I've written pretty extensively on this blog about how the Internet is rendering traditional media like TV and print obsolete, but there are plenty of other institutions that are on our favorite technology's dinner menu, institutions that, all things considered, are a hell of a lot more important than the way we get our news and entertainment. There's a running narrative in all of the institutions slated for demise in the next couple decades and it revolves around the obsolescence of the tangible. Most commonly, brick-and-mortar bases of operation are simply unnecessary, or becoming less necessary with each passing year, but there are other physical things that just don't need to exist anymore. Let's consider the dissolve of the following.

Banks

This is what got me thinking about the buffet of institutions spread out before the Internet. One of the other writers on the Klat network over at Money Fest clued me in on BankSimple, a new Web service that is essentially a bank program without a physical bank. More accurately, BankSimple is a bank's money management service outsourced to the third party. They do the grunt work of processing your transactions so the "partner" banks that actually hold the money don't have to pay nearly as much for the same work in-house. BankSimple gets a cut of the loan and interchange profits from the banks, which eliminates a pretty beastly chunk of a bank's operational overhead. This sounds nice and it is, but it's also just a transitional business. Sooner or later, an actual bank is going to go pure digital and cut out the BankSimple middle man. The larger implication here is that physical banks aren't really necessary anymore. We don't need tellers, deposit slips and vaults when everything is direct deposit, online banking is the preferred method of management and cash is downright quaint. Big institutions like Bank of America and Chase will survive the transition, but they'll have to ax their current fee structures to compete with new services that make fee-free banking a selling point.

Offices

I've harped on this before, but it bears repeating. There's no reason most white collar business needs to operate out of an office space anymore. Everything can and probably should be done remotely because, as with the brick-and-mortar costs for banks, maintaining a central workplace in needlessly expensive. All documents can and should be digital, everyone has a computer and cell phone, and rent for office space is damned costly. Combine that with the rising prevalence of the independent contractor and you've got a recipe for the death of the cubicle.

Schools... sort of

There's a clever fella named Salman Khan who did the obvious and finally recorded what amounts to a series of instructional Youtube videos for mathematics, starting at grade school level and pushing right on through calculus. California school teacher Kami Thordarson adopted Khan's system, called Khan Academy, and "flipped" her classroom, meaning she let Khan do the lecture work while she spends her class time serving as a one-on-one activities tutor for her students. In the process, Khan and Thordarson kicked the bell curve right in its soft bits. I don't think we're ever going to get to a point where kids don't go to school anymore, but I do believe that schools are going to change dramatically. It's hard to argue with the results programs like Khan Academy and class flipping are getting. In fact, the only people who are railing against the method are the educators who have been insisting that the current education system isn't horribly broken and ineffective, which kinda hurts their credibility in the same way insisting that the sun revolves around Earth hurts a scientist's credibility. The schools themselves won't disappear, but the concept of a room where a teacher talks at the middle to the detriment of the outliers isn't long for this world.

Because there's a lot more to talk about concerning the above three changes, I'm going to break form this week and do a double-length entry. Part two coming later today.