April 6, 2018
TECHNOLOGY/SCIENCE/ENGINEERING/BUSINESS
When I mounted a pioneering effort in Internet evangelism in the mid-nineties, there were some things we read about but could not imagine thus making explanation rather difficult. Members of my faculty, however, all agreed that we should just sell the message that ‘with a future of the internet, everything is possible’. The way we put it in our class notes was that ‘The Internet would radically change the way we live, work, play and pray’
We could imagine eLearning, eHealth, and eAgriculture. It was a bit difficult for me to comprehend eCommerce. And indeed going by what is happening now in selling and buying online, even those who said they understood the phenomenon would be confessing that their imagination was far from today’s experiences.
But then we mentioned eCommerce lavishly in class but avoided saying too many things to limit errors.
Could we have mentioned eSports? No. Not at all! It never happened.
It was in 2006 I stumbled on a New York based Chinese friend who asked if we had started familiarising with eGames in my country. It did not make sense to me especially against the background of the angle he was pursuing. He was talking of the business side, not the technology side, of eSports.
Today it is a different story. The best explanatory (and exploratory) story I found so far is told by Erin Winick in The digital athletes of the future: Earning $1.6 million behind a keyboard which shows that there is a lot of catch up to do. And business to do too.
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