One of the interesting aspects of the home of tomorrow is a moderate reversal of a trend that started in the industrial revolution. For centuries, most people worked at home, plying their trade or working their land. Those who needed to work where their customers could meet with them, like blacksmiths or shopkeepers, merely made their homes out back or upstairs. As commerce became more sophisticated and interdependent, cities flourished. And as commerce became more centralized with the advent of heavy industry, people began to leave their homes in greateer numbers to work in the factories and mines. Shops became larger, and were no longer family-owned. People left their homes to work. In more-industrialized nations today, there's been a partial reversal of that trend. As industry is less dependent on machinery, and commerce less dependent on location, work is becoming less centralized. Technology has been a great driver of this trend, and now, technology that's available in the home, or even the pocket, makes it possible for more people to work from home or from anywhere.
None of the fifties futuristic visions even came close to anticipating the home office of the future. In those, typically the man of the house would grab his hat and briefcase and jump in his flying car to go to an office somewhere in the city. Shuffling over to your home office in your pajamas with a toothbrush in your mouth to check the morning's email never played into the futurists' visions, but it's as common today as flying cars aren't.
One of the business world's greatest technological boons of the 20th century, the fax machine, built upon the 19th century's great business invention, the telephone, to help make distance irrelevant. It also acted as a baby step for the home office, enabling legions of individuals and small businesses to interact with customers instantaneously, regardless of their location. Add to that the affordable personal computer, and by the 80s the home office was a real possibility for many people. Remember that in the fifties, very few people really anticipated the advent of small, inexpensive computers. Their visions of computer technology were either vastly over-optimistic (anthropomorphic robots) or woefully conservative (wall-sized home computers with punch cards).
One thing that most futurists foresaw were video telephones. Even in the thirties, Dick Tracy had a wrist-mounted videophone. It's been an ongoing obsession among geeks and industry types ever since. There have been commercially available video phones for decades, and most haven't worked well, though businesses have been enjoying relatively workable video conferencing for 15 years or so. Now, in the era of home broadband, with a few dollars' worth of hardware and free software we all have the capability to partake in video calls. And for the most part, we're not really interested. Even people like me who have partaken in high quality video telephony still prefer voice only calls in almost all circumstances. Who would have thought?
But as much as the video phone has failed to take off, there are dozens of other communications methods that the internet have opened up that have profoundly affected the way that we work and communicate. And the internet has not only made them available, it's made them available very, very cheaply. I remember back in the stone age, 1989, I was carrying on a long distance relationship, and my obsessive, chatty girlfriend racked up a $1000 phone bill. Today, I use Voice-over-IP and get local service, all the snazzy features, and unlimited long distance for under $10 per month. If I were stingier, I could probably get that down to $7. Email, the Web, IM, text/photo/video messaging, mp3, RSS, P2P, fax-to-email services, voicemail-to-email services, the Blackberry, wireless networking: these have all had a huge impact on the way we live and work, and many of them were largely unanticipated by futurists.
The Cell Phone
We love our cell phones. They have transformed not only our ability to be away from the office, but also the way that we communicate as families. Today, Mom doesn't need to ring a dinner bell or holler out the back door that dinner's ready. She just calls everyone's cell phone. And that's no joke: we use our cell phones not only to communicate with each other across the mall or the supermarket, but from upstairs to downstairs inside the house. Starting in the 80s, in-home intercoms became common in model homes and high-end applications. Today, most people would consider it the height of inconvenience to have to get up and push a button on the wall when they could just use their cell phone from the sofa.
Strangely enough, people in the fifties and sixties would not be surprised in the least by our love affair with the mobile phone today. They were well-aware of the marvels of wireless radio communications back then, and portable personal telephones are merely a logical extension of that. I think they'd be impressed by our ability to send messages, check the weather, listen to music, read novels, and play games on our phones, and I think they'd be amused at some of the silliness like flashing lights, musical ring tones, and animated screen savers, but if a geek from the fifties were to see where the mobile phone is today, I think his primary reaction would be surprise that it's not wrist-mounted.
