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USA Edition | Today Is Monday, September 6, 2010 |
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What Consequences Will Flow From An On-Line Future?
What has happened on my desktop, your wireless phone, thousands of server-farms, along millions of miles of digital light-pipes and millions of web sites amounts to a total rewiring of humankind’s collective nervous system. Changes of this magnitude are very rare in human history. The wheel. Fire. Spoken language. The written word. The printing press. The immediacy era.
Cyberspace
Immediacy Era Redefines The Human Experience
The ongoing explosion in connectivity, world-wide information availability, and never-ending indexing of something close to the entirety of human knowledge comprise the single most important event in recorded history. We may take it for granted, or assume it only slightly changes our lives, but the truth is that the immediacy era redefines the human experience.
The onset of the immediacy era has, at the very least, suspended the protections and safeguards that attached to the codex era news and information collection and distribution.
Those most attuned to the fast pace of modern technology [ largely persons under 30 ] tend to perceive ongoing advances in telecommunications as ordinary — for in today’s high-tech world anything more than a year old is already ancient.
What has happened on my desktop, your wireless phone, thousands of server-farms, along millions of miles of digital light-pipes and millions of web sites amounts to a total rewiring of humankind’s collective nervous system. Changes of this magnitude are very rare in human history. The wheel. Fire. Spoken language. The written word. The printing press. The immediacy era.
As we have watched, explored and participated in the digital revolution our world has changed forever. For good or bad, for love or hate, for prosperity or famine, for rich or poor, until death do us part.
It’s not the Internet that matters for it is but one implementation of immediacy era infrastructure. It’s not technology that has changed — it’s the end of the inflexibility of codex era in favor of the timelessness and reach of the immediacy era.
The Old Order Changeth
When Did You Last Use A Dictionary Or Search An Encyclopedia For Information?
Those who arrived on planet Earth after 1990 have only known the immediacy era. One might think that a revolution that occurred at least a generation ago is already old. For someone in their 20s the immediacy era has been around all of their lives. But when examined against the timeline of human communications– the codex era that today’s immediacy era replaced lasted for thousands years.
Jiahu Script, the earliest known written form of communication was first applied to tortoise shells around. 6600 BC. Jiahu writing provided the foundation for the codex era – a time when writing on objects was replaced by writing on a portable medium ( paper ). When examined against the long endurance of the codex era, today’s immediacy era is in the infancy of its infancy.
Among the the major demands of codex publishing were the serialization and timed release. The newspaper model in which there was a daily edition comprised a series of news packages that followed upon one another as each daily cycle played out. Each day’s installment stood alone for that day and the last in a series. The concept of what is now called the 24 hours news cycle was not feasible in codex era publishing.
Codex: The Father Of Episodic Thinking
What made the newspaper successful was having 24 hours to accumulate, write, edit and publish. But that era is long gone today.
Codex era news was episodic in the sense that while news happens continuously 24 hours a day, the distribution of edited news during the codex era occurred once a day ( in the case of newspapers ), or as broadcast news unfolded, perhaps a few times each day.
The Codex infrastructure required capital investment for printing presses and/or broadcast station equipment. Large office facilities were required so that the people collecting and editing news could easily interact with one another and the physical form of in-process materials.
The combination of physical content and episodic publication created a caching-driven work environment that supported the temporary storage of information ( usually on someone’s desktop ) for later recall and processing. When the publication’s deadline approached information was moved from the cache to the publication’s codex device, i.e. newspaper layout and Linotype keying, or scripting for broadcast.
The cyclical nature of publication demanded by Codex era technologies provided time to ponder, question, fact-check, re-write and edit what was to be published or broadcast. Publications intending to be probative, responsible and credible benefited from the cyclical nature of publishing and broadcasting that enforced a sometimes long delay. News waiting for the next publication event was ripe for analysis and skeptical editing.
Firing The Gatekeeper
Journalism was but one institution that benefited from the caching of news materials pending the next make-up or broadcast deadline. A story filed at 9 am for evening publication, for example, could be fact-checked, pondered over, edited, or re-written while it was in the cache awaiting a decision to publish or to kill the story. Thus the publications senior editors we gatekeepers who read, evaluated and challenged news materials in the cache knowing that they would later choose which stories warranted publication and which didn’t.
Technology has given us worldwide reach unimaginable only a generation ago. Digital networks have opened up a cornucopia of information to anyone who seeks it. You, me, and every other person on the planet has immediate access to information resources never-before available to any government, institution, organization or individual.
The massive shift now underway in how and with whom we communicate is potentially the single most important event since the discovery of fire. The changes we’re experiencing have long-range, perhaps even deterministic impact on the human experience we do not even begin to understand. The consequences of such a massive change, for either good or bad, are not known, or understood.
Immediacy Era’s Staggering Implications
The immediacy era is upon us.
Some long-enduring institutions and have already been massively changed, their future role in society diminished, or their functional capabilities obliterated. Among them are wire based telephony, publishing, broadcasting, marketing, education and social connectedness.
Some long standing institutions, with deep roots into every society and nation, newspaper and book publishing, may soon perish — as the written word is inexorably freed from the ink-on-paper model.
The lessons are clear: Change or perish. Abdicate old for new. Abandon historical assumption and embrace the possible.
The immediacy era changes everything.
Nothing that exists today will go unchallenged, or remain unchanged. For the massive extension of our species’ collective nervous system, whether for good or for bad, is neither predictable or, comprehensible.