One of the mainstays of digital lore has been the “Negroponte Switch”, named after the founder of MIT’s Media Lab. Nicholas Negroponte popularised the observation that in the past, voice telephony had run over landlines and mass communication like television had travelled over the air to viewers. But this was rapidly changing. Telephony was migrating to the mobile wireless, especially in poor countries, while TV was moving in the opposite direction to cable landlines.

This is true for the present. But in the future we will see a significant switch-back from this path, in the opposite direction.