The Information Revolution

Aleks KrotoskiUndergraduate Lecture Series

Oxford Internet Institute

11 October 2010

http://alekskrotoski.com

In the beginning

“I invented the Web because I needed it really. Because it was so frustrating that it didn’t exist.”

Sir Tim Berners-Lee

It caught on

“The headless, anarchic, million-limbed Internet is spreading like bread-mold. Any computer of sufficient power is a potential spore for the Internet.”

Bruce Stirling, 1993

Because people came to the Web

“It was a place where the crowds of Dead Heads, who went to Grateful Dead concerts and recorded the gigs, could freely swap tapes and swap gossip. They’d been doing that helter skelter by email, and The WELL gave them a place where they could conjoin all of those conversations in one place.”

Stewart Brand, founder of The Well

But it had shortcomings

• Giant library

• Technological gatekeepers

• Technophiles

Yet, there were important functions (1990-2003)

• Share information

• Communities of Practice

Fast Forward to Evolution: the man (hearts) the machine

Web 2.0 is:

“A set of principles and practices that tie together a veritable solar system of sites that demonstrate some or all of those principles at a varying distance from that core.”

Tim O’Reilly, 2005

Functions of the Web 2003-2010

• Share information

• Communities of Practice

• Open Access

• Self-publishing

• Hyperconnectivity

The World-Changing Web (Proposed)

• Democratisation of Knowledge

• Transformation of the Nation-State

• Self-Actualisation

“...a new communications technology was developed that allowed people to communicate almost instantly across great distances, in effect shrinking the world faster and further than ever before. A worldwide communications network whose cables spanned continents and oceans, it revolutionised business practice, gave rise to new forms of crime, and inundated its users with a deluge of information, Romances blossomed over the wires. Secret codes were devised by some users, and cracked by others. The benefits of the network were relentlessly hyped by its advocates, and dismissed by the skeptics. Governments and regulators tried and failed to control the new medium. Attitudes to everything from newsgathering to diplomacy had to be completely rethought. Meanwhile, out of the wires, a technological subculture with its own customs and vocabulary was establishing itself.”

Tom Standage, 1998

That was written about the telegraph

Reality check:“Each defining technology represents an

important breakthrough in the ability of humans to communicate with each other; each enables important changes in how we preserve, update and disseminate knowledge; how we retrieve knowledge; the ownership of knowledge; and how we acquire knowledge.”

Dewar, 2000

“Any technology tends to create a new human environment…Technological environments are not merely passive containers of people but are active processes that reshape people and other technologies alike…”

McLuhan, 1962

What social transformation can we actually expect from this

information revolution?

Case Study 1: The Printing Press

• Invented by Gutenberg in 1450

• By 1500, 13 million books were circulating in a Europe of 100 million people

• In that time, as many book copies were printed as had been produced in the previous millennium by scribes (Toffler, 1991)

The hype (then)

“Printing, gunpowder and the compass changed the whole state and face of things throughout the world.”

Francis Bacon (1561-1626)

“The art of printing will so spread knowledge that the common people, knowing their own rights and liberties, will not be governed by way of oppression.”

Francis Bacon (1561-1626)

Social implications

• The printing press revolutionised access to information:

• It changed the conditions under which information was collected, stored, retrieved, criticised, discovered, and promoted (Eisenstein, 1979)

• Implicated in the Reformation, the Renaissance and the Scientific Revolution

Social transformations: Democratisation of knowledge

• Access to information: no more relying on authority or gatekeepers to interpret

• Gospel truths re-cast: no more single infallible text

• Publicising science: bridging the gap between town and gown

Social transformations: Transformation of Nation-State"Printing from movable types created a quite

unexpected new environment - it created the PUBLIC. Manuscript technology did not have the intensity or power of extension necessary to create publics on a national scale.

What we have called "nations" in recent centuries did not, and could not, precede the advent of Gutenberg technology any more than they can survive the advent of electric circuitry with its power of totally involving all people in all other people.”

Marshall McLuhan, 1962

Social transformations: Self-actualisation

• Development of modern forms of consciousness:

“Print culture, because it allows for cumulative advance of knowledge, views the past from a fixed distance.”

Eisenstein, 1979

Social transformations: Rules and Regulations

• Dissent and subversive views should be tolerated, but controlled

Case Study 2: The Telegraph

• Invented by William Fothergill Cooke and Samuel F.B. Morse in parallel in the mid-1700s

• By the time the telephone arrived, it criss-crossed the world, connecting all continents.

The hype (then)“The Atlantic Telegraph - that instantaneous

highway of thought between the Old and New Worlds.”

Scientific American, 1858

“All the inhabitants of the earth would be brought into one intellectual neighbourhood.”

Alonzo Hackman, 1846

“The demands for the telgraph have been constantly increasing; they have been spread over every civilized country in the wortld, and have become, by usage, absolutely necessary for the well-being of society”

New York Times, 3 April 1872

The hype (cont)

“’Tis done! The angry sea consents.

The nations stand no more apart;

With clasped hands of the continents,

Feel the throbbing of each other’s hearts.

Speed, speed the cable, let it run.

A loving girdle ‘round the earth

Till all the nations ‘neath the sun

Shall be as brothers of one hearth”

Actual social implications

• The telegraph revolutionised temporality of information:

• Fiddler Dick

• Commerce

• Synchronous communication

• Information overload

Another implication

“The telegraph was the first technology to seized upon as a panacea. Given its potential to change the world, the telegraph was soon being hailed as a means to solving the world's problems... it failed to do so, of course - but we have been pinning the same hope on other new technologies ever since.”

Tom Standage, 1998

So.

What is uniquely Web?

• Unfettered access

“You don’t need to be a technologist to be an activist.”

Peter Sunde, co-founder of The Pirate Bay

• Opportunity to self-publish

“The Web has enabled people to participate in creating their own media.”

Christopher “moot” Poole, founder of 4chan

What is uniquely Web?

• Speed of disseminationFrom one-to-many to many-to-many

• Hyperconnectivity“In three clicks you can start somewhere and end up

somewhere you never dreamed of, with information, perspective or insight that you'd never have found. One of the joys of the Internet is finding and reading something you think is wonderful that you'd never have found without it.”

Charles Leadbeater, author of WeThink

The World-Changing Web (Proposed) (Revisited)

• Democratisation of Knowledge

• Transformation of the Nation-State

• Self-Actualisation

Democratisation of KnowledgeOld Media Creators"In any age, society needs its interpreters. In the past they were -

in succession - theologians, historians and scientists. Each of these groups was corruptible; each had its own rogue elements. Now society's interpreters are undoubtedly the media.”

Bishop of Wakefield, Guardian, 2008

New Media Creators“With the Web, people in power can't edit or co-opt what we've

said. Every newspaper you read has an agenda. Every paper has a school of thought they want to promote. With the web, I can publish whatever I want to say. They can't censor our voices any longer.”

Jody MacIntyre, Life On Wheels

Democratisation of Knowledge: Interpreters

Old Media Audiences

"What we know about the world is largely based on what the media decide to tell us. More specifically, the result of this mediated view of the world is that the priorities of the media strongly influence the priorities of the public."

Walter Lippmann, 1922

Democratisation of Knowledge: Quantity

”Despite the monopolies of global news organisations, 'there is more diversity of information than would have been considered possible in the mainstream media even two decades ago”

J Schultz

“Every two days now we create as much information as we did from the dawn of civilization up until  2003. That’s something like five exabytes of data. The real issue is user-generated content.”

Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, August 2010

Democratisation of Knowledge:

Public accessTotal British Library holdings now: • 658.4 linear km in the vaults• 100 Tb held in the digital library

store.• Anticipated growth of 10km per

year

BUT

• The potential for disinformation can lead to:– Confirmation biases– Re-emergence of hierarchy

Transformation of the Nation-State

• Transnational identities• Communities of Practice• Anonymous• CyberWar

BUT: National Security"In three short decades, the internet has grown from the

realm of geeks and academics into a vast engine that regulates and influences global commercial, political, social and now military interaction. Neuroscientists tell us that it is changing the development of our cerebral wiring in childhood and adolescence. Social scientists and civil libertarians warn that our privacy is being eroded, as ever more of our life is mediated by the web. It should probably come as no surprise that governments believe control of this epoch-making technology is far too important to be left in the hands of idiots like you and me.”

Misha Glenny, 8 October 2010, FT Magazine

BUT: Regulation

• Digital Economy Act (UK)

• Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act (COICA), introduced by Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) and Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT). It's currently being considered by the Senate Judiciary Committee. (USA)

BUT: The Spinternet

The Web has the potential to be the ultimate propaganda tool:– Censorship– Infiltration– Press & PR

BUT: Digital Imperialism

Transforming the social: Hyperconnectivity

• Many-to-Many

• In the Loop

BUT

• Slacktivism & social capital

• Identity crisis

“It used to be, ‘I have an emotion, I will share’. Now it’s, ‘I will share, I have an emotion’.”

Prof Sherry Turkle, 2009

So.

• We’ve been here before.

• But we’re also experiencing something new.

• Enlightenment? Reformation? Renaissance?

The information evolution is here.

Thank you.

http://alekskrotoski.com

A few good references

• Dewar, J.A. (2000). The Information Age and the Printing Press: Looking Backward to See Ahead http://www.acm.org/ubiquity/views/j_dewar_1.html (retrieved 5 October 2010).

• Eisenstein, E.L. (1979). The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, Cambridge University Press: New York.

• McLuhan (1962).The Gutenberg Galaxy: The making of typographic man, University of Toronto Press: Toronto.

• Standage, T. (1998). The Victorian Internet: The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the Nineteenth Century's On-line Pioneers. Walker & Co.