Part One: The Internet Edge

Net scholar Mark Stefik has written The Internet Edge, Social, Technical and Legal Challenges for a Networked World, an effort to put in perspective and historical context this amazing, unnerving moment in human and technological history. Happily or not, we are all now living on the Internet Edge. The real change is just beginning. First of a series discussing some of the ideas raised in the book. (Read More). "An edge...marks the limits of who you are and what you imagine yourself capable of ... One of the things about an edge is that it represents a really huge identity crisis. On the right side...is a new identity. One the left side is an old identity." Stefik, a principal scientist and manager of the Human Document Interactions Area at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center and the author of Internet Dreams (MIT Press, l996), is one of the smartest thinkers and writers about the Net and the electric communities forming online.

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.)

Comments

This is not a scientific discovery

[El Volio]

This is technological progress, not a scientific discovery. It doesn't really compare with, say, the periodic table; that's apples and oranges.

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.