I bought a CD today. An actual, real CD. For the first time in over a year. I got it in the liquidation sale at the local(ish) Woolworths. It’s a pity that their going.

I bought Avril Lavigne, Under My Skin. And that’s not the point. It says something about CDs, if normal people my age (16, the age where music is most important, arguably) don’t ever buy CDs anymore (not just based on me, I was with a bunch of friends and they looked at me funny when I picked it up). Their outdated technology now, like VCR’s and Floppy Disks. Or at least, their outdated technology to the younger generation, there are still people like my father who buy CDs for the car :P

It lead me to wondering (on the bus home) as to how long it’ll be before all physical portable storage in the form of a disk (cd, dvd, bluray, etc) will be obselete, and everything will be distributed online. Except console games, which no doubt will always be on cds. I’ll give it 10 years before the internet is the primary distribution for everything except food and that. Making us all the more reliant upon it.

And then I have a feeling that the internet will implode not long after that. The sheer traffic making it unstable and causing blackouts, and then we’ll regress to some old-school storage media, maybe? I read articles that the Internet is already struggling under the load, so why shouldn’t this happen? Of course, we could just increase the routing capacity of the ‘net, but there are limits to that too.

There are lots of scare stories about the future, and I think there is merit in some of them, especially about the internet collapsing as we enter the exabye era.

I’m looking forward to seeing how it goes :) I wonder if the failure of the internet could cause a recession of it’s own? I reakon so.