BlogDale

How is ICT changing lives? Sure, the technology and all that it gives us is great. It makes things easier and gives accessibilty to more things, in the way that things that used to be hard are now easy. But that’s always been the case - technology’s always made things easier and that’s how we’ve advanced.

There’s a dimension, though, to ICT that I had been considering recently. It’s given us something more than just making things easier; it’s allowing us to do things we never could do before. A conference call between continents was never possible until recently; I’d never spoken to someone in another timezone but now I have a Skype contact list that includes people from all over. And this is getting to my point - that the technological growth is now not as important as the network growth, we’re now in a position where the growth is that of the organic network of people and their contacts. This is how there is now an explosion in the spread of human knowledge, and the potential for more is huge. Reed’s Law indicates the exponential rate at which a network will grow as there are more participants. As more people join the group as there are more nodes for collaboration, and the capacity for subgroups to explore further ideas grows.

I believe that the implications of this make trivial all the other things that information technology delivers. What has gone in the past has been great, but it is nothing compared to what we will have in the future. Going back only a hundred years, the speed of the spread of ideas was limited by postal and telegraph services, by emergent telephone connections and unreliable radio. Now all it takes to share an idea with the world is to write it down on a blog at the time it occurs and instantly it is shared with the online world. Right now. And get responses almost instantly from interested parties, many of whom might not even be in your team or workgroup but nevertheless have something useful to add.

With the capability to communicate and grow in groups across geographical and temporal boundaries, the speed of the Internet has compressed the time for discourse, and the development of human ideas will be enormously faster than in previous ages; what would have been the implications of Liebnitz and Newton developing calculus together rather than working in parallel and in competition, separated by days (at least - I’m guessing) of postage?  And what if they had simply posted their ideas on the web ready for others to add to the development?  Reed’s Law would have kicked in and we would have had umpteen groups working on different aspects of the problem and maybe it wouldn’t have taken a computer to solve the Four-Colour Map theory.

The potential thinking and reasoning power of so many conjoined minds is staggering.  “A computer so complex that organic life will form part of it’s matrix”.  Perhaps Deep Thought had it right, and Douglas Adams was a prophet.