CCT 205: Digital Innovation and Cultural Transformation Lecture 3: Information Society: Historical Adherents and Detractors

Administrivia CCIT Virtual Gallery and March 20th panel Text status?

Plus ça change… Information society/information superhighway - concepts that were hot topics of heated discussion Now, we not only see their effects, we live them as part and parcel of every day life Not surprisingly, both adherents and detractors were right and wrong in equal measure

Cyberspace and the American Dream Or… Toffler - The Third Wave (1980) First wave - agricultural revolution Second - industrial Third - information/post-modern society Leverages more optimistic of McLuhan’s writings strongly (but…)

Third Wave Capitalism Schumpeter and creative destruction (and similar systems phenomena) Where some saw peril, authors saw opportunity - change will destroy old models but create new, better ones Some element of wishful thinking at play - How? Why? Better? Will certainly have to read Toffler again…

Good points still… Highway vs. cyberspace metaphor (a common argument in early 1990s) Highway - centralized control, grids vs. organic development, bureaucratic vs. communitarian, expensive vs. cheap and local Web 2.0 delivers on principles and power of cyberspace - the “information superhighway” elements arrived more or less dead on arrival Examples?

Implications Demassified but integrated culture (hopefully at least?) Citizens with constant embedded access to information that makes their lives richer and gives them power (but does it?) Property rights widely held and easily exchanged fairly (kind of…)

Caution! Winner- enough with the rhetoric - what is actually going to happen (good and bad?) Neither reactionary to change - Winner clearly sees West’s ability to change and for the better Creative destruction impacts certain groups and privileges others - class and skill shift as much as anything (as was first/second wave transition)

“Sociopathic cyberlibertarianism” Ouch - but there’s some truth to this Unfettered capitalism, renunciation of previous community structures, ad hoc groups easily abandoned, fetishization (and commercialization) of ego Has as predicted led to new forms of discourse, norms, and personalities that are effective (for better or worse…) Examples?

Cult of Information Rozsak - another prescient book Information 24/7 available on a variety of devices from millions of sources - the very definition of information overload Infoglut is not only not helpful, it can be extraordinarily harmful - why?

Example: MSN Last term 300 survey hours of Internet use daily But most of it is MSN and Facebook Information abound - but of what value? There is positive value to be sure - examples? Negatives?

Data -> Wisdom? Data - bits and bytes (example?) Information - structured in a way that makes human sense (example?) Knowledge - repurposed information with value, function, purpose (example?) Wisdom - intuition of what knowledge is important when (and what’s nonsense…) - and the very thing that infoglut hurts?

Information Overload Information that is hard to process into knowledge isn’t particularly useful Information design and various IT tools can help process information to make knowledge creation possible But wisdom…well, that takes time (and we increasingly have little of it, which is potentially dangerous.)

Solutions? Societal change generally is evolutionary - radical changes proposed by adherents and detractors usually comes out in wash But…attack on wisdom might just be the one thing that causes chaotic destruction Thomas Homer-Dixon - our inability to be wise (esp. in ecological sense) might just lead to circumstances we can’t control Alternatives?

Next Week Chs. 6, 12 for lecture Labs tonight - mashup work continues - group formation/topic assignment for those who missed that day