Slashdot Mirror
Part One: The Internet Edge
His premise this round is that a growing number of people in the world -- especially the people reading this -- are present at one of the greatest technological events ever. They're on the Internet Edge, right on the boundary between the past and an enormous array of changes being driven by the rise of networked computing.
This Edge is so pervasive that it seems sometimes to be both visible and palpable. The Edge is obvious everywhere, as each of us struggles to sort out how much of the new we want or have to embrace, how much change we can absorb, and how much of the old we want or need to keep.
Great scientific discoveries are inseparable from key changes in technology. Many of the elements in the periodic table were identified in the decade after the invention of the storage battery; advances in astronomy and medicine go hand in hand with technology: witness the invention of such instruments as the telescope, microscope, and magnetic resonance imager.
Given that, we are likely heading towards the Mother of all Periods of Scientific Discovery. Suddenly, everyone lives on the Internet Edge, from Wall Street brokers struggling to make sense of NASDAQ, to grandmothers getting online to exchange e-mail with their grandkids, to parents and teachers who know less about the world than children, to politicians, academics and journalists who feel power leaching away from them like water dripping from a faucet. And certainly, to the growing numbers of technologically centered people who are figuring out -- and creating -- software, operating systems and the new kinds of personal relationships and challenges brought about by this Edge.
In the social as well as technological arena, writes Stefik, technologies spark radical change. "This is why the edge for technologies of connection is often a conflict between global and local values. Such a conflict can evoke resistance, a 'pushback,' as people seek stability and attempt to protect the status quo."
This conflict is evident across the culture -- note the fights over Napster and intellectual property, epidemic alarms about online crime and predators, cries from religious leaders that young people are being infected with pornographic and blasphemous dogmas, the new legal and copyright debates, challenges brought about by burgeoning forms of online education, open source challenges to the computing, legal, medical and other industries, and the growing political struggles between individualism and corporatism. Politicians demanding blocking programs and parents installing filters are pushing back on the Internet Edge. Plumbers ordering parts online and gardeners trading bulbs on eBay are living there.
In our time, society seems nearly split in two, one side of the culture embracing technological change, the other side ferociously resisting it. It's nearly impossible to pick up a newspaper or magazine without seeing evidence of this "pushback," this raging debate -- Are we changing too rapidly? Developing technolgies we can't control? Overwhelming ourselves?
The really astonishing thing about life at the Internet Edge is the realization -- already known to scientists, programmers and engineers -- that today's Net will soon be considered the crudest of technologies.
The Internet, still in its first primitive stages, is in a state Stefik calls "becoming." It is fluid and evolving, and it is generating phenomenal fear, confusion and conflict. Rather than approaching statis and comfort, the Net is still being invented -- bad news for the millions groaning to deal with what's already been built. It is, says Stefik, characterized by open options, unknown possibilities, confusion and imperfect technology. "Our social structures, cultural assumptions, and legal structures are co-evolving with the Internet." And the next wave of scientific discovery -- wireless and nano-technologies, AI, genetics and supercomputing -- will bring the change Stefik writes about, along with the anxiety and controversy.
Or not. While the change Stefik writes about is inevitable, it hasn't been completed. Meanwhile, conflict shrouds life on the Internet Edge. The Columbine massacres get blamed on computer games, adults decry the spread of sexual imagery online, schoolkids who are passionate Net adherents feel isolated and, increasingly, feared. Some of the country's most powerful institutions have organized to try to retain control over culture (movies, music, books) and information (legal and business documents, medical research).
There isn't an institution in American life, from politics to education to entertainment, that isn't being pushed to Stefik's Edge, worried about the future, uncertain how to cope and adapt and often trying desperately to preserve the past.
This idea of an Internet Edge is exciting, even haunting. Stefic succeeds in putting our era into the historical context it deserves -- something that our frantic daily lives make it easy to ignore. People who make history are often unaware of it, but we have the luxury of sensing that it's happening all around us. The Edge reminds us that we are living in an amazing time, with front-row seats to big-time history.
Next: The Sensemakers.
(Over the next few weeks, I'll be writing along some of the other ideas raised in Stefik's book.)
We're at the edge of something deeper than you think.
The most immediate thing to look forward to is better human computer interaction. Much, much better HCI. The implications of this are somewhat surprising. Right now you type on your keyboard, its inefficient. Well lets just imagine the key board and type in space then used a camera hooked up to a computer to observe the fingers. This is possible today but pointless. How about if electrodes were planted in your arm and acted on the signals before they reached your fingers. Again, we could do this today. How about we tracked the signals back and intercepted them via an implant in the brain. This is today's cutting edge. However things are moving fairly fast. There already exist mechanisms that can detect brainwaves and people have been trained to move a mouse around a screen just by thinking about it. The interface is kinda clunky at the moment, they have to think about sex to move left and right, or oceans to move up and down. Still, it's a proof of concept, things will improve.
Screw wearable PC's, bring on the implants. With the kind of information density, we can manage these days it's actually worthwhile. Wouldn't it be nice to be able to remember everything ever said to you, or said by you. If nothing else, it would be a great help when you get into one of those "he said, she said" arguments. With todays technology you could build a portable device that remembers and voice recognizes everything you ever hear for five years. A little further down the line, and you'll be able to get an implant which will let you remember everything you ever saw. When the interface gets good enough, it will be pointless to worry about whether its stored in neurons or stored on a chip.
BT are already working on the foundations for a device that could be installed in the brain to store everything you ever see,hear feel touch or smell. Its called project "Soul Catcher", I'm not making this up.
And for all those out there who think we're going to evolve into a race of cyborgs: you're crazy... it'll go MUCH further than that.
After all, once people have got decent hardware implanted in their heads, do you think we're going to be satisfied with a 200baud connection (human speech). No, we'll use the hardware in our heads to communicate with other people (through the hardware in their heads). With sufficient communication, it stops making sense to talk about multiple communicating processors - you end up with a single, massively parallel computer. When people get used to taking part in the enhanced meta-brain it will become literally unthinkable to go back being an individual entity. You might as well try to imagine what it would be like to be a mollusc. Don't believe me ? - we already have this idea of "however did we manage without the internet", it's only been in mainstream use for 2 years !
We will become the Borg, but not in a bad way. If you combine the properties of humans and computers and end up with something which does not have the best of both.. then you haven't done it right. The internet will evolve from being a global suppository of all human knowledge into actually being humanity. We will be the nodes on the network. It won't take long either. Just a couple of hundred years or so at this rate.
http://rareformnewmedia.com/
The real emphasis comes down to the almighty dollar. The social impacts are always secondary. Using your electricity example, the electricity phenomenon was a base in which people looked for ways to exploit it for money, ie: lights, motors etc. The folks leveraging electricity (technology) for the most part were not out for the good of the people or to proactively phase in (no pun intended) any ned social impact. They did it to power the factories and to make products that used the base, so that they would benefit monetarily.
Technology has always affected social behaviors, look at the airplane. It was invented and perfected as a novelty, wasn't really accepted for warfare use until late in WW1 and commercial traffic was not a large profit center because it was simply to expensive to make them safe. However, once they did, it shrunk the world, expanding cultures and races and most importantly to the folks who paid to make air travel safe, it made them buckets of money.
Being on the edge of this latest phenomenon is no different. Why is this technological advance so important in relation to the others? It's not if we just look back and learn from our past, both good and bad. So what if this particular advance spawns geeks instead of pilots, if it advances technical cultures rather than third worlds, the mechanics are the same. The folks who preach that this its the big one" for any technological advance are IMO just short sighted and are doomed to make the same mistakes that we've made throughout history. Midville school for the gifted. We have as a species the ability to learn from our past and unfortunately as a species do that all to infrequently.
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Take all good things in moderation, including moderation.
Actually, given the number of posts on this story that you have, and the similar vein they are in, how are we to know that *you* are not just some AI out there...
or maybe I am...
"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
Yes, but all of those sciences existed before the Internet's invention, and long before its popularization. The Net certainly provides interesting examples and helps further research along by smoothing over the obstacles to communicating scientific ideas - but it is fallacious to argue that technologies necessarily inspire scientific progress. A. Keiper
In my reading about Renaissance Italy (limited, I have to admit), and in reading writers like Peter Gay, I don't come across anything that makes me believe they were aware of the history they were making, not outside of the CHurch. Do you disagree?
jonkatz@slashdot.org
Take this, for instance: "... people living within the borders of These United States live not in a democracy, but in a republic, where the rights of the minority are supposed to be protected."
That is, of course, an overly simplistic understanding of political philosophy. A republican form of government does not protect the rights of a minority any differently than a democracy - both can preserve or harm rights. However, a republican form of government better permits the political expression of the interests of a minority than a pure democracy, which could suffer from a "tyranny of the majority."
And yet your dabbling in political philosophy seems to have given you no understanding of basic social contract theory. And let me assure you, the "dead white men" who founded the United States used the word "society" far more often than the goofy terminology you think they intended: "a dynamic, evolving conversation." Puuuh-lease! That's what happens around a dinner table.
You're right, there are clashes between minorities and majorities. And the interests of individuals and societies are sometimes at odds (as in the case of paying taxes). But to say things like "technocrats" somehow "define" what you call "collectives" (including the term "society") runs counter to historical evidence and all common sense.
A. Keiper
I usually read Katz's stuff here, and sometimes even like it, but this time I simply could not get past the first 3 paragraphs. Is it just me, or is there another story every couple months ... about how the Internet is a radically new paradigm that will Change Everything?
Nope, it's not just you. And I've already lost a bunch of karma points after I realized that I couldn't get past the first three paras myself. So I decided to point some of this out, at the danger of my karma.
Look, I'm not saying that Jon hasn't improved, just that this is a throwback to his lame days of posting. And there is no way slashdot should have to suffer through a series of articles that regurgitate more of the same.
Note I've been posting all these without my +1 bonus, so that it didn't interrupt anyone surfing at 2 or higher. As proof of which, I'll post this at my normal +1.
Will in Seattle
But I do look forward to when I can tell my grandchildren, "I actually had to write out my correspondances with friends with this thing called a pencil! I then had to walk uphill both ways to a mailbox that was at the end of our yard!!! Yes, back then, we actually left our homes!"
Most human cultures, and the Americans in paticular, seem to be very adept at making the revolutionary commonplace. All around us we see samples of the pattern. A fringe technology or ideal catches on, is promoted and milked dry by megacorps, and then becomes passe when the next new fringe is discovered. Look at the progressions in musical sounds over the last fifty years. Just about every genre has been through the pattern of Discovery->Mass Marketing->Burnout. Grunge would be a nice recent example. The flannels of yesteryear have given way to the Backstreet shirts of today. Boy bands will fade away as something else catches on. Watch for it.
Sit on the beach some time. Watch the waves form from swells, roar up the beach, and the receed as miry whisps of foam. A whole lotta movement and power, but it never goes anywhere. Welcome to the American mass-market media culture. Some will get sucked out to sea and live forever on the waves of yesterday. Others will stand on the sand and watch every passing fancy tickle their toes. Sure you might be on the crest of the coming wave now, but the swells are endless and your ride is short. Where will you end up when the ride is over?
Once the Internet became the darling of Wall Street and the Engine of the New Economy, the crest started forming from the swell. They promoted its virtues to Joe Average No-mouse-in-my-house American. Everyone grabbed a board and headed into the water. How long of a ride does this wave still offer? When will the Internet become a utility and not a revolution? I dont know. There are other swells out there though. Forget the edge of the Internet, it is just another wave in the ocean.
-BW
Sorry, you're wrong. I don't "assume" that. I'm actually FROM the woods of East Texas, and grew up in a very diverse Dallas neighborhood. My assumption is that children aren't necessarily learning prejudice from society the way our grandparents did. I'm quite aware of where integration still is lacking -- and yes, the suburbs are a big part of that. So is big corporate America, for much the same reasons.
There's lots left to do; my viewpoint is that the Internet is going to accelerate that far beyond what was envisioned even a short while ago.
"You can never have too many elephants on your team."
Once the Internet becomes widespread and cheap, cheap enough that portable Internet communication devices are given away like calculators are today, what will happen to languages with a small user base? Will they end up like Gaelic, Yiddish and many aboriginal languages? Will everyone have to learn English, or perhaps English, Mandarin or Hindustani, to be a fully functional person in the New World?
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Although, I would imagine that we are not the first to think of ourselves as living "on the [insert name here] edge"...think what it must have been like living in Renaissance Italy, for example. They probably said many of the same things about how the world is changing. Dave
We're always living on the edge.
This is just the latest of waves in the whole media revolution, starting with the invention of writing through the printing press, movies, radio, television and now the internet.
It's constantly getting easier to spread information, and that constantly dismays the people in charge, for whom ignorance is bliss, as long as it's our ignorance.
To think that this is some kind of new edge, and not just the constantly advancing crest of the communications wave, is to ignore th vast history leading up to this point.
My Journal
A better analogy (and one used quite often) is, say, the harnessing of electricity for economic use. The period we're in now is definitely some sort of an "edge", but I'd say we're on the cusp of a potential period of social, not scientific, discovery.
It's a lot like the events of the last 40 years in the American South, as integration progressed. Children became less and less likely to learn prejudice as they went to school and did other things with other children of other backgrounds. Racism still exists, but it's no longer a societal norm, and that's a big shift. Similarly, we're going to see more and more internationalization for the same reasons. Unfortunately, human society as a whole doesn't move on "Internet time", so this will still take a while, but it will happen. Children will start realizing there are more viewpoints than just the ones they grew up with, and that will mark an even more profound shift in thinking than the integration the US has gone through, because this time it will be far more universal.
Most (though certainly not all) "geeks" have already learned this. How many of us here really give a flip about somebody's race? That's because we've learned to connect with people of different backgrounds, whether that's online, offline, or both.
The Internet is not a huge scientific advance, but an engineering one. And like many great engineering efforts, it's effects will be far more societal than scientific.
"You can never have too many elephants on your team."
One of the things that has bothered me about this conversation for awhile is that it seems to indicate that people can either be geeks or jocks. Or to use the metaphore above can either use garden.com or advocate limits on what children can view.
IMHO I want to be able to use the internet and computers for what they good for (collecting information, making a living) but then I want to be able to go out and LIVE.
My real point is that in all things balance is they key. A child who spends all their time on the net is going to feel isolated, because they are, but another child who uses it to research their homework, and the computer to finish up the project, but then goes outside an plays with friends, even *gasp* plays sports, is going to have a much more balanced view of life.
Technology is not an either or proposition.
Stefik is right in the fact that there is always a terrible, and sometimes bloody, response to new technology and the ideas that follow.
Witness the Protestant reformation of Europe, where Guttenburg's Press was used by the Protestants to make Martin Luther's translation of the bible into German, which allowed more people to read (information wants to be free?) the Bible. The bloodshed that the Catholic church committed to stop the Reformation was astounding.
Many people say that the Reformation could not have occured without the printing press, which ended the church's monopoly on learning....now, the bonds on learning have slipped more...this makes for some interesting years ahead.
The Internet, still in its first primitive stages, is in a state Stefik calls "becoming."
Wasn't that more like 5-10 years ago, I think we have gotten stage 1 done already, all the frame work is down on paper (or in the ground on wires), it feels like now it is more like stage 2 or 3...
Seriously look at all the AOL users out there, the Internet is avaiable to people besides geeks, and the "normal people" not only know what it is, most of them want to get on it (if they aren't all ready).
If my grandparents use a technolgey it means that it is no longer bleeding edge and means that it is now mainstream and socially acceptable. The first stage of anything is not defined like this, the first stage of anything is small, obsecure, not well defined and sometimes not socailly acceptable, Hrmm how would you descripe the Internet 7 years ago?
The first stage is set and done, moving on to Act 2 (or 3-4)
There is still some issuses to work out like bandwidth, laws, who owns what, etc, I am not saying that we are done, the Internet will be continuely growing and adapting, but the first basic parts have been accomplished.
J(ust)MHO
"`Ford, you're turning into a penguin. Stop it.'" -THHGTTG
His premise this round is that a growing number of people in the world -- especially the people reading this -- are present at one of the greatest technological events ever. They're on the Internet Edge, right on the boundary between the past and an enormous array of changes being driven by the rise of networked computing.
True, sort of, but people living in every age where there is progress can claim that they are on the "edge" of a revolution. Looked at from a distance, the small peaks average out into a smooth, exponential curve marching ever upwards. To claim that the internet is more revolutionary than the internal combustion engine, the harnissing of electricity or even the first person to make a tool from stone is a conceit it is easy to fall into - that events happening now are somehow different from those that happened before.
This is understandable - after all, we're the ones living in those events and we see the changes as they occur all around us, and so they seem sweeping and important. But in a hundred years time people will look back at the "internet revolution" and compare it to the "far bigger" changes occuring to them and their society. It's all a matter of perspective.
The fact is that every significant breakthrough brings about changes in the way that society functions. It's just that the internet is the new technology that's happening now - in twenty years time it could be nanotechnology - which of course will make the internet revolution look small :)
It would appear that communications has developed to the point where it is coming full-circle. We have developed from the verbal tradition at the tribal level to a hierarchical mass-media situation in which the individual has little voice and even less decision in the content of the information flow to a modern hybrid -- anyone can have a voice, anyone can choose what they want to know more about, and anyone anywhere in the world can access that information.
Why, you may ask, is this important?
The methodology of communications directly affects the socio-political structures of its culture. Back in the pre-writing days, verbal tradition tied tribes together. Interactivity (the ability of people to question the material and get direct responses) existed, but the ability to reliably exchange that information with people outside the tribe was inhibited for obvious reasons. This basically creates a socio-political structure that is inherently small (no more than a few hundred people per group), and a structure that is more or less equal.
Mass media (printing press era up to the dawn of the Internet) was basically the opposite. You lacked interactivity, but your message could reach large numbers of people with ease. This system allows for a more authoritarian setup/more rigid power structure, as communications become more one-way, people become more and more used to being told what to think and are more likely to follow along.
What the Internet has done is to combine these two forms -- and as a result, the socio-political structure of the world is beginning to change. The lashing-out of religions, governments, and the Average Joe is due to a realization, at least on a subconscious level, that the old ways of doing things are going to go away.
What's happening is that the new methodology of communication is creating more of a global tribe than a culture.
Culture is something that is forced upon us by mass media, where tribal associations are something we create ourselves in response to our basic human needs.
Everyone has certain material and spiritual needs, and the Internet allows us to fulfill those needs in a new method that has nothing to do with the current socio-political structure.
Will the outcome be bloody? Maybe. Maybe not. But whatever the case, change is afoot.
blog |
I completely agree with El Volio's astute comment - this set of technological changes does not necessarily presage a scientific age. There have been a great many instances of technological advance in history that had barely any scientific implications. (Of course, science is indeed being stimulated, by things like journalistic "skywriting" online, because every information technology has eased the discussion of discovery.)
As for there being lots of opponents of technology who strongly deride every advance, well, of course there are always going to be as many neophobes and neophiles. But technology's advance (as James Burke has shown again and again) is nearly unstoppable; the best a society can do is hope to direct it.
A. Keiper
The Center for the Study of Technology and Society
Washington, D.C.
Yes, the world is changing. The world has been changing since the world has been a world, and it isn't going to stop. Change is the one "constant" that can be counted on. The largest problems all people face is when they get secure in the current ways, and decide that the current way is the best POSSIBLE (rather than best current) way to do things. When this happens, people get old. The world moves on around and without them and you end up hearing things like "In my day, such and such was.."
So it really should come as no surprise that much of our society is all freaked about the impending changes. Most of our (US) citizens are in their "declining" years and (to quote S. King) the "world has moved on" since their youth. The trick to remaining young (and therefore flexible) is to embrace the changes that are coming, because they ARE coming.
Churches will always be one of the first to start shouting about the huge cataclysmic dangers of any new movement in society. After all, their whole stock & trade is in the current (old) way of thinking, breathing, interacting. All of their interests are wrapped up in the old way, and change would effectively remove them from their coveted places of power.
-The Reverend
-The Reverend (I am not a Nazi nor a Troll)
=(.\')=
Um, am I the only one to whom this seems like nothing more than an advertisement? I mean, frankly, it seems like Mr. Katz is either friends with the author, or is getting some sort of cut of the profits, because this column strikes me as nothing more than a big promo piece for the book. Example -- count the number of times he uses "Edge" with a capital "e." It's striking. Katz doesn't seem nearly so interested in discussing/reviewing the book as he does in promoting it. I question the value and ethics of this piece.
The Internet is already fostering a social revolution, but the scientific fallout is going to be a second- or third-order effect at most.
--
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
Maybe we're changing too slowly. Maybe these reactionaries are dragging us back, keeping us from reaching our potential.
On the other hand, maybe we're going at the right speed, but in the wrong direction. Large corporations now believe they "own" the Internet. That's not progress. That's one step short of owning us.
One thing we definitely need, IMO, is a superset of the current domain name system, more flexible, semi-decentralized and used on a voluntary basis. Although it'd get weird if we had to connect to a distant server if our local DNS doesn't support it. Of course, eventually, demand would make it nearly ubiquitous. And it'd be a thorn in the side of Big Money. Maybe more restrictions on commercial abuse^H^H^H^H^Hactivity could be made.
After all, it is only semi decentralized. >:-)
Stay up hacking each weekend. Sleep is for the week.
I can't tell if your point is about technology generally or the Internet in particular - but in both cases, society attempts to adapt to and regulate the technology and succeeds to a certain degree. By "society" I don't merely mean government, but ordinary people, making the decisions that affect their lives. The claim "society doesn't exist" is as true as the statement "technology doesn't exist"; you seem to have a problem with generalizations.
Would you care to elaborate upon your cryptic concluding statement? "'Society' can either adapt or disappear, the latter being the more likely conclusion." I'd be interested to hear what you mean.
A. Keiper
While I too have been thinking about just how the 'net is the "cutting edge" (Katz, you're no pioneer in these concepts), I've also come to realize that there are certain careers that spring up out of different needs:
the innovator - the people who make the technology, whether it be the physicist in the lab working on condensed matter, the engineer in the processor fab working on smaller die sizes, and even the programmer hacking out the next great database, or crypto program.
the maintainer - the sysadmins, web monkeys, database programmers, and system repair people who work with those tools that were given to them to create new things.
IMO, (and this is certainly gonna seem like a troll), only the first group really matters, and it's where (mainly), the brains lie. As a network admin, sadly, I fall into the second group. I grad'ed with a BS in physics, but with the relative openness of the market, I decided to put any further education on hold.
Now, this is not to say that there aren't very intelligent people maintaining computer systems, but for the most part, maintainers are filling a gap, that essentially plumbers did when closed plumbing came into existance.
People like Carmack, and Trovalds, and the researchers @ Cornell are doing the stuff that's putting us on the edge, IMO, it's not a good idea to get them mixed up with the maintainers...
Q: What do you think about American Culture?
A: I think it's a good idea.
(adapted from Gandhi)