The Digital Revolution - Living up to the Hype?

Logic Bomb writes "There is a short editorial [free reg. req.] over at the New York Times that talks about how the Digital Revolution really hasn't made as much of a difference in people's lives as some other developments in recent history - electricity, hot running water, medical progress, and others. The author, noted (and humorous!) economist Paul Krugman, thinks it's just not that much of a revolution yet. Does the Slashdot community agree? What possible future developments do people think must be made a reality before the Digital Revolution transforms human life as much as the Industrial Revolution?"

Comments

The Impact Of The Digital Revolution

[Bowie J. Poag]

...I think this guy has got it wrong. The "digital revolution" (if you even wanna call it that) hasn't been around long enough to really have a an accurate assessment of its impact on things. Most people in this country didn't even fathom the idea of using a computer for day-to-day things up until just a few years ago. Like hot water, indoor plumbing an electricity, digital technology will become less of a novelty and more of a necessity as time goes on.

Want proof? Ok, take television for example. The technology has been around since the late 1920's, but its impact as a medium wasn't really felt until the mid 1960's. Take radio. Its been around since 1910 or so, but its impact as a medium wasn't felt until the 1940's and 50's.

We've got along way to go with this..Things are just getting started. To say something like the digital revolution hasn't had any impact is fairly short-sighted..Its too early to judge the big picture. Here we have a technology that has the capability to collectively educate millions of people, keep everyone in touch worldwide and beyond, and allow us to work more wisely & efficiently as a species. To say that this sort of thing wont have an impact down the line is like saying the Gutenberg press was only good for smashing grapes.

My $0.02,

Bowie J. Poag

Perhaps the revolution has barely started yet

[Sebbo]

I agree that if the information revolution has now happened it ain't all of that, but what if it's just starting?

For good or ill, in a few decades, virtually everyone may be connected all the time. Then it will be time to compare

Re:it has had an impact, but the impact is limited

[YIAAL]

Yeah, you're right. Though I still think indoor plumbing is a bigger deal.

Re:What happended to the 4 day workweek?

[Chandon Seldon]

The lack of a 4 day workweek is a result of the political and economic systems you are working in.

The particiular form of capitolism used the USA and many other parts of the world today tends to optimise for the wealth of corporate shareholders, not the shortest work week for average workers.

The high taxes and low efficiency of usage in the USA just compound this problem. If there were no income tax and no social security collection, that would straight out allow a 3 or 4 day work week, because everyone would just have more money.

Just give it time

[rgmoore]

The problem isn't that the digital revolution isn't that great, it's that genuine revolutions take a lot longer than most people appreciate. It's easy to look at how much difference things like electricity and running water make in our lives and describe them as revolutionary, but they probably seemed pretty weak to the people who experienced the change. That's because it took a long time for the real imact to be felt.

Take cars as an example. The first primitive automobiles were built in the late 19th century, but didn't have much impact because they were just rich mens' playthings. It wasn't until the 1920's that even the most forward thinking communities really started planning themselves around the revolutionary changes in lifestyle that the automobile made possible, and most cities didn't really start to reorganize until after WWII. That's something like 70 years between first invention and really dramatic public impact.

The same thing is true of just about every big invention/discovery. It took 40+ years between Relativity and its first practical application (unfortunately a nasty one). It's almost 50 years since the structure of DNA was discovered, and the big changes that's going to bring us are clearly still in the future. It shouldn't be surprising that nearly 60 years after the first computer we're still not really fully into the computer age.

That being said, I think that it's easy to underestimate the importance of computers, particularly for older people who didn't grow up with them. People in the Slashdot generation, though, use computers very differently from the older generation, and they play a much bigger role in our lives. Why? Because we grew up with them and the radical things that they can do. That's the way it is with a lot of revolutions; the older generation never fully adopts the changes, and it isn't until they die off that the full impact is felt.

Times Editorials?

[jpowers]

Electricity, of course, is a bigger deal and always will be. Phones and the other stuff can't be as big as electricity. Think about it: You can buy pure energy, and direct it into any amount of force. How can anything compete with that?

Besides, electricity took a little while, too. You had lights and then radio, but the electric appliance revolution didn't really pick up until after WWII.

T.Hobbes is right, digital stuff only adds functionality to electricity and phones. For now, the rest of us are just early adopters, but once the appliance flood starts...

So the Times can check back in another 50-75 years to see if digitization's had a big enough effect on society for them.

-jpowers

it has had an impact, but the impact is limited

[T.Hobbes]

if you expect a new development to change the world, you'll inevitably be dissapointed. if, rather, you understand that each new development has its place, then you can see the value of its impact. The telephone had an impact, but it didn't change every aspect of everyone's life; the same goes for the digital revolution. It has allowed the transfer of information to proceed at rates unheard of before, but that's all it is: the transfer of information. By itself, its impact is limited; in conjunction with other elements of society, its impact is much larger, as it adds to the utility and effectiveness of existing technologies.

.. at least that's what i think!

Re:it has had an impact, but the impact is limited

[lamz]

The impact is incredible, but people are either too young or forgetful to realize. I'm 29, but here is one solid example that I remember from my childhood in the 1970s:

Banks used to be closed on weekends, and were only open from around 10-4 on Mondays to Wednesdays, and 10-6 on Thursdays and Fridays. There was no such thing as direct deposit, so everyone had to take their paycheques to the bank. Most people got paid on Wednesday or Thursday, in order to hit the one-hour window during their lunch-hour the following day, or the one-hour window after work on either Thursday or Friday.

There was no such thing as ABMs, direct-debit payments at stores, and credit cards were not nearly as widespread as they are now, so most purchases were with cash. If you missed your one-hour opportunity to deposit your cheque and get enough cash for a week, then you were screwed until Monday at lunch.

Aside: You know the little fence posts that denote the line-up area at the bank? Each one of those had an ashtray built into the top, and half the people in line were smoking the whole time.

Don't poo-poo the digital revolution if you were born well after it started. Ask someone old, like me, and they'll tell you about long distance phone calls for around $1 a minute, buying 16k memory packs for a ZX-81, being amazed by arcade games like Pac-Man, and that you could change the channel without getting up from your chair.
Mike van Lammeren

Re:it has had an impact, but the impact is limited

[rnturn]

``Banks used to be closed on weekends, and were only open from around 10-4 on Mondays to Wednesdays, and 10-6 on Thursdays and Fridays.''

Depends on where you lived. I took out the cash for my first car late on a Saturday afternoon... from a drive-through.

There was no such thing as direct deposit, so everyone had to take their paycheques to the bank. Most people got paid on Wednesday or Thursday, in order to hit the one-hour window during their lunch-hour the following day, or the one-hour window after work on either Thursday or Friday.

I seem to recall that going to the bank was not such the big deal that you think it was... of course, you would have been a toddler in those days. I remember running into friends at the bank. Also, the need for instant cash that everyone seems to have now wasn't so widespread. I worked some summers at places that would cash employee's checks at the job site. (Mainly, we thought, so they could blow it all on beer when they got off work. Me? I could always wait until Saturday morning when I could walk to the bank.)

``There was no such thing as ABMs,...''

There still aren't. They're prohibited by a treaty. (I know, I know... you meant A- T -Ms.)

``...direct-debit payments at stores, and credit cards were not nearly as widespread as they are now, so most purchases were with cash. If you missed your one-hour opportunity to deposit your cheque and get enough cash for a week, then you were screwed until Monday at lunch.''

Most stores accepted checks for purchases. Nowadays, clerks look at you like you're from Mars when you want to pay with a check. If you were incapable of managing your money, I can see where not having 24x7 access to your bank could be a problem. Most people were able to plan their expenditures and have the appropriate amount of real cash on available, otherwise theyd write a check. As far as the easy availability of credit cards, one could argue that easy access to credit has not been such a good thing. You rarely heard of people declaring bankruptcy back in the good old '70s. Nowadays, it seems that every other person you meet has had a credit card revoked or has declared Chapter Something-or-other because they got themselves into financial trouble via easy access to credit. Not exactly progress, IMHO.

I'm not all that sentimental about those days. I just don't think that they were as bad as some people make them out to be. Things weren't bad, just different.
--

What happended to the 4 day workweek?

[Anonymous Coward]

In the 70s, it was predicted that with all the modern "tools" that were coming out, that we would have more time on our hands and would only have to work a 4 day work week.

Surprise, I'm working even more.. So much for computers and technology making life easier for us.

We do seem to have more time to post comments to slashdot though, maybe its not so bad after all...

Re:What happended to the 4 day workweek?

[Reality Master 101]

If there were no income tax and no social security collection, that would straight out allow a 3 or 4 day work week, because everyone would just have more money.

No, everyone would still work 5 day weeks, because they would want more money. Everyone already can work 4 days for the most part, except people like high living standards more. Look at how many parents sacrifice their children by working two jobs rather than just cutting back their lifestyle.

Granted, I think taxes are too high, but that's not the only reason.

And it has nothing to do with "corporate shareholders", considering that people work far harder in small companies with way fewer benefits than in large companies.

To tell you the truth, I think workers are unbelievable spoiled as it is compared to 100 years ago. 40 hours a week, out of 168? That's a vacation to those of us who have small companies.

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Re:What happended to the 4 day workweek?

[Black Parrot]

> If there were no income tax and no social security collection, that would straight out allow a 3 or 4 day work week, because everyone would just have more money.

While I generally agree with your post, that last part was IMO a bit over the top. If there was no income tax, and no other new or raised taxes to replace it, people would end up spending their "just have more money" maintaining the country's infrastructure. Or perhaps they would prefer to let it decay in order to "just have more money" in the short run, in which case I suspect that their wage earning ability would plummet after a few years.


--

Tip for the newbie

[Kaufmann]

To bypass the "free registration required" BS on any NYT article, just replace the "www" in the URL by "partners": like this. Good readin'!

(No, it's not "Redundant". You may already know about this; some don't. It's useful nonetheless.)

The Revolution is Only Beginning

[John Murdoch]

Hi!

It must be a slow news day at the New York Times....

This editorial is asking and answering a simple, but stupid, question: is the "digital revolution" as significant as electricity? Or the internal combustion engine? Or modern medicine?

Well, gosh, no. Except....

There is absolutely nothing technologically significant about the internal combustion engine. It is the product of relatively low-precision machine work with an astonishingly small degree of innovation from year to year. There is a LOT that is technologically significant about how the internal is USED, however. Electricity--it was a curiosity in the 18th century that was celebrated by "philosophical gentlemen" who usually died trying to play with it. It was technologically meaningless, UNTIL it was put to use.

In the 15th century a group of Germans achieved an astonishing technological breakthrough: they were able to machine wooden (and later metal) parts to tolerances of less than 1/1000 of an inch. A big deal? Yes! Nobody--anywhere in the world--could achieve that precision. But was it a technological breakthrough?

The Reformation didn't happen because a bunch of Germans developed precision measurement and machining. It happened because those Germans were led by Johannes Gutenberg, and what they were machining was moveable type. What they created is still the most significant technological advancement in the history of the world.

So how does the Digital Revolution stack up? We're WAY too quick to be judging. The revolution is only just starting, and it will be decades before we fully understand just how far-reaching it will become. Just as a f'rinstance, consider this: the Chinese student uprising in 1989 was largely driven by the fax machine. Consider the impact of email, especially with strong encryption, on repressive governments everywhere. It is entirely possible that we will witness dramatic political changes around the world in the next decades due to the "digital revolution." That may be good (like the Soviets, the empire collapses peacefully) or bad ( like the Yugoslavs, the old order dies in flames). But either way, the impact of something as low-tech as email, coupled with something as "digital" as strong encryption, will be substantial.

the digital revolution

[DAVEO]

will make possible many new advances in human life. as we saw in tne new york time article last week, it will (and already has) spawn new progress in the medical fields, increase productivity, and, as we are already witnessing, let people tens of thousands of miles away talk with each other, having a worldwide combining effect on culture as television did in the u.s. when it first came out.

perhaps the most important (or significant) advance will be in convenience. think how your daily life would be without electronics. not very fun, eh? and to compare the digital revolution to others isn't right, the industrial revolution took many decades, we're just starting the digital revolution, there is much to come. go back 50 years, and see how far we've come. it is big indeed

Corporatism - The Evil Empire

[Peter Dyck]

The reason why we are working even more today has nothing to do with the available technology. It has, however, everything to do with the prevalent political dogma that permeates the modern, post cold war societies in North America and Europe.

Corporatism.

As a demonstration of how little society's technological level correlates with its sense of morality, today's technology has been harnessed to the service of the meta-national corporate elite and their dogs-of-war, namely the law enforcement and military institutions.

While the technology already exists to allow people to work 4 days a week or even less and still maintain a sufficient, ecologically sustainable zero growth production level, this would not benefit the corporate elite. They benefit solely from maintaining the hybris of continuous growth; keeping people consuming more and more regardless of whether they need all the material goodness or not. In this great scheme of things the role for us, the little people, is that of the unquestioning and obedient consumer living in fear and under the gun of the law enforcement establishment. A consumer ready to sell out his fellow man in vain hope of getting something in return from his corporate masters. The ultimate nightmare of a good consumer would be the fall of his benefactors and collapse of the entire corporate world. No-one to tell him what to think; what is right, what is wrong, what is good, what is bad. It is the human condition.

This is the trap into which we have been lured in by false promises of comfort and safety. This is the prison from which we must escape.

-Peter Dyck

Re:Much of the revolution is invisible

[Black Parrot]

> Like advances in the past, the most important aspect is that productivity increases

If you listen, you frequently hear voices asking whether the USA's multi-trillion dollar IT investment has actually led to any tangible productivity increases.

I know that in the places I have worked there has been a marked tendancy for employees to fiddle with their computers rather than actually using them for productive purposes. This ranges everywhere from playing games at work (how many people do you know who like to turn their screen where it can be seen from the doorway?) down to the steady stream of clubies marching down to roust the guru out to show them for the thousandth time how to change fonts, screensavers, sound associations, etc.

I think electronic productivity is like the paper-free society. It sounds good in principle, but in practice you have more people throwing away paper than ever before.

Then there's the world of embedded processors; I don't notice elevators and stop lights to be any more efficient than they were before.

For me, the null hypothesis is that the digital revolution has been incremental at best, and probably counterproductive in at least some areas. I will hold that null hypothesis until I see substantial evidence to the contrary.

That's not to say that it couldn't make a grand difference, nor that it hasn't already in some areas. I just don't think it has in the big picture.

But lots of interesting posts are pouring in; perhaps I'll feel otherwise within an hour or so.

--

Take Control of Your Life

[goingware]

I feel that the digital revolution has lived up to its expectations in my case because I have chosen to take control of my life.

There's a discussion of what happened to the four day work week below with the consensus that it never came about because of corporatism.

As long as people just stay in their jobs and do what the boss expects of you, the boss can keep turning up the speed on the machine and you have to keep up.

Not all of you are in the position to do what I do, but you could do something appropriate to yourself.

I became a consultant

It is still the case that I work long hours, but usually this is because I choose to. When I take time off is almost always under my control. I work at home, and I could work in the nude if I wanted to (I find office dress in the home office makes me more productive though).

Note that this is different from telecommuting. I used to telecommute too, but it really didn't serve my needs. It invited the corporate master into my home.

It is also different from being a contract programmer for a body shop. Read about my decision not to work with recruiters or agencies and why they are bad for both employers and employees.

There are a few aspects of the digital revolution that made this all possible:

• I find customers almost entirely through the web. I explain how in Market Yourself - Tips for High Tech Consultants

• Laptops are suffiently powerful that I can use a laptop as my primary development machine for commercial programming on a variety of operating systems. Read about my laptop here. This allows me to travel or live anywhere and have my development system at-hand.

• With good phone service and a high-speed internet connection and online shopping I can operate my business from St. John's Newfoundland and live in a much nicer place than Silicon Valley.

The most important factor in all of this is to make the conscious choice to take advantage of the opportunities afforded by high-tech yourself. If you don't make the choice I'm sure Time-Warner or Microsoft will be happy to make your decisions for you.

Many geeks are shy people who are easily taken advantage of by those with more social skills - such as managers at high-tech companies, salemen and the like. The first step in taking control of your life will come when you can say "no" to your boss.

I learned to say no to a difficult boss and my life at the company got better. I stopped working all nighters. And not too long after that I learned to stop feeling loyalty to a company that didn't care about me and went looking for a new job. Between one friday and the following monday my pay doubled.

Read The Cluetrain Manifesto for more information on how the Internet is restoring personal power to the individual and taking it away from the corporation.

Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow

Read www.cluetrain.com

[goingware]

The Cluetrain Manifesto is all about how computers and the Internet are taking away power from corporate control and returning it to the people - both the customers and individual workers at the companies.

Consider that when my former employer Live Picture announced that it was moving from scenic, rural Scotts Valley, California to Silicon Valley, the first thing I did (three hours after the announcement) was type up a page-long resignation with a detailed discussion of why I thought it was a miserable idea - and email it to each person in the heirarchy up in the company from my project manager to the Chief Executive Officer. I understand our expensive new CEO that was hand-picked by John Sculley was pretty furious about it (she got fired about a year later).

Consider further that I could then use the Altavista advanced search for boolean expressions like employment and programming and 95060 (repeated for each of the Santa Cruz County zip codes) allowed me to write the original form of this page:

The Santa Cruz County Computer Industry Index

whose URL I then emailed around the company to help my coworkers find new local jobs so they wouldn't have to commute over the hill.

Individual action has existed throughout history. What the Internet has done is made it much more effective.

Anyone can speak out, and their speech can be accessed by anyone else almost instantly. Companies can try to carefully control communication between themselves and the market (or their vendors) but individual actions such as the one I took when my employer announced a really annoying policy design can make their efforts futile.

Consider that Microsoft is working hard to win over the court of public opinion to prevent its breakup.

How effective is that actually, today? How much more effective would that have been 15 years ago when Microsoft could have controlled the industry media and folks like us couldn't have spoken out effectively.

Re:Washing machine and vacuum cleaner

[lamz]

"I do not see any improvement of that magnitude with computers."

I disagree with you. If you disagree with me, then write out your answer on a piece of paper and mail it to me.

Mike van Lammeren

Re:It's not the web alone.

[rgmoore]

The same will happen now. The digital revolution alone will not make big waves in our dayly lives. But combine it with new revolutions in bio (gene) tech and nano-tech and the start of the corperate republic and it will make at least as much waves as the last big revolution.

The big thing to consider is the extent to which the digital revolution is necessary for those other revolutions. Sequencing the Human Genome is going to have a huge impact on biology and medicine, and it would be completely impossible without digital computers. It's just not possible to deal with as much data as is a genome any other way, much less the much large ammount of data that is generated in producing that genome. Lincoln Stein, a leading bioinformaticist and Perl hacker, has estimated that it will require about 1 TB of total data to generate the roughly 1 GB human genome.

The same thing is obviously true of a lot of other potential revolutions. If the first practical nanotech devices (if there ever is such a thing) aren't designed on digital computers, I'll eat my hat. An it's not just future developments that depend on digital media. A lot of those older technologies that have been so revolutionary, like cars, trains, the electrical grid, mass-media, modern medicine, etc., may not have depended on computers originally but they do today and it would be almost impossible to go back.

Just to pick cars as an example, every mass-market car being designed and built today was designed, at least in part, on a computer. All modern cars are built on assembly lines that make heavy use of computer driven robotics. They depend on parts that are delivered by computer dependent just-in-time delivery systems, and they rely on so many on-board computers that they have to be extensively tested for negative effects caused by RF interference. Almost nobody would be willing to buy the best car that could be made without any use of computers because it would be so much more expensive and much lower quality than those that make extensive use of computers.

Re:Much of the revolution is invisible

[Black Parrot]

> Most every stop light I visit has a sensor that makes it turn green if I'm sitting there and nobody else is coming.

FWIW, just this morning I sat for an extremely long time at a light where no one was crossing in the other direction. (Perhaps merely post-thunderstorm FOOBARation.)

Clearly, this one counterexample is not enough to dismiss the whole digital revolution on. And lots of other people are pointing out other interesting things I hadn't thought of. Still, it looks to me like it's evolutionary rather than revolutionary. Three steps forward, two back, and all that.

--

Space Age

[Black Parrot]

> Unfortunately, the media has hyped everything up to the point of unbelievability, and everyone's wondering why they still have to drive to work.

Yeah, before we lived in the Information Age, we lived in the Space Age. Where's the promise? Sure, satellites contribute a lot to communications and weather forecasting, and planetary probes contribute a lot so certain branches of science. But it's still kind of a joke to call it the Space Age.

BTW, nice post. And not only is the Reading Revolution still in progress, but we couldn't even try to have a Digital Revolution without it.

Over the long haul, I suspect AIDS and Megacorporations will shape the world more than the Digital Revolution does. Probably also some other things that stand out less obviously than AIDS and MCs do.
--

Re:Space Age

[Black Parrot]

> Do you really think that massive, geographically distributed, tightly integrated megacorps could exist without modern digital communications?

East India Company?

Yeah, digital helps, a lot, but so do frequent flier miles and doughnuts. I just think there are (probably) going to be a lot of direct social and political consequences of MCs (and AIDS) that outweigh the direct social and political consequences of the DR.

Perhaps I'm wrong. I'm pretty optimistic about the role the internet is playing in giving the Little Guy a voice (so long as he isn't too poor to go on line), though unfortunately I expect to see it 0wned and regulated to the point that it's ultimately no more revolutionary than the telephone and newspaper have been for the past 100 years.

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worldwide economic consequences

[MillMan]

Most comments here point out why the digital revolution has been important, and I'm inclined to agree with most. But the article itself and everyone here has seemed to miss a point of the internet/information revolution: the fact that many people on this planet are becoming obsolete by market logic or even more obsolete than they were before. The result, of course, is lack of access to a modern lifestyle and thus a life of poverty in general.

Whenever the technological complexity of the word/economy increases, the "cost of entry" goes up; as in the amount of education you need to be able to do work in such an economy, as well as the monetary cost of providing you with that education.

So lets take a look at Africa. Africa has never been modernized in general, and has basically been in ruins since around WW2 (when I beleive colonialism ended). In the 80's, a lot of African countries decided they wanted to start modernizing. Loans were granted, projects were run, and it pretty much failed. Loans couldn't be paid. SO the IMF and the world bank stepped in. One of their main points in their fiscal restructuring for these countries was to make sure than "social spending" was kept to a minimum, which includes education, medical care, social well being in general. So at precisely the time that education has become even more important, it gets thrown out the window.

To get Africa back on track, we can't just donate computers to them and expect the problem to be solved. 150 years ago it would have been much simpler, but look what needs to be put in place today: stable political structures, transporation and electric infastructure, social institutions (also for stability) and educational infastructure. That's no easy task.

The market certainly won't correct this problem. Whats the incentive? Today Africa is used mainly for its natural resources, with corporations usally getting an unfair price while the heads of state are paid off. Even if it got a fair price for its resources, basing your economy off of this hasn't worked for probably 150 years: today you need advanced manufactured goods, and services. Now the market can't correct political issues in Africa, but it would be silly to ignore the fact that large corporations have a stake in this corruption, with nearly free labor and resources. There is no toher profit to be made, and thus no investment back into the community.

The situation at home is similar. While everyone is talking about how its such a workers market, people have lots of money, etc, is only partially true, in reality the population is becoming highly polarized. So while myself with my EE degree can make pretty good money, that kid in the ghetto, even if he has computers at his/her school, has a low chance of making it this far.

Social spending in the US has been cut quite a bit in recent years, in relation to defense and law enforement, anyway. People though cutting welfare would help, but it hasn't. It just makes poor people poorer, even if they have a job. So at exactly the time when education spending needs to go up significantly (especially for those who have poor schools to begin with) it hasn't.

Now, you might be saying by now that I'm just a bleeding heart liberal, and I pretty much am. Fixing social issues isn't directly related to technology issues. I understand that. But you can't deny the higher cost of entry into today's economy, and how many people simply don't have it.

The worlds governments and institutions simply haven't figured out a way to realign themselves to give equal access and opportunity to all.

Change is about more than commodity goods

[sansbury]

By his measures, the printing press, TV, and radio didn't matter for much either, since they didn't make people directly able to buy more stuff right off the bat.

The digital revolution will change the way the world gets things done even if it doesn't change the amount of things that get done. I'm willing to bet it will change both.

Krugman seems to have made his bid to join the list of people who said things like, "A Wheel! Who needs one?," "Man will never fly," and "no one will ever need more than 640k of ram."

-cwk.

The missing point...

[mindstrm]

The digital revolution may be upon us.. but it seems to me we're in the very beginnings of it, not near the end.

Many geeks can see it, we dream it.. sci-fi predicts it in a way..... the real digital revolution is barely even started... we're just getting the seeds in now.

Of course it hasn't radically changed the world yet.. the industrial revolution took more than 5 years..... this one will probably take 20!

Digital Revolution

[dorzak]

The digital Revolution has had a HUGE impact. However it is not as noticable as the others. We don't tend to think of how much work digital is making or saving us. However with running water we can point to the pump, the bucket, and say see I don't need those anymore. Digital is part of everything. It is an enabling revolution, for good or for bad. How many people now are involved in the stock market who weren't before? Sure they may not trade online, but they can deal with a local or phone call broker because he can now get that information faster and more reliably since the digital revolution. It used to be you had to call a brokerage in New York, or your agent did to get the actual transaction done. Transaction times were measured in days. Now they are measured in hours and sometimes minutes. Brokerages use to discourage you from making trades often because they had to hand compute, or with at most a calculator helping, the tax information. Wait, that calculator could arguably be called digital. The source of information the broker used were expensive. Now most of them use cheap TCP/IP to get the information. The digital revolution is an ungoing and a stealth revolution. Computers are part of it. Linux is part of it. Open Source thrives because of it. Take a look at early accounts of the BSD project. They used SNAIL MAIL to send huge reels of tape to developers, users, etc. Think about that.

Re:Digital Revolution

[babbage]

By citing the stock market, I think you're missing the point. Having running water or flowing electricity had a direct & immediate impact on the quality of life for millions of people. Being able to buy or sell shares of stock faster is a nice perk for a small percentage, but even for them has little impact on quality of life. You may have have a good point, but this isn't the evidence to prove it.

I can't decide if all this digital hoohah is making the world a better place or not. Certainly there is a considerable minority that stands to gain much from it -- I would include the Slashdot audience among that number. But there's a much larger majority that, if they feel any impact from it, it's only going to be indirectly -- at least for now.

Access to quick information keeps getting bandied about as the next big revolution, in the spirit of the space age, the industrial age, etc. I dunno, I guess. Certainly the current new wave of technological innovation [1] has had a massive impact on our economy. But are these changes good? Profits are up, salaries aren't. Job security is a relic. Stock holders are cashing in -- and more people are becomign stock holders -- but that leaves a couple of problems, like what about the rest of us that aren't in on the market. More importantly, what about the ones that are in the market -- if it crashes, as I'm sure it will sooner or later, where will these young workers with crap salaries and worthless stock options be? Our success is by no means assured.

But that's just the economic side of things. Things like water, electricity, and the telephone had benefits far beyond the economic. They enabled a whole new range of activities while making a large number of older ones simpler or even unnecessary (going to the well, etc). What does the info revolution offer to the average Joe? On one hand, he doesn't ever have to go to a library again if all the books are already out there. Why call your friends cross country when you can chat for free at your computer? Why, indeed, would you ever have to leave your home at all?

The digital age unquestionably brings great benefits, but it also brings great dangers. It's not unique in this (plumbing might have brought, say, cholera, and electricity of course brought electrocution) and I'm not yet sure how the good and bad sides balance out here. I think that won't be clear for several years to come. If we transform from a nation of couch potatos into a nation of desk potatos, that isn't necessarily an improvement. I am looking to see how things unfold over the coming years before forming an opinion on this matter...

[1] (Does anyone else hate using that word now? Is it just me?)

The media and revolutions

[dbarclay10]

Let's face it. For the past ten years, the media has hyped up everything to h*ll and back. There's no avoiding it these days. One enthusiastic reporter feels the need to .. er .. exaggerate a bit, and it runs from there. I firmly believe that a revolution is under way, but, frankly, it's only been going on for half a century(at most). All other fundamental revolutions took millennia(look at reading - the revolution started with the first form of writing, and has only reached fruition lately with high literacy in developed countries).

Left to itself(without the media), the "Internet Revolution" would have proceeded a-pace. I can imagine small parts of our everyday lives having something to do with computers. Then larger parts. Eventually, a rather huge portion. Look at reading. How long can you go without seeing a word written somewhere? If you close your eyes, it'll be longer, but your brain might still turn something up ;)

Anyways, so, there is a revolution under way. It's still in its infancy. There are many people whose lives are devoted to computers(they live, eat, breathe, and work computers). But not the masses. We're just waiting for the printing press, so to speak. Unfortunately, the media has hyped everything up to the point of unbelievability, and everyone's wondering why they still have to drive to work. Well, I say, wait. It'll come. In the end, one way of life will die, and one will emerge. It's just the way a world works - but don't hurry it.

Dave

It will

[kip3f]

Right now, most computer and internet technology exists in a technological context; I can surf the web, or I can go outside into the "real world". Things will get interesting when this technology is really integrated into consumer products - a fridge that can print out a grocery list (and maybe even automatically order), vacuums that vac without any human intervention, an oven that can download recipes (to be displayed on its LCD, and to set the cooking times).

When it undoes what the Industrial Revolution did.

[eAndroid]

I think there are enough signs of this that it is a strong possiblity. Those who take advantage of new technologies will become more wealthy than those who don't. The working middle class will disappear. Thos with access to digital tech will become rich and powerful, those without it will become poor. It will be much like it was before the Industrial revolution. Those with the technology will have lax jobs as well - sitting at a computer, working at their leasure from any part of the globe.

Re:Much of the revolution is invisible

[DeadSea]

It can also lead to such things as improved ecology, as by definition higher productivity means making more out of fewer resources.

During our entire history of industrialization the standard of living has skyrocketed. We have also trashed our environment. There will be no ecological benifit from higher productivity. Higher productivity does not (sadly) mean making more out of fewer resources, but consuming resources faster.

As the standard of living increases, everybody wants a bigger house, more stuff, and more time to travel. Even if we don't use up all of our resources, we will pollute the earth and crowd out everything else on it.

Hopefully not. But I'm feeling pessimistic today.

for a slightly contrasting point of view...

[sethg]

see this essay by Brad DeLong, an economist at UC Berkeley. He claims that "eighty percent of the acceleration of measured productivity growth in [1995-99] can be credited to information technology investment."

He also suggests that information tech has the following unmeasured effects on things that economists find interesting:

• Companies can keep better track of their inventory; this improves economic efficiency in general (since goods are spending less time "in the pipeline" between manufacture and sale) and may moderate the boom-and-bust cycle.
• Perhaps unemployment is so low because the wage increases that employees expect are equal to their growth in productivity -- and therefore, employers don't need a higher unemployment rate to keep workers' aspirations in check.
• If historical macroeconomic patterns don't apply, then this creates trouble for national banks (such as the US Federal Reserve), because they can't depend on comparisons with past business cycles to decide whether to raise or lower interest rates.
• If deposits at commercial banks become less significant as a means of payment, then central banks might not be able to affect interest rates (since right now, they operate by selling and buying bonds at those banks).

--

This applies to so many things..

[Crixus]

It's funny. I didn''t even look at the NYT piece yet, but we're having a discussion with the very same title in an audio engineering forum of which I'm a part.

In the audio world there two camps. The analog camp, and (you guessed it!) the digital camp. I'm sure you can guess how the analog guys feel about digital audio. :-)

Rich...

Re:This applies to so many things..

[mindstrm]

Why is it even an issue?
It seems so obvious.

Barring interference (noise) in the analog signal (in other words, things over short distances, or long distance with lots of extra engineering), analog will always sound better or equal to digital. Digital cannot sound better than analog....

however, when it comes to replicating signal, with analog there is always the possibility (and the reality) of signal degradation.

It is much cheaper to broadcast a superior quality digital signal throughout, say, all of north america, than it is analog.
It is much easier to make limitless copies of digital audio and keep the quality the same.

With analog, certainly, the quality could be better, but it does not have this property.

Re:This applies to so many things..

[Crixus]

I'm not so sure that "warmth" we're looking for is necessarily due to sample rate.

I know guys who record at 96Khz all the time, and then record the same thing at 48 Khz and a/b it, and then stick with 48K since it sounds identical to them, and they save storage space.

What is the one thing that analog tape does that digital doesn't? (or two as the case may be).

1) Analog adds some harmonic distoration when you hit it hard enough (with some tape compression), and

2) Analog has wow and flutter... which means there's plenty of phase coherency problems at higher frequencies (the higher the frequencies the more things get out of phase from wow and flutter).

I've worked in analog rooms for the past 5 years, so I'm no digital apologist, but I'm also a computer guy, and it seems to me that BOTH of those things can be emulated in the digital domain with a good enough alogorithm.

George Massenburg has already done a ton of research in these areas and he states emphatically that all it takes to emulate these things is good math, and enough processing power (but we already knew that, didn't we?).

So it's only a matter of time before digital wins on all levels. For convenience it's already tops (until you get some errors on your tapes!) and it's only a matter of time until we can sit in front of a good digital console and there will be emulatiom modes for 20 of the world's most favorite mic-pre's, compressors, EQ's and the ability to emulate different brands of analog tape at different flux references.

Kasparov lost, so will analog... it's inevitable.

Rich...

Re:This applies to so many things..

[Crixus]

Why is it even an issue? It seems so obvious.

To WHOM? Nothing is that simple or black and white, and certainly not this topic considering that hundreds of millions (if not billions) are being spent on DSP in the audio arena.

Digital cannot sound better than analog....

Where is THAT written? :-)

It's only a matter of time, I'd bet anything that I own. See my other post on this matter.

Re:Much of the revolution is invisible

[rgmoore]

If you listen, you frequently hear voices asking whether the USA's multi-trillion dollar IT investment has actually led to any tangible productivity increases.

This is misleading for a large number of reasons. One is that the questions about productivity are primarily aimed at whether or not investment in desktop computers has improved office productivity. This is both a much narrower question than the impact of computers in general (which is clearly positive; take a look at automation in manufacturing) and a harder question to answer because office productivity is very hard to measure. If computer technology allows me to create better written reports (because I can edit more easily) with easier to understand figures (because of graphics software) in the same length of time it used to take to do things the old way, has my productivity increased? I think it has, because my product is more valuable, but that's not going to show up in any conventional measure of productivity.

The issue of quality is actually a deep problem with many measures of productivity. A car today costs a lot more than a car did 10 years ago (even taking the CPI into account) but they're not directly comprable. The modern car is quieter, safer, more comfortable, less poluting, and has better performance and more features- and a lot of that is attributable to increased use of digital computers both directly and in the design and construction of the car. Without taking that qualitative factor into account, though, it looks as though cars production hasn't gained much in productivity. In fact, manufacturers today could build a car to the standards of a decade ago for a lot less, indicating a big jump in productivity- much of it computer driven.

Its all one revolution

[jflynn]

All of the advances since 1900 have been part of the scientific revolution, of which the digital revolution is a part. Computers are happening because some scientists and mathematicians studied solid state physics and the theory of computation, basically the same reason we have electricity and medicine, etc.

It was a long time between the discovery of electricity and its widespread use in homes. As the light bulb was to the application of electricity, so the Internet is to the digital revolution -- the means for getting the basics installed in everyone's home. In the beginning many complained of the harsh unreal light of electric bulbs, and loudly bemoaned the so-called "progress." But lightbulbs improved and a whole spectrum of unimagined applications rapidly arose from the availability of electricity.

The next real shocker may well be practical nanotechnology or genetic mastery. But those who thumb their nose at the digital revolution then should imagine the difficulty of designing nanotechnology or decoding the genome without computers. It's too interdependent to make comparing parts useful, and what would be the point? To tell scientists what to study?

The revolution has already been televised

[drinkypoo]

That article looked like a paid advert for the show "1900 house". The phrase "1900 house" appeared four times in quotes, and once outside of them.

From the article:

I hope that digital technology proves me wrong; but on the evidence of "1900 House," I'd say that the future is not what it used to be.

Thank "god"! Digital technology has already proven him wrong, following on the heels of analog technology which did the same thing. People have been bitching about this forever, how the world isn't the same, and how they're nostalgic for the good old days when we had the plague and malaria running around all over the place, when children died of polio or spent the rest of their lives crippled because of it, when infant mortality rates were more than twice what they are today...

If we suddenly reverted our technology to that of a hundred years in the past, I'm guessing about a quarter of the population of the US would die off in the first six months, with similar dieback numbers in most of Europe. Third world countries would do much better; Most of their populations haven't seen much in the way of changes in their way of life in the last hundred years, except in cheaper medications being available to them. I'm guessing we'd only see ten to twenty percent over six months, there.

It's important to realize how far our materials, textiles, and medicines have come over just the last century, which should give you some idea of the impact on our population, mostly in medicine. People used to die because they stepped on a rusty nail, and now you get a course of shots, experience some soreness and maybe a mild infection, and you're walking on it with only mild stiffness in a week or so. The only improvement to our health would come from reverting to a period before the industrial revolution, which would probably halve our cancer rates or something. Lung Cancer seems to be primarily caused by particulate matter like soot, which wasn't so much of an issue in most (non-volcanic) parts of the world prior to the industrial revolution.

There's also the discontent factor. We have too many people to have them all wandering the streets in a state of boredom at once... And if you think WE would be in a sad state without the entertainments we've come to enjoy, consider China, or Japan, with even more insane population densities in places than we in the US "enjoy". (Yes, I know Slashdot has a global readership, but I can only speak from what I know.)

Face it, once you've been to the moon, you can't go back to tilt-a-whirl, and once you've been to the twenty-first century, hopping back to the beginning of the twentieth just doesn't sound that exciting. It sounds more like an exercise in old and unexciting ways to die.

Re:Counterspin

[sansbury]

Posts like this make me wish I had a mod point to give you. Anyway...

the web is worse than tv for fostering a sense of narrative

Definitely- even "Baywatch" at leasts attempts to wrap a POS plot around the T&A.

The complete and utter cooptation of the web by commercial interests.

Go cry on somebody else's shoulder. It's not polluting any rivers or making the air dirty and it's fostering the transfer of large sums of money from the suits to the pocket-protector crowd.

The web promotes exchange and access to information. In the near future, information by itself will become as much of a commodity as cement or cold-rolled steel. The only people who will profit then will be those who can add value, aka Knowledge. The fewer of these people there are, the more money I will make.

What about society? It will survive, just like it has for generations. In the US there are tons of resources available for people who want to adapt, and a tremendous job market waiting for those who do. If people resist changing with the times they will get run over, and that's nothing new.

-cwk.

Informational Revolution

[GreenCow]

I believe more of what we have now is improvements to our ability to access information and to communicate..in the past 10 years we have gained the ability to exchange ideas with almost everyone on Earth instantly..not everyone has a computer but almost everyone has access to one through libraries and schools. It's not a substantial difference for those who choose not to use it, but such level of communication and accessability is what leads into the next 10 years, where the fruits of our developments start to come forth..everyones lives will either be made perfect or we will destroy ourselves, when the potential for either becomes so easy, then one of them is bound to happen.

Profound impact on me

[iCEBaLM]

The "digital revolution" has had an enormous impact on my life. I'm from a "village" of 1,350 people but I have friends from all over the world. "Digitization" (yeah I know, not even a word) is an enabler, it enables people to do so much more then you could without it, akin to machinery.

If it really hasn't had an impact on our lives then why does everyone seem to have a computer these days, why are IT jobs becomming more and more prevelant, and why doesn't my watch still have hands that rotate around the face?

I think that anyone who says the Digital Revolution hasn't had a significant impact on our lives can't see the forest for the trees.

-- iCEBaLM

Invisible revolution

[Hard_Code]

Some revolutions just aren't that tangible. Look around you. I bet a lot of what you see is made out of some form of plastic. Yet, who ever heard of the "plastic" revolution? Or how about the synthetic textiles revolution? The strength of many "revolutions" often lies in the fact that they are taken for granted. Perhaps we don't think there is a revolution now...but in a 100 years we will all be talking about the "digital revolution".

The web is unbalanced

[Junks Jerzey]

People have access to the Internet, but the value of that is debatable. Doing searches on various topics shows this. You tend to gets lots of hits for:

* porn
* anything pop culture related (movies, young actresses, pop music, TV shows, video games)
* anything geek related (Linux, programming, MP3s, freedom of software)
* special interest hobbyists (users of old computers, gardeners, model rocket builders, etc.)
* Intentionally weird stuff (scans of housecats, pop tart experiments, marshmallow bunny torture).
* The same news you see in papers and on TV.
* Corporate marketing fluff.

What you don't find is most of what's in any library. It's very easy to come up with an important topic that turns up very little web action. This always bothers me when I see students using the web for research.

It's too early

[emgeemg]

The so called Digital Revolution is still in its infancy. I can't help but wonder if all the world was marveling at what has happening when those first factories were being built or when those first steam engines hit the tracks. Probably not. The average people on the street were probably commented about those weird, huge factories. Sure, those people working directly in those industries realized the potential of what they were doing, but most of them probably had no idea just *how* important it would be. We label periods in time in hindsight. Someone living in what we refer to as the Ice Age today wouldn't have called it that. They'd just say it was too damn cold out. We don't know really what all this technology we're developing today is going to mean for the human race. We can hypothesize and predict, sometimes we might even be right. But if the time we live in is going to be labeled the Digital Revolution, we are at the forefront of it. We're not even completely sure of what to do with. Before this can truly be called a revolution and effect everyone's lives forever the technology needs to improve (and it will), it needs to become ubiquitous (and it probably will). Today, I think we're still laying the groundwork for the real revolution which has yet to come. But for right now, "Digital Revolution" is only a marketing buzz word to me.

Much of the revolution is invisible

[Tony Shepps]

Like advances in the past, the most important aspect is that productivity increases -- not that we can suddenly play Quake at good ping times, or email grandpa instead of snail mailing him.

Productivity increases lead to higher and higher standards of living, which mean fewer poor people, more choices for everyone, etc.

It can also lead to such things as improved ecology, as by definition higher productivity means making more out of fewer resources.

It's so hard to measure how much recent increases in productivity are due to computing and the net. If you build a bridge, you know that the bridge doesn't actually create things, but it helps people get places where they can create things. If you build cyberspace, it doesn't build anything at all physically, but it helps other people to be more productive as they see fit.

Knowing that I can order from outpost.com at 11pm and receive what I ordered at 10am the next day has led to changes in how I work. Knowing that I can get the news/outlook I need from Slashdot has led to massive changes in how I think. (I run a web development business, and I now refuse to take Microsoft work.)

Look at the 40s and 50s. They had rooms full of *typists* for pete's sake. People whose only job was to type up what people wanted to communicate. Those jobs are now all gone, replaced with jobs that *must* be more productive. And the modern economy sucked in all the cheap labor from welfare reform *without* having those people sit in a room typing.

What's more, the marketplace is now so ultra-competitive that no money in a business can possibly be wasted. In the 70s and early 80s, businesses were full of fat. Projects went nowhere. People made money for doing nothing. When that happens today, there's more likely to be real consequences, IMO. I like that; it means that bad management is punished and ludicrous waste is avoided. Usually.
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