the world will be irrevocably changed by 2014, if not sooner and Google will achieve world domination. How true that prediction became is up for speculation and debate. In 2005 there was no AI to contend with and Cryptocurrency was in the vague future, not actually becoming an entity until 2009, four years after this program aired.

There is a lot that is taken for granted now that was in its formative stages twenty years ago. One thing is certain; changes are happening at a faster rate than ever before, perhaps because information itself is available almost instantly.

One of the points brought up in this program was the issue of news media. Would newspapers and “legacy media” still be as essential in 2014 as it was (still, but dwindling) in 2005? Certainly the explosion of cellphone cameras, the massive number of blogs – the massive growth of podcasting and the birth of the citizen-journalist – the increased quality of streaming, the rapid growth of e-commerce and the success of entities like PayPal (which began in 2002). All these were either in speculative stages or were in the process of being developed and used. And news gathering as we knew it was a relic of the past. I don’t think anyone would consider the encroaching politicization of news at the time, or the concept of bot farms in the grand scheme of things. That was a dystopian side not many wanted to entertain.

But it’s interesting from a historic standpoint to consider just how much things have changed over 20 years – and how they continue to change now. Makes one wonder what the world of Technology will be like by say, 2030.

Should be amazing – here is that episode of ABC Radio National’s Background Briefing program from December 1, 2005.