My latest piece in The Oldie

Predictions - what won't happen

January 2023

A new year always seems like the time to make predictions for the next twelve months; however, as somebody once said, prediction is very difficult, especially about the future.

Looking back at my past prophecies is a salutary business; I see that some years ago I predicted that, as filters improve, spam emails might soon become a thing of the past.  That was, I don’t need to tell you, hopelessly optimistic. If anything, the opposite has happened.

In the digital world developments are as hard to foresee as anywhere; throughout the industry, people with large brains are constantly working on new ways to use this relatively new thing called the internet.

So, this year, rather than trying to guess what will happen, I’ll list some things that won’t happen.  Frankly, I’m more likely to be right.

First, local newspaper websites will continue to be almost unreadable, encumbered as they are by endless slow-loading adverts and ‘clickbait’ (‘Your jaw will drop when you see…’) desperately aimed at generating advertising income.  This will continue until the publishers accept my theory that there is a market for local ad-free websites of record for which people will pay a modest annual subscription and which report local sports, crime reports, politics, community events the like.

People hate intrusive adverts on websites, and many will pay to avoid them. Whilst they would never be big money spinners, these sites could, I believe, support small local teams, especially if the technical stuff were handled centrally. 

Another thing that won’t happen this year is the effective reining in by government of the excesses and harmful activities that take place on social media sites, whatever laws they pass.  It’s depressing, but a fact of internet life.

Controlling what people put online is like trying to grip jelly, even if you pass all internet traffic through a government censor, as the Chinese do.   You could shut down the likes of Facebook, Twitter and the other big companies but there would still be thousands of alternative platforms coming and going like will-o'-the-wisps, based outside this country and so beyond our government control anyway. 

Next, 2023 won’t see an end to passwords, or all the other irritating logging on procedures we endure.  I concede that they are a necessary evil, but there are so many options it’s bewildering at best and impenetrable at worst.  At present I maintain an online password vault which is remembering over 3,000 passwords, most of which are for sites that I will never visit again.  This is absurd.

On top of that, many sites want to phone me, send me texts and emails or insist I use an ‘authenticator’ on my phone before admitting me.  Banks want me to put my debit card into a machine and press endless buttons. The one I have from HSBC is so small that my arthritic fingers often mess it up.  It’s all a muddle, and whilst this sort of security is undeniably important, there really ought to be a better, more standard way of doing it by now.

Another non-event in 2023 will be the improvement in the quality and reliability of voice calls on mobile phones and via the internet.  Almost nobody uses a landline anymore, but they are more reliable than mobiles and Zoom and easier to use. Not for long, though; BT is shutting down all landlines by 2025, so we’ll be stuck with indistinct mobiles that cut out regularly or simply don’t connect, and peering up someone’s nose on a Zoom call.

One cheery thought is that this will mean that us Oldies can irritate young people by endlessly starting sentences with ’In the old days, when we had proper telephones..’.

I’m looking forward to that, at least.