So, we've talked about some old institutions that are either changing or going away entirely because of the Internet, so let's take a gander at how society will change as a result.

The first casualty, brick-and-mortar banks, won't be missed and arguably aren't even missed today. Plenty of people never set foot in the local branch of whoever holds their money and e-commerce has already driven plenty of nails into cash money's coffin. All in all, life as we know it won't change if real world banks disappear or, more likely, become highly uncommon. The biggest impact I can see is the federal government scaling back its actual cash and coin minting. In one of life's supreme ironies, money is made from materials that are worth less than their stated value but the government can only ever print money at a loss. It literally costs money to make money, so when data finally gets back to the government concerning the marked decrease in cash usage nation wide, some bean counter is going to approach the President with a plan to shut down a mint, scale back production and save tax revenue by slowing the flow of cash and coin into a country that doesn't want to use it. The feds are already batting around some pretty historic cuts that are viable precisely because the Internet has made certain services obsolete. Right now the government is talking about getting rid of mail delivery on Saturdays, but it won't be long before the USPS simply ceases to exist because nobody really receives meaningful paper mail anymore. Private parcel services will snatch up the remaining business and people won't notice except for the lack of coupon books and credit card offers filling up their trash bins.

The tech-based school shift won't really change day to day life. At most, kids will learn faster and come to college and/or employment better prepared, which will increase tech job competency in a market that already demands it. For general lifestyle, though, things won't look any different. Kids will still get up in the morning and go to school, even if that school operates in a very different way than it did just a few years previous.

The starkest shift is going to come as a result of the death of the office. For one, all those corporate parks and skyscrapers are going to need to transform into other kinds of spaces, lest every city on the globe be filled with abandoned towers and suburban ghost towns. Best case scenario, sprawl gets curtailed by turning corporate space into mixed use structures that transform a skyscraper into 20 city blocks made vertical. The average white collar lifestyle is going to twist in some very interesting ways, though. The old icon of parents going off to work in the morning will disappear for a portion of the populace as kids grow up seeing their parents work from home or on the go. More importantly, kids will be spending a lot more time with their parents as a result, which will create closer families, for better or for worse. That or families will seek further isolation from one another with the aid of technology, the dreaded "everyone wears headphones and looks at a different screen" scenario. These two extremes aren't, of course, mutually exclusive.

In the broad sweep, Internet technologies aren't just breaking down institutions, but the very concept of structure altogether. It's creating a world where the faster, cheaper, easier option is independence and an itinerant sense of isolation. There's simply less of this world we can touch every day, which is slowly changing perceptions on the whole. It's a strange time to be alive and all these changes seem inevitable. I'm personally okay with embracing this transition, but I already work and communicate through this series of tubes. I've got little to lose and all of it is inconvenient. I imagine for people who are more invested in the tangible, this time is unsettling.