I heard a number of people saying that the Tron 2.0 game, and any film sequels should have shown us a world changed by the development of digitizing technology to open many new possibilities for a storyline. And in one respect, I agree that it could, but the result could prove to be far too chaotic to use simply for a film franchise. Unless Tron became as big as something like Star Trek was 10 years ago (though I wouldn't mind seeing that happen
), it'd be pointless to even bother with. I might love to write about some of it if Tron ever goes in the direction of an 'expanded universe' ala Starwars. The problem with all this is I fear it would become a completely different animal, and stray far away from the spirit of the original film.
Putting that aside though I'll give you my reason as to why it wouldn't happen, and the scenario presented in Tron 2.0 of a world where practically nothing has changed is extremely realistic. If we're assuming that the human world portion of Tron is the same world that we're all living in, I'd give digitization about 100 years... maybe, before it could become mainstream. 20 years is nowhere near enough to get a new technology into the world. And here's why..
(ok, I got REALLY bored the other day)
The video-telephone was first shown in at the World's Fair in 1964. Aside from having a little camera and microphone atop their computer, anybody got one of these yet? Doubtful. I don't know why it hasn't taken off, but it just hasn't, but this is nothing compared to the troubles of getting something like digitization into the common world. Reason #1: money. The biggest factor that keeps humanity developing at a snail's pace.
The best existing example of this fits well, because it's about the same thing digitization is about.. transportation. Time and time again, more efficient carburetors have been developed that get anywhere from 2 to 9 times the number of miles out of a single gallon of gas. Yet not one of these has found their way into a car that we can go out and buy, because the plans get purchased by oil companies for huge amounts of money, and then buried to keep them from being produced. Why? Because they'd lose a lot more money than that if the engine replaced what we're using right now. And assuming the developer of such an engine decided not to sell out, I'm sure certain companies wouldn't be above derezzing the situation by other means...
But this is only one enemy that the technology would have. It wouldn't potentially just kill car engines, it could kill cars, planes, trains, boats.. all transportation as we know it could cease to exist. Postal services would be out of business (they've already tried to ask that email have some kind of stamp/tax to make writing letters & using traditional mail seem less expensive). Hundreds of thousands of jobs would be lost.
If that's not enough, health and safety issues would extremely frightening. How much of a margin of error could the computer have for reading a human's structure. Ok, a margin of error of 0.00001% which doesn't sound bad at first, could become extremely hazardous after being digitized multiple times.. (ie making a copy of a copy of a copy). Star Trek's "transporter psychosis" (fear of arriving at your destination looking like a Picasso painting) would frighten many people. Long-term effects on animals would have to be studied for decades before it was even considered for human use. It even has religious implications, because although we could transport any kind of matter, how would we be able to digitize a human's soul as well. And all these fears would no doubt be advertised be the afore-mentioned companies who have everything to lose if digitization became a success.
*takes a deep breath* That's about it. Even without this, personally I'd like to see the Tron universe remain somewhat confined to a few local computer systems at least for the time being until the franchise would be ready to flourish into