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				Dr. Moira Gunn Introduction Talking for ten minutes about the digital revolution reminds me of old joke in broadcasting. Leonard Bernstein comes into a studio, and the radio announcer says "Mr. Bernstein, we have just a couple of minutes, can you tell us about music?" I read about 100 books each year to prepare for my show, and each one is just one person's view. So, this is the digital revolution in one person's view. What are the physical elements of the digital revolution? - 200 million PCs in the world - 12 billion microprocessors in the world It's like comparing ants and dinosaurs - what's important? The internet makes it techically possible to be world wide, and all of these microprocessors can be interconnected - I've been very surprised to hear how little people in Europe worry about Y2K. The problem is bad enough with just the PCs interconnected; I can guarantee that if we were having the Y2K problem with all of the microprocessors interconnected as well as all of the PCs, the problem would be much more serious. The Y2K problem is the first challenge of the interconnectedness of diverse, heterogeneous devices. Add in (because they're important from the societal point of view) cell phones, voice mail, pagers and so on, all kinds of communications devices which people have as a part of living everyday life as well as work, as well as any part of strategy. All of them come together to make the personal dynamic that is all around you. What does it mean? If we just start out with the internet: In Canada and the US, there are 87 million people online - 29% of the population Europe, 33 million online - 5% of the population Asia/Pacific, 27 million - less than 1% S. America, 4 million - less than 1% Africa, 1 million - less than 1% Middle East, 1 million - less than 1% 153 million online worldwide, less than 2% of global population Question: On a worldwide basis is this linear or exponentially? Will we hit a plateau? What does the digital revolution mean in a saturated society such as the United States? - 85% of working adult Americans use a personal computer. This was not true five years ago. - The average American comes into contact with 72 microprocessors before lunch. ("Andy Grove told me that, and Andy Grove is thrilled.") - Over 90% of American schools have interconnections to the internet. At the high school level, they're up near 100% and all the kids are online - with the exception of a few fringe schools, but that will always be the case. - 83% of American businesses have intranets. This happened in the last year and a half. We went from PCs on the desktop to PCs out to the internet to PCs all on intranets within the business. (Dell Computers' big thrust was not selling more and more laptops, more and more PCs, but in fact client servers to go inside businesses and support what they're doing.) I think this year will become the year of the extranet where people will have custom nets that function through the internet. But the networking of this society is happening fast. How did we get here? The usual story is that Tim Berners-Lee conceived the web, wrote the first browser, worked to promote the idea, and so on. The web got real in 1993 with Mosaic, and everything depended on pictures. The proliferation 1994-98 of the world wide web, and in 1999 it is rampant. Truth is, "Bob did it." Bob Taylor and Charlie Hertzfeld back in 1966 started at ARPA. The internet was originally a solution to the problem of logging onto different machines within the network. The first transmission went between SRI in Palo Alto and an undergraduate at UCLA, because no one was particularly interested in the implications. Typing "logon," they got as far as "l - o - g" before the system crashed. But that was the beginning. Lesson: It takes thirty years to become an overnight sensation. What it needed, as all technologies need, was to get to the point where the whole thing will work. Until we had pictures, until we had the bandwidth, and until we had individual computation at our fingertips, the whole thing couldn't come together. From a technology standpoint, then, the digital revolution is right on schedule. Now, if you look how communications like radio and telephones came in to societies, you'll see that the internet is starting to match them. What does this mean societally? 80 million baby boomers led to 76 million in the following generation. These are the two big bulges in US population. One of the societal issues that will face the digital revolution, one that none of us can direct, is that on technology youth always take a contrarian position. But it's a very real position that carries them forward and through new changes. That was true in the 60s, and then in the 80s (Steve Jobs: "Never trust a computer you can't lift."). What is the next generation going to say in twenty years about computers? What will they say about computers that you can't see? Even now, 98% of computers are embedded where you can't see them. Drawing a parallel with telephones, we are now at that early stage where you see, where you have a one-to-one connection between the object and what it does. In a few years, we will have debates about 'what is a computer' because this one-to-one connection will be gone. What is the effect on adults? - 40% of US adults are technophobic. ("Why can't I run a VCR?") - 10-20% are mildly so. This was first studied in 1993, and then again in 1998 with the same results. It's a human condition. As people, as organizations, as societies, we have to understand that. When we ask a society a technology question, 40% of the people may not even hear it because it has to do with technology and they will be emotionally set up to say "no." On the other hand computer anxiety does not relate to performance. Once you've gotten around it, you're fine. Other effects on individuals: For people using languages based on alphabets, in manipulating texts, your right hand and your left brain are doing the processing. But if you see a picture, it goes to your right brain. Men's and women's brains also function differently, but over time you can integrate the different parts. It is part of the challenge for each of the genders to develop the alternate side of the brain, so that you're at full capacity. A big change in the last five years is that we are now writing with personal computers. We are using both hands even though we're using an alphabet. So what you're doing with your left hand as you type goes to your right brain and has to be crossed over. (We can put the electrodes on and show you.) So if the medium is the message, this new approach has to be affecting what we're saying and how we're thinking about it. What we're doing now is making everyone integrate left and right sides more. Also, when your right hand uses the mouse, it's driven by pictures, so the right-brain information from the pictures has to be integrated over to the left-brain controlling the mouse. Now millions and millions of people are using much different parts of their brain when they read and write. We're not sure of the outcome, but we know for a fact this is different and new. Scientific acknowledgement and measurement of the unconscious We are now clear that there is an unconscious because we can measure it. ("Why do you want a mature engineer on a job? Because of this developed intuition.") Many good decisions are made in the unconscious - if you decide to raise your hand, your hand is already going up by the time you've vocalized the decision. Athletes work the same way. It's the creative, nonlinear part of the brain that makes the important breakthroughs. "How many Nobel laureates do we have to listen to who say 'it came in a dream'" before we recognize what is going on? Location and dislocation Some time ago, there was a greater sense of 'placefulness.' I live here, I work over here, I walk down the street, I go to the market, my friends and family are here. Then things got a little crazy. Particularly in the 50s, people moved all over the place. It didn't matter that you didn't live near your families. We got lost in some kind of 'placelessness.' Then moving forward with e-mail and voice mail, people got ever more disembodied, and it was a very uncomfortable place to be from a societal point of view. But what has really happened is that we are coming back to 'placefulness,' but on a global level. (I came to Europe, but my teenage sons are e-mailing me questions about different things; I am always connected to my family.) It doesn't matter where I am, but if it's essential to be present, I can be. So we are now coming back to 'placefulness,' and I think you will see this trend continue. Effects on society Many times through history, big crowds have played a role a critical junctures. In the last three years, we've started to see such crowds on the internet. The first was in 1996 for the chess match between Gary Kasparov and the IBM computer Deep Blue. Then in 1997, the landing of Pathfinder on Mars outclassed that by a factor of three or four. What could top that? Publication of the Starr Report in 1998. It was disseminated to nine sites, and in the first two hours of its availability, over twenty percent of worldwide traffic on the net went to just these sites. This phenomenon is now called flash crowds. The internet crowd had an effect on society at large because for the first time, major newspapers printed a 364-page government document in its entirety. This was a real change from previous media practice; even if you were not on the internet, you got all of the data. Without the internet, this would not have happened - newspapers had never done anything of the sort before. International Digital Communities There are many elements to this, but the most powerful element is the formation of cross media groups, which are re-shaping media from the bottom up. For example, the BBC has long had an African radio service with a very small audience. When they put this service on their web site, it consistently ranked among the top ten in traffic. Who was visiting? African-Americans. The BBC gained a whole new audience - an international digital community. One can leave where one is from, and - consistent with the idea of placefulness - one can stay. Also, when India and Pakistan tested nuclear weapons, the BBC discovered through its online readers that public reactions were very different from what its reporters were hearing in official circles. This allowed the BBC to immediately redirect its coverage and to expand its approach. These are both immense improvements. We're seeing media re-assemble themselves. Television did not kill radio, the VCR did not kill movies, the internet will not kill newspapers. Media persist, but they will come back together differently. We can look at this increasing interconnectedness as the emergence of world consciousness. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a Jesuit paleontologist, struggled with these kinds of ideas, with the creation of a 'noosphere,' as early as the 1930s. Because he was not distracted by the technological changes, his writing may provide a good guide to what is actually happening today. Challenges for tomorrow These are the biggest ones I see and hear about now: Privacy: the rights of the individual versus the needs of government and the desires of business. Literacy: are pre-literate individuals excluded from digital society? Societal protections: how to balance need for anonymity with protecting societies? Perhaps an unsolvable problem. International economy: transformation into integrated information economy. We still need hard goods, but what happens when transaction costs go to zero? Conclusions The act of observation is certain to affect the social system we are observing. Call it the Heisenberg Certainty Principle, but it makes me optimistic that we can change things for the better. Finally, humans are still humans. When some people first took hand-held global positioning systems (GPS) to the equator in Kenya, they wanted to take their picture with the GPS device standing on the line that was drawn there, and among all of the tourist hoopla that had been set up for people wanting to see the equator. The problem was, all of the setup for visitors was about a kilometer south of the actual equator. When the visitors confronted the local mayor with this fact, he replied, "Oh yes, we have known this for a long time. But the parking there is terrible."
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