This is from the Citizendium blog; I thought you mind find this interesting. --Larry
<http://blog.citizendium.org/2008/01/10/the-world-remade/> The world remade Filed under: Technology <http://blog.citizendium.org/category/technology/> , Internet <http://blog.citizendium.org/category/internet/> , Theory <http://blog.citizendium.org/category/theory/> Larry Sanger @ 8:09 pm Edit <http://blog.citizendium.org/wp-admin/post.php?action=edit&post=277> This A column. We now speak incuriously of the many revolutions and paradigm shifts we are undergoing. Yet few people have grasped this fully or taken it very seriously. The world is being remade from top to bottom in the space of a generation. In the middle of the most dramatic historical changes, people often fail entirely to understand exactly how momentous the events around them areor, as with many of us at present, they understand that dramatic changes are taking place, but they dont quite grasp their nature. Sometimes we comment casually, reducing radical mutations of society to mere slogans and acronyms, as if they were normal events at which it would be naive to evince shock or wonder. To try to gain a wider perspective, it might help for us to list a number of dramatic, existential changes to the nature of our society. 1. We have instant communication with people around the world. I have e-friends in Australia and France I have never met. I can flame and flamed by people in Hong Kong and Brazil. 2. We have instant communication with strangers we have never met face-to-face. We have brand new methods of getting to know these strangers. 3. We have instant communication with our friends, families, and workmates virtually at any moment anywhere anyone is. 4. Our online communities are wholly different from anything before that preceded them in several important respects. Some of us spend many hours a day working in such communities. 5. Most of us leave a digital trail accessible to all. In my case, a really diligent researcher could construct a nearly day-by-day account of my doings based on what I have said online in various places. 6. Among other things, this radically changes the nature of our public identity and reputation. 7. Even more of us leave a less-accessible digital trail that, increasingly, is allowing authorities to conduct searches about us that are more invasive than most home invasions would be. 8. This is because, for many of us, our entire lives are becoming digitized. Consider how many aspects of our lives, in past generations nonexistent or totally analog, are now part of digital networks: telephone (cell especially); television (cable and satellite especially); Internet reading (websites and, if Kindle takes off, books as well); e-mail, blog, and other online communication; music (esp. MP3 services); library use; credit card use; etc. 9. In time, all these networks will be centrally organized, purely for our convenience. From single entry-point devices like the iPhone well be able access every aspect of our lives that is mediated by a network. This in turn will make surveillance only easier. 10. The Establishment older people and traditionalists may not be the force in online society that it could be. But the current plugged-in younger generations are growing up. When they are grown up, what will the world look like when the full wealth and authority of The Establishment is online? 11. Increasingly, people who are really plugged in are having to choose actively to see people face-to-face. Its now clichéd that technology brings us together, but it also drives us apart but this will only become more strikingly true. For some of us I think its already a serious problem, and for the world dominated by Generation Y, it will be even more so. There must be interesting solutions in the offing (and I dont mean <http://www.meetup.com/> MeetUps) to the problem of how to bring a totally digital, wired society together in meatspace. (Think in this connection of the Freemasons and <http://www.brad.ac.uk/webofhiram/> their secrets.) 12. Increasingly, for many of people online, many of our most significant relationships are made online, not as part of offline groups such as school, church, and work. How could this fail to have revolutionary effects? 13. Free collaborative digital encyclopedias will unify all of credible, general human knowledge into one central knowledge base, endorsed, in time, by powerful universities and publishers. Whatever projects manage to do this authoritatively and exhaustively will be tremendously influential. If they arent justly governedmaybe even if they arebeware. 14. All books, journals, and archives will, in time, be digitized and brilliantly searchable, cutting research time to a small fraction of what it used to be. It is only a matter of time before the entire contents of all the worlds libraries and archives will be accessible in a minimal amount of time from anywherebut not necessarily by anyone. (Access fees could be a major front in the political battle for equality in the 21st century.) 15. We can find and buy anything, almost any item of merchandise, in a matter of minutes from anywhere, and have it shipped almost anywhere. 16. Culture is now fully and rapidly portable. The language, religion, mass media, arts, etc., of every advanced society on Earth are online, and will become even more so. I learned Irish traditional music in Ohio, Alaska, Russia and occasionally Ireland largely because of the Internet. Madagascar band <http://www.frootsmag.com/tarika/> Tarika can sell their music instantly to people in Hawaii. How will this change traditions? How will it change how we socialize? I could go on, of course. I might have left out what you think will be the biggest change worked by our digital networks. These are not merely technological changes, not merely <http://www.techcrunch.com/> new gizmos and business plans. They are in fact deep existential changes they are changes in how we live, love, work, study, research, shop, waste time, act together, and even fight. Few of us have begun to understand quite how these changes, together, are utterly remaking the world before our very eyes. The impact of these changes together will utterly dwarf the changes worked by the electric light, the telephone, the automobile, the transistor, and the pre-Internet personal computer. The world at the close of 2007 is quite different from 1907 or 1957, but will be completely different, something enormously foreign to the pre-Internet world, in 2057. I invite you to think of that not as industry hype but as a serious proposition, something to be excited, or concerned, about. The changes worked by the Internet will be recognized as by far the most important changes in history, rivalled only by the inventions of language, writing, and the printing press. Quite possibly more important than the rise of the Greek rationalism and democracy, the spread of classical culture via the Roman Empire, the Christianization of Europe, the nation state, the scientific method, modern egalitarian democracy, the industrial revolution, totalitarianism, and globalization. I only hope that we will like what our world changes into. I only hope we will be able to anticipate the horror scenarios, and act to avoid them. Society has not always been good at anticipating the disastrous effects of revolutions; few understood at the time that the Russian Revolution and the election of Hitler could have such devastating effects, with tens of millions dead in wars, genocides, and purges, and Europe essentially destroyed. History could have gone differently; it often takes just one individual insisting strongly on a different course of action, and the world will be (or would have been) radically different, and perhaps better. We as a global society will be faced with innumerable choices in our lifetimes, as we remake the world, or as it is remade for us. I hope well be choosing wisely, our generation. Surely many of us know this much now: we are in the middle of a revolution, and thats not hype, its not just technology news, its sobering fact. If so, then I propose that we have a duty to think about these helter-skelter changes, and, as we do on wikis, <http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/CZ:Be_Bold> boldly take responsibility as citizens of the world. I think we as a society should be studying this revolution more than any other current event; and I think that newspapers (and Google News) should have special daily sections: The Digital Revolution. This is, to my mind, the biggest news that affects our present and future lives, far bigger than the Iraq War, bigger than the U.S. presidential elections, probably bigger than global warming. The fact that we are paying so much attention to those relative trivialities will look silly to future scholars. We, many of us, are sleepwalking through the biggest societal earthquake since the invention of the printing press. So I have questions for you: how else is our world being remade? What did I leave off of the list above? What do you think will prove to be the most dramatic, the most consequential of these changes? What policies, what philosophies, should guide us as we develop these social technologies? What are the worst case scenarios we should fear and act to prevent?
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