A digital media forecast wherein Google, Amazon, and Second Life own life, the universe, and everything by 2050.

In a world where being “plugged-in” is the most valuable commodity, companies like Google, Amazon, and Second Life can do just about anything and buy just about anyone, according to this forecast published by Casaleggio Associati, an Italian e-Commerce and digital marketing consulting agency.

This future-influencing forecast aims to change the public perception of how media is consumed in the present-day and in the future. Many of Casaleggio’s clients likely have reservations about the future of digital (Do people still think it’s just a fad, or are those folks all dead?).

Many of the predictions made by the forecast follow the all-too-common groupthink that we’ve all heard before: Google will control the data, Amazon will control the shopping, and Apple will control the hardware. Here, it’s predicted with such certainty that one tends to view the forecast as a sort of theatre or, perhaps, a poorly-written Philip K. Dick novel, rather than an accurate forecast of the future of media.

I tend to disagree wholeheartedly about the speed of this kind of consumer adoption of new media trends. For the soapbox portion of this essay, I’ll draw your attention to the fact that it’s already 2012 and my Wi-Fi connection doesn’t work half the time, my MacBook runs far slower than my thoughts, and while it’s true that people are becoming both producers and consumers of information, this actually contributes so intensely to the disintegration of media that it makes it impossible to write an algorithm to find relevant information. Have you ever tried setting up a Google Alert for a topic you’re interested in? It’s still garbage, and Google Alerts was introduced in 2007.

Analog Version: http://www.casaleggio.it/thefutureofmedia/storyboard.php