Do you hear that? The slow rumble in the distance? It’s the thunder of information you’d rather not be privy to. And it will soon be all around you. In this second-wave tech bubble we’re in, the name of the game is communication. Due to the fact that very little is actually communicated, I would be more inclined to refer to it as information access.

Sites like Twitter are emblematic of this trend of information streams that you can choose to drink from or not. Nothing is required of you, no obligation of eye contact or civil acknowledgement. Just dip into someone’s life for a moment until boredom starts crawling up your leg like the icy hand of death and quickly move on.

Scientists have also apparently invented an invisibility cloak that, when further refined, will keep visible light from reflecting off the object it surrounds. One of the developers even had the roombas to speculate that future cloaks could theoretically mask an area from “acoustic waves, so as to shield a region from vibration or seismic activity.”

We are being weaved into a thick fabric of information that is already forming tectonic meta plates on top of the conventional ones. I could see a point in the near future where I’d be more excited by an informational cloak that would make me invisible and immune to the seismic meta activity than one that protected me from meatspace dangers.

Imagine localized alert systems that instantly send mobile messages to everyone within the area affected by an earthquake. The alert would divulge the epicenter of the quake and the recipient’s distance from it, probably on a comprehensive map on a mobile phone or other device. Now imagine that each of these informed persons is a red dot on a different map. There would be little, if any, visible shifts in terrain from afar, but you could see all these tiny red dots moving away from the epicenter, resembling a seismic ripple.

Or maybe a quake is a bad example. Perhaps people realize the futility of trying to escape from it. But what about a gunshot in a crowd? Or simply in your neighborhood? I’m sure there’s someway to detect gunfire in the air just as we’re able to detect shifts in the ground? The immediacy, customization, and localization of information and the ways you choose to receive it are forming a very real meta physics that is closely tied to more concrete physics.

I predict that the next media boom after blogs will be the separation of information into meta layers contoured to geographic and meta locations (primitive example). Say, for instance, that you’re monitoring the people who are likely to vote democrat and who are likely to vote republican in the next election. They are represented and red and blue dots on a map. Say the Foley scandal hits and you see a ripple effect of red changing to blue around the country. The epicenter is not a location but the news source that broke the story.

Now you have a ripple effect of distribution that you can then track on a map. You will be able to see the networks of readers for various media providers and study the meta physics of events. With proper visualization and interface, this can provide a far more comprehensive sense of global and local affairs in seconds, rather than trolling through headlines via RSS.

I would find the dead zones and move to one.