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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?"
...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
Bowie J. Poag
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...
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
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.
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.
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.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
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.
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.
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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