In enthusing about Apple’s newest iPhone last week, I received a range of comments back about the impact that broadband technologies will have on us as individuals. The comments came from people in one of two camps. Those who see the upside of the “broadband” society, and those who see the downside.
Aside from videos and games, there are three major areas of broadband applications: information search (think Google); social media (the phenomena of Facebook); and mobile computing (Apples for everyone).
Upsiders see ready access to information search tools as being transformative, enhancing opportunities for innovation and growing knowledge.
Downsiders see that access to too much information leads to our lives becoming more complicated, speeding up and decreasing attention spans. Ready access to information leads to information overload and a consequent dumbing down of society, which affects reading and writing skills.
In the area of social media, the Upsiders see it as being participatory and inclusive, bringing people together in a ‘global village”. Anonymity on the web leads to beneficial whistle-blowing - look at what Wikileaks has achieved in terms of debate on public and private issues.
The social media Downsiders see this as polarising, excluding many and leading to tribalism and the rule of the mob. Encouraging anonymity on the web leads to a lack of accountability, resulting in greater antagonisms.
Mobile computing is about being always networked and the Upsiders see this as enabling instantaneous access to what-ever they want, where-ever they want it! The Downsiders see individuals freedoms constrained when they are always accessible, their lives speeding up even more, and their individual privacy being undermined. They wonder about what reality really is and who they can really trust.
Those who see the digital society as being good are the ones who tend to get excited about new technologies and buy in to them early on.
Those who see it as a bad thing tend to be older people who pine after the “good ol’ days” when everything was less complex and the pace of life slower. It is not that they resist change at all cost, it is just that they have known a world different from today’s.
It is clear that the pace of current technological change will disrupt tomorrow’s society. The disruptions have started, and they will be as significant as those of the Industrial Revolution of the early 19thcentury that led to the rise of Luddites.
As one who sees broadband being as important today, as electricity was 100 years ago, I of course consulted that font of online knowledge, Wikipedia, to get a definition of Luddites. The term came from groups of workers, led by one “General” Ned Ludd who, in 1811 England set about destroying the machines in textile mills that threatened their livelihoods.
The Luddites of old were not afraid of those new technologies and were mostly handy users of them. No, what they feared was that as skilled textile workers, the mill owners would replace them with unskilled and lesser-paid workers to operate the new machines.
The same applies today. The new technologies that work over broadband will result in the loss of jobs. Video and dvd rentals are being replaced by Internet downloads. Travel bookings are increasingly done direct and on-line. Robotic machines will replace human workers. The answer is not to smash the machines as the Luddites did, but to get over the nostalgia and work to mitigate the coming disruption by assimilating the new technologies in to our daily lives.