Exit the Telephone

Long the mainstay of communications, the internet is finally pushing the telephone to the periphery. Yes, it's still used, but less and less. And it's being replaced not by cell phones, but by email and texting. email has assumed a general application and people of all generations use it frequently, often when a phone call would have taken place. Younger people like texting, as do some older folk. See this article for more.

For many young people, a cell phone is not for talking but for texting. That may change with the coming explosion in smart phone video calling - hard to say.

The internet has displaced lots of technologies that once were seen as fundamental to the world. Television is another technology that is on the way out. But the cycle is incomplete. The internet is simply an enabling technology, not the ultimate user. Laptops and tablets are simply tools that have sprung up to most expeditiously employ the internet. However, the long term prospect is that the internet will underlie other things we use, like refrigerators, ovens and cars. We see some of this already, particularly with cars. Ultimately, the internet will ultimately underlie the telephone and televisions and these end user devices, which after all are quite suited to their purpose, will cycle back to something like they were before the internet, only driven by the internet. Smarter and wireless, but still fundamentally the same as the old.