Copyright (c) 2000 by Michael Finley

Have you noticed that certain fixed elements of the information age are starting to come unglued?

This past week, I got mailings from two formidable computer age magazine warhorses.

The first was from PC Week. I have been getting PC Week free for the past seven years, because I'm on a list of visionaries too cheap to subscribe to anything. I get two copies, actually -- one for the blue recycling tub and one for the yellow one.

I seldom read more than a few pages of it, because it is an industry insider publication. PC Week is mainly for IT professionals. Whereas, I'm unemployed -- I mean, a futurist. I read about legacy systems and connectivity forums, and my eyes glaze over, and I think about beets.

But my point here is that trade magazines like PC Week tend to be pretty conservative about change. Change too much, too fast, and they lose their readers and advertisers.

Well, this week PC Week changed its name to e-week, and that is no small change. It remains a staple for the desktop computer industry, but the focus changes radically, from machines to the virtual realm the machines escort us to.

But here's an even more radical change. Another Ziff-Davis magazine, PC Computing, is changing its name to Smart Business [for the New Economy]. It's a bigger shift than PC Week to e-week because this is a consumer magazine, and consumers are harder to herd from point to point than people who read trade magazines.

Either way, these changes are pretty brave. I'm guessing a lot of people are still interested in plain old computers, and will seek out magazines not too ashamed to write about them, and even mention them in their titles.

Will PC Magazine change its name any time soon? Nah -- they're making too much money.

But on to the significance of the name switches. What it means is something that certain visionary futurists who shall go unnamed, ahem, have been predicting for years -- that the better technology becomes, the more invisible it becomes, until no one who's cool wants to talk about the technology anymore. We want to talk about where it takes us, instead. And the answer to that is -- "beyond."

Years ago I wrote for an IBM magazine for IT professionals that was way ahead of the curve on this development. The magazine, circulated mainly to CIOs and senior MIS managers, was called Beyond Computing. We tried to convey that there was a larger, more strategic reality beyond the way people in IT silos were at that time willing to consider. In reality, we wound up talking about management, which was new to tech professionals, but not "beyond" much else.

The name is coming around again. PRI is airing a new segment called Beyond Computers. See the trend?

Let's talk about the word beyond. At first glance it's a racehorse, instantly galloping your mind to a place it has not previously gone. On second glance, however, it’s a Missouri mule. I once tried to title a book Beyond Competition, but when I checked Books In Print I was dismayed to see there hundreds and hundreds of titles beginning with the word beyond. Beyond Politics. Beyond Compliance. Beyond Virtuality (really!).

We so want to be "out there" -- but if we all crowd around the same preposition, we're pretty much in one place, aren't we?

I knew how unbeyond I really was this week when I got an e-mail from a high school sophomore in Toronto named Jerome. "Dear Mr. Finley," he wrote, "as a futurist you must have a better idea than anyone about what's going to happen next. I am doing a paper on Alvin Toffler's 'The Third Wave,' and I want to speculate on what happens after his third wave, which is the wave of information. So my question is, what’s the fourth wave?"

It's a fine and thoughtful question, but what do I tell the kid? That I merely have to look it up in the futurist's index -- here we are, agriculture, industry, information, and the fourth wave -- plasma. The fourth wave, the one beyond the one that's currently in its very infancy, will be The Age of Plasma. Whatever that means.

Or: I could tell you what the fourth wave will be, Jerome, but then I’d have to kill you. Futurist rules, ya know.

No, I prefer to stake out the more modest, nonbeyond terrain of being an authority on what happens in the next 45 minutes. It's just as mysterious as the next millennium, and actually far riskier, because you run the distinct chance of someone finding out how wrong you are. A risk you never run with plasma, but hey, that's me.