ebrooks: Streaming the Future

As tech­nol­ogy changes and evolves there are fewer things on earth that have yet to be touched by the far-reaching ten­ta­cles of the Dig­i­tal Age. In fact, the Dig­i­tal Age has grown to be so dom­i­nant with its infi­nite num­ber of ten­ta­cles that it now wails on octopi and other crea­tures lim­ited to a finite num­ber of ten­ta­cles as relics of a bygone era.

The lat­est thing to be rev­o­lu­tionised by the Dig­i­tal Age is one of the planet’s most pure, free and uncom­pli­cated beau­ties – the com­mon brook. We’ve all, at one time or another, hap­pened upon a small brook some­where: a walk in the woods that comes to a small stream of water; an explo­ration under­neath an inner-city bypass that reveals a hid­den creek; a late night walk through a for­est with your cousins to prove there’s no Blair Witch that ends when the lit­tlest cousin falls into an unex­pected water hole. With the excep­tion of this last exam­ple we almost always asso­ciate brooks with nature and nat­ural beauty.

The only prob­lem with brooks is that for the most part they’re far away. Whether you live in the city, the desert or the Antarc­tic the clos­est brook to you is prob­a­bly one you con­jure up in your mind as part some anti-stress/happy place brain exer­cise. Well, this is no longer the case.

Sci­en­tists – oth­er­wise known as employ­ees of hard­ware and soft­ware com­pa­nies – have come up with a device that brings the com­mon brook to you no mat­ter where you are. The device is called an ebrook. It’s a small tablet-like, touch­screen appli­ance that beams live video feeds of brooks back to the ebrook user in real-time.

Just imag­ine the pos­si­bil­i­ties of the ebrook. Never again will you need to take your printed pho­tos of brooks with you on the train to look dur­ing your jour­ney. Never again will you need to haul sealed plas­tic bags of peb­bles and fresh water to and from school. Never again will you have to go into a dusty of old book­shop and search through the piles of thick, bor­ing books just to find one that has pic­tures of brooks in it.

Sud­denly the world (of brooks) is at our fin­ger­tips. But the own­ers of the land on which the brooks are found – be they gov­ern­ment or pri­vate – are cau­tious. Will peo­ple still come to see brooks in per­son? Will peo­ple steal brooks when they are digi­tised? If the pirat­ing of music and movies can explode on the inter­net, then what’s stop­ping the same hap­pen­ing for brooks too? Peo­ple don’t steal brooks from real life so they shouldn’t be allowed to steal ebrooks either.

Ama­zon, the world’s largest rain­for­est, has been offer­ing their own ebrooks for a while already and say that in recent months sales of hard cov­ered ebrooks – that is brooks that are hard to cover and are there­fore mostly ignored by tourists – have brought in more money than tourists themselves.

Even though the tech­nol­ogy is only just tak­ing off now, ebrooks are the only thing the peo­ple of these com­mu­ni­ties can talk about. Park rangers talk about what ebrooks will mean for for­est preser­va­tion (although this link is still fairly unclear). Wildlife con­ser­va­tions don’t know much about ebrooks but they’re excited about them. And just about every­one talks about how, with this new tech­nol­ogy, surely the qual­ity of the brooks them­selves will improve dramatically.

We may still not have set­tled on ade­quate and rea­son­able prices for ebrooks – it turns out that putting a price on life’s free and sim­ple plea­sures is harder than it sounds – but this doesn’t mean there isn’t a lot to talk about. And if you’re not already talk­ing about ebrooks then attend an ebrook sem­i­nar or work­shop or con­fer­ence before it’s too late. The future of the com­mon brook will only hap­pen once and you don’t want to miss out on that!