by Al Gore
The proliferation of texts in languages spoken by the average person triggered a series of mass adaptations to the new flow of information, beginning a wave of literacy that began in Northern Europe and moved southward. In France, as the wave began to crest, the printing press was denounced as “the work of the Devil.” But as popular appetites grew for the seemingly limitless information that could be conveyed in the printed word, the ancient wisdom of the Greeks and Romans became accessible. The resulting explosion of thought and communication stimulated the emergence of a new way of thinking about the legacy of the past and the possibilities of the future.
The mass distribution of knowledge about the world of the present began to shake the foundations of the feudal order. The modern world that is now being transformed by kind rather than degree rose out of the ruins of the civilization that we might say was creatively destroyed by the printing press. The Scientific Revolution began less than a hundred years after Gutenberg’s Bible, with the publication of Nicolaus Copernicus’s Revolution of the Spheres (a copy of which he received fresh from the printer on his deathbed). Less than a century later Galileo confirmed heliocentrism. A few years after that came Descartes’s “Clockwork Universe.” And the race was on.
Challenges to the primacy of the medieval church and the feudal lords became challenges to the absolute rule of monarchs. Merchants and farmers began to ask why they could not exercise some form of self-determination based on the knowledge now available to them. A virtual “public square” emerged, within which ideas were exchanged by individuals. The Agora of ancient Athens and the Forum of the Roman Republic were physical places where the exchange of ideas took place, but the larger virtual forum created by the printing press mimicked important features of its predecessors in the ancient world.
Improvements to the printing press led to lower costs and the proliferation of printers looking for material to publish. Entry barriers were very low, both for obtaining the printed works of others and for contributing one’s own thoughts. Soon the demand for knowledge led to modern works—from Cervantes and Shakespeare to journals and then newspapers. Ideas that found resonance with large numbers of people attracted a larger audience still—in the manner of a Google search today.
In the Age of Enlightenment that ensued, knowledge and reason became a source of political power that rivaled wealth and force of arms. The possibility of self-governance within a framework of representative democracy was itself an outgrowth of this new public square created within the information ecosystem of the printing press. Individuals with the freedom to read and communicate with others could make decisions collectively and shape their own destiny.
At the beginning of January in 1776, Thomas Paine—who had migrated from England to Philadelphia with no money, no family connections, and no source of influence other than an ability to express himself clearly in the printed word—published Common Sense, the pamphlet that helped to ignite the American War of Independence that July. The theory of modern free market capitalism, codified by Adam Smith in the same year, operated according to the same underlying principles. Individuals with free access to information about markets could freely choose to buy or sell—and the aggregate of all their decisions would constitute an “invisible hand” to allocate resources, balance supply with demand, and set prices at an optimal level to maximize economic efficiency. It is fitting that the first volume of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire was also published in the same year. Its runaway popularity was a counterpoint to the prevailing exhilaration about the future. The old order was truly gone; those of the present generation were busy making the world new again, with new ways of thinking and new institutions shaped by the print revolution.
It should not surprise us, then, that the Digital Revolution, which is sweeping the world much faster and more powerfully than the Print Revolution did in its time, is ushering in with it another wave of new societal, cultural, political, and commercial patterns that are beginning to make our world new yet again. As dramatic as the changes wrought by the Print Revolution were (and as were those wrought earlier by the introduction of complex speech, writing, and phonetic alphabets), none of these previous waves of change remotely compares with what we are now beginning to experience as a result of today’s emergent combination of nearly ubiquitous computing and access to the Internet. Computers have been roughly doubling in processing power (per dollar spent) every eighteen to twenty-four months for the last half-century. This remarkable pattern—which follows Moore’s Law—has continued in spite of periodic predictions that it would soon run its course. Though some experts believe that Moore’s Law may now finally be expiring over the next decade, others believe that new advances such as quantum computing will lead to continued rapid increases in computing power.
Our societies, culture, politics, commerce, educational systems, ways of relating to one another—and our ways of thinking—are all being profoundly reorganized with the emergence of the Global Mind and the growth of digital information at exponential rates. The annual production and storage of digital data by companies and individuals is 60,000 times more than the total amount of information contained in the Library of Congress. By 2011, the amount of information created and replicated had grown by a factor of nine in just five years. (The amount of digital storage capacity did not surpass analog storage until 2002, but within only five years the percentage of information stored digitally grew to 94 percent of all stored information.) Two years earlier, the volume of data transmitted from mobile devices had already exceeded the total volume of all voice data transmitted. Not coincidentally, from 2003 to 2010, the average telephone call grew shorter by almost half, from three minutes to one minute and forty-seven seconds.
The number of people worldwide connected to the Internet doubled between 2005 and 2010 and in 2012 reached 2.4 billion users globally. By 2015, there will be as many mobile devices as there are people in the world. The number of mobile-only Internet users is expected to increase 56-fold over the next five years. Aggregate information flow using smartphones is projected to increase 47-fold over the same period. Smartphones already have captured more than half of the mobile phone market in the United States and many other developed countries.
But this is not just a phenomenon in wealthy countries. Although computers and tablets are still more concentrated in advanced nations, the reduction in the cost of computing power and the proliferation of smaller, more mobile computing devices is spreading access to the Global Mind throughout the world. More than 5 billion of the 7 billion people in the world now have access to mobile phones. In 2012, there were 1.1 billion active smartphone users worldwide—still under one fifth of the global market. While smartphones capable of connecting to the Internet are still priced beyond the reach of the majority of people in developing countries, the same relentless cost reductions that have characterized the digital age since its inception are now driving the migration of smart features and Internet connectivity into affordable versions of low-end smartphones that will soon be nearly ubiquitous.
Already, the perceived value of being able to connect to the Internet has led to the labeling of Internet access as a new “human right” in a United Nations report. Nicholas Negroponte has led one of two competing global initiatives to provide an inexpensive ($100 to $140) computer or tablet to every child in the world who does not have one. This effort to close the “information gap” also follows a pattern that began in wealthy countries. For example, the United States dealt with concerns in the 1990s about a gap between “information haves” and “information have-nots” by passing a new law that subsidized the connection of every school and library to the Internet.
The behavioral changes driven by the digital revolution in developed countries also have at least some predictive value for the changes now in store for the world as a whole. According to a survey by Ericsson, 40 percent of smartphone owners connect to the Internet immediately upon awakening—even before they get out of bed. And that
kick-starts a behavioral pattern that extends throughout their waking hours. While they are driving to work in the morning, for example, they encounter one of the new hazards to public health and safety: the use of mobile communications devices by people who email, text, play games, and talk on the phone while simultaneously trying to operate their cars and trucks.
In one extreme example of this phenomenon, a commercial airliner flew ninety minutes past its scheduled destination because both the pilot and copilot were absorbed with their personal laptops in the cockpit, oblivious as more than twelve air traffic controllers in three different cities tried to get their attention—and as the Strategic Air Command readied fighter jets to intercept the plane—before the distracted pilots finally disengaged from their computers.
The popularity of the iPhone and the amount of time people communicate over its videoconferencing feature, FaceTime, has caused a few to actually modify the appearance of their faces in order to adapt to the new technology. Plastic surgeon Robert K. Sigal reported that “patients come in with their iPhones and show me how they look on FaceTime. The angle at which the phone is held, with the caller looking downward into the camera, really captures any heaviness, fullness and sagging of the face and neck. People say, ‘I never knew I looked like that! I need to do something!’ I’ve started calling it the ‘FaceTime Facelift’ effect. And we’ve developed procedures to specifically address it.”
THE RISE OF “BIG DATA”
Just as we have extended our consciousness into the Global Mind, we are now extending our peripheral nervous system into the Internet of Things, which operates almost entirely below the level of consciousness and controls functions important to maintaining the efficiency of Earth Inc. It is this part of the global Internet that is proliferating most rapidly, generating far more data than people themselves produce, and evolving toward what some call the “Internet of Everything.”
The emerging field labeled “Big Data,” one of the exciting new frontiers of information science, is based on the development of new algorithms for supercomputers to sift through voluminous new quantities of data that have not previously been seen as manageable. More than 90 percent of the information collected by Landsat satellites has been sent directly to electronic storage without ever firing a single neuron in a human brain, and without being processed by computers for patterns and meaning. This and other troves of unutilized data may now finally be analyzed.
Similarly, most of the data now being collected during the operation of industrial processes by embedded systems, sensors, and tiny devices such as actuators has been disposed of soon after it is collected. With the plummeting cost of data storage and the growing sophistication of Big Data, some of this information is now being kept and analyzed and is already producing a flood of insights that promote efficiency in industry and business. To take another example, some commercial vehicles mount a small video camera on the windshield that collects data continuously but only saves twenty seconds at a time; in the event of an accident, the information collected during the seconds prior to and during the accident is saved for analysis. The same is true of black boxes on airplanes and most security cameras in buildings. The data collected is constantly erased to make room for newer information. Soon, most all of this information will be kept, stored, and processed by Big Data algorithms for useful insights.
Plans for gathering—and analyzing—even larger amounts of information are now under way throughout the world. IBM is working with the Netherlands Institute of Radio Astronomy to develop a new generation of computer technology to store and process the data soon to be captured by the Square Kilometre Array, a new radio telescope that will collect each day twice the amount of information presently generated on the entire World Wide Web.
Virtually all human endeavors that routinely produce large amounts of data will soon be profoundly affected by the use of Big Data techniques. To put it another way, just as psychologists and philosophers search for deeper meanings in the operations of the human subconscious, cutting-edge supercomputers are now divining meaningful patterns in the enormous volumes of data collected on a continuous basis not only on the Internet of Things but also by analyzing patterns in the flood of information exchanged among people—including in the billions of messages posted each day on social networks like Twitter and Facebook.
The U.S. Geological Survey has established a Twitter Earthquake Detector to gather information on the impact and location of shaking events more quickly, particularly in populated areas with few seismic instruments. And in 2009, U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon launched the Global Pulse program to analyze digital communications in order to detect and understand economic and social shocks more quickly. The pattern with which people add money to their mobile phone accounts is an early warning of job loss. Online food prices can be surveyed to help predict price spikes and food shortages. Searches for terms like “flu” and “cholera” can give warnings of disease outbreaks.
The intelligence community is using the techniques of Big Data analysis to search for patterns in vast flows of communication to predict social unrest in countries and regions of particular interest. Some new businesses are now using similar techniques to analyze millions of messages or tweets in order to predict how well Hollywood—and Bollywood—movies will perform at the box office.
DEMOCRACY IN THE BALANCE
As always, the imperatives driving commerce and national security adapt quickly to the emergence of new technologies, but what about democracy in this new age? The rapid and relentless rise of Internet-based communication is surely a hopeful sign for the renewed health of self-governance, largely because the structural characteristics of the Internet are so similar to the world of the printing press: individuals have extremely low entry barriers and ever easier access. As was true in the age of the printing press, the quality of ideas conveyed over the Internet can be at least partially assessed by the number of people with whom they resonate. And as more people find resonance with particular expressions, more still have their attention directed to the expressions whose popularity is rising.
The demand for content on the Internet is also linked to a significant rise in reading—a faint echo of the “big bang” of literacy that accompanied the creation of the Gutenberg Galaxy. In fact, after reading declined following the introduction of television, it has now tripled in just the last thirty years because the overwhelmingly dominant content on the Internet is printed words.
With democracy having fallen on hard times due to the current dominance over the public interest in so many countries by wealth and corporate power—and in others by the entrenched power of authoritarian dictatorships—many supporters of democratic self-governance are placing their hopes on the revival of robust democratic discourse in the age of the Internet.
Already, revolutionary political movements—from the Tahrir Square protesters in Cairo to Los Indignados in Spain to Occupy Wall Street to the surprisingly massive crowds of election protesters in Moscow—are predominantly shaped by the Internet. Facebook and Twitter have played a particularly important role in several of these movements, along with email, texting, and instant messaging. Google Earth has also been significant in spotlighting the excesses of elites, in Bahrain for example—and in the Libyan revolution, Google Earth was actually used by rebels in Misrata to guide their mortars. (Google Earth also, by the way, triggered a small border dispute and brief armed standoff between Nicaragua and Costa Rica, when it mistakenly attributed a tiny portion of Costa Rica to the national territory of Nicaragua.)
Thus far, however, reformist and revolutionary movements that have begun on the Internet have mostly followed the same pattern: enervation and excitement followed by disappointment and stasis. It is still an open question whether these Internet-inspired reform movements will gain a second wind and, after a period of simmering, reemerge and ultimately reach their goals.
One of the first revolutionary movements in which the Internet played a key igniting role was t
he 2007 Saffron Revolution in Myanmar. Activists took extreme personal risks to spread their messages urging democratic reforms by using the World Wide Web with false names from Internet cafés and by smuggling thumb drives across the border to collaborators in the diaspora living in Thailand. Unfortunately, the authoritarian government in Myanmar was able to smother and shut down the Saffron Revolution, but only at the cost of completely blacking out the Internet inside the country’s borders.
Nevertheless, the revolutionary fires lit before the Internet was shut down continued to smolder in Myanmar and continued to burn brightly in other parts of the world where the forces of conscience had been awakened to the abuses and injustices of the Myanmar dictatorship. (Diasporas, particularly educated and wealthy diasporas in Western countries, have been newly empowered by the Internet to play significant roles in fostering and sustaining reform movements in their countries of origin.) A few years later, the government of Myanmar was pressured to loosen its controls on political dialogue and release the leader of the reform movement, Aung San Suu Kyi, from her long house arrest, and in March 2012 she was triumphantly elected to the Parliament amidst many signs that the popular movement that had begun on the Internet was reemerging as a force for change that seemed destined to take control of the government.
In many other authoritarian countries, however, the ferocious resistance to reform has been more effective in snuffing out Internet-based dissent movements. In 2009, Iran’s Green Revolution began as a popular protest against the fraudulent presidential election. Although Western sympathizers had the impression that Twitter played a key role in igniting and sustaining the protest movement, in actuality social media played a much smaller role inside than outside Iran because the Iranian government was successful in largely controlling Internet use by the protesters. While it is true that YouTube videos documented government excesses (most famously, the tragic death of Neda Agha-Soltan), the more potent social media sites that would have enabled dissenters to build a larger protest movement were almost completely shut down. Indeed, during the election campaign itself, when the principal opposition candidate, Mir-Hossein Moussavi, began to gain momentum by organizing on Facebook, the government simply blacked it out.
