A funny thing occurred to us on the journey to the future. The internet went from being something unique to being a dull utility, just like mains water or electricity – but we did not even realize. Thus, we ended up being completely dependent on a system about which we are terminally obsessive. What do you think of me exaggerating the dependence? Just ask Estonia, one of the most dependent nations in the world that was basically shut down for two whole weeks because of an incessant attack on its network infrastructure. Or imagine what it would be like if, on one day, suddenly you found yourself unable to book flights, transfer funds from your account to your bank, check bus times, send an email, search Google, call your family using Skype, buy music from Apple or books on Amazon Buy or sell things on eBay and watch video clips on YouTube or BBC shows on the iPlayer or perform the hundreds of other things that have become as natural as breathing.
The internet has quietly infiltrated our lives, yet we seem to be remarkably insensitive about it. That’s not because we’re short of information about the network; on the contrary we’re inundated with information. It’s because we aren’t sure what all it signifies. We’re in the state once described by that legendary cyberspace expert, Manuel Castells, as “informed confusion”.
Mainstream media don’t exactly help here, because much – if not most – media coverage of the net is negative. It’s a must for our children’s education, they concede, but it’s riddled with online predators looking for children to “groom” to be abused. Google is supposedly “making us stupid” as well as destroying our concentration into the bargain. The company is also believed to be causing an epidemic of plagiarism. File sharing is killing music, the internet is taking down newspapers and Amazon is destroying bookshops. The internet has been making fun of legal injunctions, and the internet is filled with distortions, lies and falsehoods. Social networks fuel the proliferation of vicious “flash mobs” which snatch innocent columnists like Jan Moir. And on and on.
All of this might cause an observer who isn’t in the loop to ask: if the internet is such a disaster and a disaster, why do 27 percent of the world’s population (or roughly 1.8 billion users) make use of it every day, while billions more are eager to gain internet access?
So how might we go in gaining a well-rounded view of the web ? What are you actually required to be aware of to comprehend this internet phenomenon? Having thought about it for some time I’m convinced that all you require is the smallest of ideas, which, taken together, can dramatically decrease the confusion of which Castells’s writing is so beautifully.
How many thoughts? In 1956, psychology professor George Miller published a famous article that appeared in Psychological Review. The title of the paper read “The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Limits on the Capacity of processing information” and in it, Miller attempted to summarize some earlier experiments which attempted to gauge the limitations of short-term memory in people. In each case he reported that the actual “channel capacity” lay between five and nine possibilities. Miller did not draw any firm conclusions from this but he did content by making a guess that “the 7s that keep repeating themselves could represent something deep and profound or be just coincidence”. And that, he probably considered, was the reason.
But Miller was unaware of the enthusiasm of the popular culture for anything that had the word “magical” as the subject. Instead of being recognized as an aggregator of research findings, Miller found himself identified as a sort of sage — a discoverer of the most profound truths of human character. “My problem,” he wrote, “is that I’ve been a victim of an infinity. For seven years this number has been following me around, has gotten within my most private personal data and has also frightened me from the pages of our most viewed journal… It could be that there truly is something peculiar about the number or else I suffer from delusions of persecutors.”
In actual fact, the basic idea which Miller developed in his 1956 paper seems to have been able to stand the test of time. The idea is that our short-term memory only holds between five to 9 “chunks” that contain information in any given time (here a chunk is defined as”meaningful unit”) “meaningful chunk”). Therefore, when trying to determine how many major thoughts about the internet would be meaningful for most readers it was reasonable to go with a total of nine. Here the nine ideas.
1 TAKE THE LONG View
The peculiar thing about living through a revolution is that it’s extremely difficult to know what’s happening. Imagine what it must have been like to be a resident within St Petersburg in 1917, prior to the time that Lenin and the Bolsheviks ultimately took the power. It’s evident that major developments are in the making; there are all kinds of contradicting theories and rumours and theories, but no one is sure how the events will unfold. Only with the benefit of retrospective analysis can we have a clear idea of what actually transpired. However, the clarity hindsight can provide is not always accurate, because it understates how confusing things appeared to those around at the time.
We’re in the same boat today. We’re living through a radical transformation in our media environment. Because we don’t have the benefit of hindsight, it’s possible that we aren’t able to know where the technology is taking us. One thing we’ve learned from the history of communication technology is that people tend to underestimate the impact of these new technologies — and underestimate their long-term impact.
We see this all everywhere when aspiring savants experts, writers, and visionaries spout their own theories of what the internet means for publishing, business education, retailing, politics and the future of civilization as we have it. Most often, these opinions are transformed into catchy slogans such as memes, aphorisms, or memes: Information “wants to be free” or the “long trail” could be the next phase of selling “Facebook recently took over its control of internet”, and so on. These kinds of slogans are in reality just short-term exaggerations from our past or current experience. They provide no information about how the revolution we’re traversing is going. The issue is: can we make a difference without falling into the trap that is feigning that we are omniscient?
Here’s a radical idea to see if there’s anything to learn from the past? Since mankind has experienced an earlier change in the way it communicates, brought about through technological advances in printing with movable type. The technology revolutionized the world . In fact it altered the cultural environment in which most of people grew up. And the great thing about it, from the viewpoint of this essay is that we’re able to see it with the benefit of hindsight. We know what happened.
A thought experiment
Therefore, let’s carry out what Germans call a “Thinkexperiment”which is a type of thought experiment. Imagine that the net is the same kind of change within our current communications environment as those created by printing. What could we learn from this test?
The first Bibles printed appeared in 1455 through the press created by Johannes Gutenberg in the German city of Mainz. Imagine that the year is 1472 — ie 17 years after 1455. Imagine, in addition, that you’re the medieval version of an Mori pollster, sitting on the bridge in Mainz with a clipboard in your hand and asking pedestrians questions. Here’s question four on a scale of between one and five in which one indicates “Not at all likely” and five means “Very likely” How likely do you think it is that Gutenberg’s invention:
(a) Undermine The authority and authority of Catholic church?
(b) Power the Reformation?
(c) Enable the rise of science in the 21st century?
(d) Create entirely new professions and social classes?
(e) What if we changed our perceptions concerning “childhood” as a safe young stage in a person’s life?
On a scale from one to five! You have only to ask the questions to realise the fatuity of the concept. Printing certainly had all these effects however, it is impossible that anyone back in 1472 in Mainz (or any other place in the world, for the matter) could have imagined how profound its impact would be.
I’m writing this article in 2010 it’s been 17 years since the web went mainstream. If I’m right in my assessment of the internet causing a transformation in our communications environment, similar to the one created by Gutenberg and the like, it’s clearly absurd that I (or everyone else) to assume that we know the long-term effects of it will be. In reality, we’re not sure.
The problem is everyone who’s affected by the internet has a demand for answers immediately. Newspaper journalists as well as their employer want to know what’s likely to happen to their industry. Similar to the music industry as well as publishers, television networks radio stations and travel agencies, government departments and universities, telcos, airlines, libraries and lots of other. The sad truth is that all of them will have to learn patience. In the case of certain of them before we have the answers to their questions, it’ll be already too late.
2 THE WEB DOES NOT ACTUALLY ARE THE The Net
The most popular and common misconception lies in the belief that both the Internet and web are one and the same. They’re not. One way to comprehend this is by using an analogy with railways. Think of the internet as the tracks and signalling, the infrastructure on which everything runs. In a railway system various kinds of traffic depend on the infrastructure- high-speed express trains slow stopping trains freight trains, commuter trains and (sometimes) specific maintenance and repair trains.
The internet and websites are just one among the many kinds of traffic that operate on its virtual tracks. Other kinds of traffic include music files that are exchanged through peer-to-peer networking, or from the iTunes store or movie files moving via BitTorrent software updates; email; instant messaging; conversations with a phone through Skype and other VoIP (internet telephone) services streaming audio and video; and other stuff that is too obscure to mention.
And (here’s the key point) there will certainly be different kinds of traffic, things we’ve never even dreamed of running through the internet in 10 years’ time.
The most important thing to keep in mind is that the internet is massive and extremely important, but it’s just one of the many things which run on the internet. The net is much bigger and is far more significant than everything else that runs on it.
Learn this distinction, and you’ll be on your way to wisdom.
3 DRUPTION IS A FEATURE NOT A BUG
One of the things that most puzzles (and is a source of concern for) users of the internet is its capacity for disruption. At one point, you’ve got an established, successful business such as, say, the CEO of a music label; and the next your business is struggling for survival, and you’re paying a king’s ransom in intellectual property law firms who are fighting to stem the tide. You might be a newspaper organization thinking about how a reliable income stream from classified ads might suddenly be gone; or a university librarian looking for the reason why students use Google today. How can this stuff happen? What is the reason it happens at such speed?
The answer lies in the structure of the network. As it was being developed in the 1970s, Vint Cerf and Robert Kahn as the principal designers were confronted with two challenging task: how to build an integrated system that could seamlessly connect lots of other networks, and also how to build a system that can be a long-term solution. The answer they had to come up with was shockingly simple. This was the result of two axioms. First, there should be no central authority or control an institution that would determine who can join the network, or what it could be employed for. In addition, the network must not be tailored to any specific application. That led to the idea of a “simple” system that could do only one thing , which was to receive data packets from one end, and then do its best to transport them to their destination. The network would not be able to decide with regard to the content of those packets – they could contain fragments of email porn, porn video telephone conversations, images… The network was not concerned, and would treat them as if they were all equal.
By implementing these twin protocols Vint Cerf and Robert Kahn created what was essentially an international machine that could provide surprises. Their idea was that If you had ideas that were able to be implemented with data packets the internet would do it for youwith no need to ask. And you didn’t have to seek permission from anyone.
The explosion in creativity that has resulted in disruptive applications – that the world has witnessed since the advent of the internet in the late 1980s could have taken a lot of organizations and industries by storm, but it was predictable, given the architecture. There are lots of smart programmers in the world and the internet has provided them with a perfect launch pad for springing surprises. What kind of surprises can you expect? Well, let’s look at the web itself. It was in the main the invention by a single person – Tim Berners Lee, who in 1991 put the code on an internet server without needing to seek permission from anyone.
Ten years after the Berners-Lee’s start of work, a disaffected, music-loving teenager named Shawn Fanning spent six months developing software for sharing music files. He then in 1999, he put his own little surprise on a server on the internet. He called it Napster and it grew to over 60 million customers before music companies was able to shut it down. At that point, however, the file-sharing genie was out and out of its bottle.
While all that was going on, plenty of equally smart programmers were incubating more sinister unexpected surprises in the shape of a wave of spam, viruses or worms. There are also others security “exploits” which they’ve been able to unleash over an uninvolved network that doesn’t pay attention to what’s inside your data packets. The risks of this “malware” explosion are alarming. For example, mysterious organizations have gathered “botnets” (made from millions of secretly compromised, connected PCs) which could be employed to carry out massive coordinated attacks that could bring down the network infrastructure of whole industries, or even entire nations. As of now we’ve seen no evidence of this, except for Estonia in 2007 and 2007, we’ve not seen an attack like this, but there is a chance that it’ll eventually happen, and it will be the net’s own version of 9/11.
The internet’s disruptiveness is a result of its technological DNA. In the language of programmers, it’s a feature, not a bug , i.e. an intentional feature that is not a mistake. It’s also difficult to comprehend how we could disable the ability of the network to generate unpleasant surprises , without also removing the other kinds of creativity it generates.
4 DON’T FEEL ECONOMICS, THINK ECOLOG
As an analytical framework, economics can come unstuck in the context of the internet. Because while economics is the research of the allocation of scarce resources, the internet world is distinguished by the abundance. In the same way, ecology (the studying of ecosystems) is focused on abundance and it’s useful to analyze what’s happening in the media through the eyes of an ecologist.
Since the web went mainstream in 1993 the media “ecosystem” or whatever you like, has become infinitely more complicated. The previous industrialised mass-media ecosystem was characterised by declining growth rates; relatively small numbers of highly profitable, successful, slow-moving publishers and broadcasters masses of viewers comprised mostly of passive users of centrally-produced content, few communication channels, and a slow rate of evolution. The new system is expanding quickly: it includes thousands of publishers; billions of active, knowledgeable, highly informed readers, viewers and listeners; a myriad of channels for communication, and a dizzying rate of change.
To an ecologist, it appears to be an ecosystem whose biodiversity has expanded dramatically. It’s as if a world in which large organisms like dinosaurs (think Time Warner, Encyclopaedia Britannica) were moving through the land slowly exchanging information in massive, separate pieces, but was evolving into an ecosystem where billions less diverse species consume transform, aggregate or break down and exchange information in smaller units and in which new gigantic life-forms (think Google, Facebook) are developing. The natural environment is undergoing a transformation. more biodiversity is closely linked to greater productivity of the whole system – that is, the rate at which energy inputs and material inputs are converted into increased growth. Could it be that this phenomenon is also taking place in the information sphere? And if it is what, who will profit in the long term?
5 COMPLEXITY IS THE NEW REALITY
If you’re not convinced by the idea of ecological metaphors, there’s no doubt that our emerging information environment is more complex in terms of the number of participants and the volume of interaction between these participants, and the speed at which things change than anything that has gone before. This complexity isn’t just an exception or something to be ignored this is the reality of the present and one that is something we must address. This is a problem due to a variety of reasons. First, the behavior of complex systems are often difficult to comprehend and harder to forecast. And, more importantly the collective mentality of the government and in industry aren’t well adapted for dealing with complex systems. Traditionally, companies have tried to tackle the issue by reducing complexity , such as acquiring competitors as well as locking in customers by introducing standardised products and services, etc. These approaches are unlikely to work in our emerging environment where intelligence, flexibility, agility, and the ability to try different things (and fail) provide better strategies for dealing with what the networked environment will throw at you.
6 The Network is NOW THE COMPUTER
For baby-boomers, a computer was a stand-alone PC that ran Microsoft software. Eventually, these devices were networked, first at a local level (via office networks) and then globally (via Internet). However, as broadband connections to the net became more commonplace, something atypical occurred: if you had the speed to connect to the network and you didn’t have to worry about the precise whereabouts of your stored information or the computer that was performing computing functions for your. And these tasks became simpler to accomplish. The first time, the companies (Yahoo, Google, Microsoft) that offered search began to provide “webmail” – email provided through programs that did not run on your computer but rather via servers on the internet “cloud”. Then Google also offered word processing, spreadsheets, slide-making as well as other “office”-type services that were accessible via the network. And so on.
Here was a transition from a time where the PC really was the computer, to one in which the network is actually the computer. This has led to rise of “cloud computing” which is a method of computing that uses simple devices (mobile phones, laptops that are low-powered or tablet computers) to access computing services that are offered by powerful servers somewhere in the internet. This shift towards computing as a service rather than a service you can provide using your own equipment is a huge change for privacy, security and economic development – and public perceptions are way behind the pace of development. What is the fate of your family’s photos collection if it’s stored in the cloud and your password is transferred to the grave with you? What happens to your files and emails – all likewise kept in the cloud on someone else’s server? Or your “reputation” on eBay? All over the place the shift to cloud computing is having profound consequences, as it makes us more and more dependent on the internet. Yet, we’re still sleeping in this brave new world.
7 The WEB is changing
Once upon a time, the internet was simply a publication medium that saw editors (professional or amateur) uploaded passive web pages to servers. For many working in the media industry this is still the mental concept of the web. In reality, the web has been through at least three distinct phases of evolution – from the beginning of the web 1.0 through the web 2.0 consisting of “small pieces that are that are loosely connected” (social networking, mashups, webmail, and many more) and is now headed towards a web 3.0 which is a global platform based on Tim Berners-Lee’s concept of the ‘semantic web’ that will include enough information about their content to enable software to make informed conclusions about their significance and value. If we wish to understand the 링크 in the present, rather than as it was before in the past, we must develop more realistic mental models of it. In particular, we have to remember that it’s no only a platform for publication.
8 HUXLEY AND ORWELL ARE THE BOOKENDS OF OUR FUTURE
In the past, critic of culture Neil Postman, one of the 20th century’s most perceptive critics of technology, predicted that the insights of two writers would, like two bookends, bracket our future. Aldous Huxley believed that we’d be destroyed by the things we love, while George Orwell thought we would be destroyed by things we fear.
Postman wrote before the internet was a major force in our societies However, I believe he got it right. On one (Huxleyan) other hand the internet has been an enormously liberating factor on our lives, offering infinite opportunities for information, entertainment as well as pleasure, joy communication, and a seemingly inexpensive consumption, to the point where it has been able to acquire a quasi-addictive effect particularly for younger generations. One can calibrate the extent of the impact by the ever-growing levels of concern in the public, politicians, and teachers. “Is Google making us stupid?” was the subject of one of the most cited pieces in Atlantic magazine in 2008. The article has been written by Nicholas Carr, a prominent writer and blogger, and asked whether the constant access to information on networks (not just Google) is turning us into a frenzied shallow people with lower attention durations. (According to Nielsen which is a market research company, the average duration of a web page is 56 seconds.) Other critics are worried that our constant internet usage could be altering the brain’s wiring.
In the reverse (Orwellian) side it is the closest thing to a complete surveillance system that anyone has ever encountered. Everything you do on internet is recorded. Every email you write, every site you visit, every file you download, every search you perform is recorded and archived somewhere, whether it’s at the web servers belonging to your Internet service provider, or in the cloud services that you connect to. As a tool used by a totalitarian state that is interested in the behaviour, social activities and thinking process of its subjects and citizens, the internet is about perfect.
9 9 INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY REGIME Is NO NECESSARILY FIT FOR A The PURPOSE
In the analog world copies were difficult as well as destructive (ie copies of copies became progressively worse than original copies). In the digital world the process of copying is simple and perfect. In reality, copying happens for computers the same way that breathing is to living things since all computations involve it. When you visit a web page, for example, a copy of the page is stored in the memory of video on your computer (or your phone or tablet) prior to the device being able to show it on screen. So you can’t even look at something on the internet without (unknowingly) creating copies of it.
The current intellectual property system was designed in an age when copying was difficult and imperfect, it’s not surprising that it seems increasingly out of tune with the networked world. To make things worse (or better, depending on your own perspective), digital technology has provided Internet users with software that make it trivially easy to copy, edit and publish anything that is accessible via digital formats – which means nearly everything in the present. This has led to millions of people have become “publishers” by the fact that their works are widely published on platforms such as Blogger, Flickr and YouTube. Therefore, wherever one goes you will find things that infringe copyright in one way or other way.
This is a controversial but fact that is it is in the fact that teens tend to drink a lot of alcohol. The only way to stop copying is to block the net. It’s not a crime to have intellectual property (or alcohol), per se however our laws on copyright are so laughably out of touch with the realities that they’re getting a bad rap. They require urgent reform in order to adapt to modern-day digital needs. The problem is that no of our legislators appears to be aware of this, and it’s unlikely to happen anytime soon.
Postscript
It’s ridiculous to believe that these nine ideas are a comprehensive summary of all that is there to be understood about the internet. They do offer a framework for seeing this phenomenon “in all its facets”, as it were and could serve as an antidote to the exaggerated and frenzied way of thinking that often appears to be a commentary on the latest developments in the world of cyberspace. The sad fact is that if there’s a “truth” regarding the internet, it’s straightforward: to virtually any major concern about its long-term impact, the only valid answer is that famously offered by Mao Zedong’s foreign minister Zhou Enlai, when asked about the significance of the French Revolution: “It’s too late to make a definitive statement.” It is.
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