Caught In |
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by Al Massey |
"How can you govern a country with 246 varieties of cheese." Charles De Gaulle
As the Walrus was saying just the other day, "the time has come to speak of many things." Forgive me while I take a small departure from the usual format of this column to shine some light in the dark corners of this thing we now know of as the Internet.
I define the Internet as a new medium of communication that will soon surpass the printing press, television, telephone and computer in its impact on our social and economic life. The `Net represents a new economy, based on the networking of human intelligence where the rules, players and requirements for survival are changing rapidly. Society is reengineering itself as a new economy based on the "internetworked" business is taking shape.
The promise of this networked intelligence is that a global network of individuals with PCs gather to perform tasks that formally took a large team years to perform on one super computer. While this age of Networked Intelligence is one of promise, it is not without peril. For those individuals, governments and corporations that fall behind, punishment will be both swift and certain. Some danger signs are pointing to a new economy where wealth is even further concentrated, and basic rights like privacy are vanishing. This new age will not be about the networking of technology, but about the networking of humans through technology.
In the past the flow of information was physical. Checks, cash, business forms, personnel records, mail, all things we could touch and file, were right before our eyes. From this day forward we will depend on the "digital," binary code residing in computers, relegated to ones and zeros capable of being accessed at the speed of light. Trouble is, it can be accessed by ANYONE at the speed of light, friend or foe alike.
In the seventh grade I read the something Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote in 1851: "by means of electricity, the world of matter has become a great nerve, vibrating thousands of miles in a breathless point of timeThe round globe is a vast brain, instinct with intelligence." For the past one hundred and fifty years the world has been engaged in making Hawthorne's words come true. Networked Intelligence has arrived and its name is the Internet.
In this digital networked economy everyone is talking about the most important element is time. Time reaches critical mass quickly when products have a life span of only a few months. A delay of a month, a week or even a few heartbeats can spell disaster. No one is immune to this fickle age, not you, not me or even the largest of the Fortune 500. Following the lesson of my seventh grade teacher I took a look at history and was astonished to learn that of the companies on the Fortune 500 in 1955, 70% are now out of business. Even more startling is that of those on the 1979 list 40% are gone.
In researching this statistic I may have found the reason for the demise of at least one of the companies on the 1955 list. I found the following passage in their 1954 annual report. "We don't have any real competition."
This digital age of networked intelligence bears little resemblance to the packet-switching system envisioned by the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) of the Department of Defense in 1969. It is ironic that this model for social change had its roots in the cold war DoD. Jefferson wrote that the greatest warrior in our fight for independence was Gutenberg, the inventor of the printing press. Jefferson went on to say that the war was "won on the written word. Words have more impact than cannons in a fight for independence." So it is that massive change is taking place in the way we interact with each other, do business, and relate to other countries through a system that was developed as a part of our Defense Department.
Johannes Gutenberg could not foresee the impact his invention would have on society. The printing press meant that knowledge was no longer in the hands of the few. In changing culture, science and economic structure Gutenberg changed the very fabric of our society. I can also assure you the architects of the Internet had no idea of the social and economic changes their invention would bring about either.
As pioneers move to this new Digital frontier there is widespread concern that life in the far-flung settlements might not be as pleasant as some proclaim. There is a lurking fear that technology will bring unemployment, invasion of privacy, and numb the mind. Change causes dislocation. In 1900 90% of our work force was in agriculture but only 3% today. Displaced farm workers had a hard time in a mechanized world. As we change to a digital economy how will we manage the transition to new types of work and a new knowledge base?
The specter of invasion of privacy hangs over our head as we move to the "internetworked" age. The Internet has the chilling potential to destroy privacy as we know it. The basic right to decide what information we give out, and to whom we give it is being challenged. We accept that we have to give certain information to governments, educational institutions and hospitals but how do we control what they do with it? As human communication, business transactions, working and learning come on-line unimaginable quantities of personal information becomes digitized and networked. What safeguards are in place to protect our privacy?
As the onramps to the digital highway become clogged with folks looking for the shinny beads of the shopping mall and the offramps become further apart and not so clearly marked what impact will this have on the digital family? When everything is interconnected by machines and controlled by microchips will we be healthier, wealthier and wiser? What impact will it have on our life, on the quality of our life? Will the digital economy create new, flexible, enjoyable working environments, or will it enslave people to piecework done in isolation?
Alan Webber, former editorial director of the Harvard Business Review, writes "No one has asked the all-important questionwhat's so new about the new economy?" Webber went on to tell about the time Albert Einstein was monitoring an exam for graduate physics students and was told that there was a problem because the questions on the exam were the same as on the previous year's test. "That's okay," he replied, "the answers are different this year." The answer to Webber's question is different this year too, and it will be different again next year also.
An analogy has been made between the Internet and the Interstate Highway system and it is a good one. Both were developed with the purest of intentions and both have been hugely successful by any measure but, as I race off the clogged Interstate, pass topless bars next to churches and schools, crawl upstairs to my office and click on the `Network Icon and move toward the info onramp I can't help but notice the gutters lined with filth and porn. I am reminded of Joni Mitchell's refrain "...they paved paradise and put up a parking lot."
Al Massey is a HAL-PC member and can be reached at almas@hal-pc.org/.
E-mail me at webmaster@hal-pc.org with any comments you have and tell me what you want to see here.
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