by Tom Wheeler
When students are individual information hubs, as opposed to a single unit buried in a larger group, they can command their lessons. Rather than sitting in a classroom trying to grab on to a concept as it flies by, the “individual hub” student can call up topic-specific online presentations. A teacher in front of a large classroom can’t keep reviewing one point for the benefit of a single student, but when the student is a learning hub he or she can review an online explanation as many times as necessary. And if it still doesn’t work, the student can find a different teacher, that is, a different online presentation on the same topic.
In 2006 Salman Khan, a young hedge-fund analyst, began tutoring his cousins in math over the internet. Ultimately, he put videos of his tutorials on YouTube, where they were so popular he quit his job and created Khan Academy, a digital learning company. His goal, he told me, was to allow anyone, anywhere, “to learn almost anything—for free.” Today, tens of millions of people have taken him up on the offer by accessing thousands of online lessons. The lessons have their own drills, and through one-on-one interaction with the student, they allow the kind of focused instruction that is difficult in a large classroom.
Connected learning also produces the Holy Grail of the twenty-first century: data. It is estimated a student produces 10 million data points in a single day.29 This information was always being produced, but schools and educators lacked the capability to either capture or process the data. How many times did the student repeat the presentation? Which points needed to be reviewed multiple times? What is the best time of day for learning a specific topic? What is the optimal amount of time to spend on new information? When Big Data comes to the classroom, it can help teachers teach as well as help administrators measure progress. Most important, it can help students learn.
Since the middle of the nineteenth century, education has forced the student to adapt to the system. The new networks make it possible for the system to adapt to the student.
Simply inserting the new network into an industrial age structure is not a solution, however. Networks change pedagogical processes as well as what needs to be learned. Industrial age schools focused on reading and math because of the need for workers to be able to read instructions and execute basic computations. While such skills remain necessary, the networked economy has redefined them.
In an eighth-grade English class at Edna Brewer Middle School in Oakland, California, I was initially surprised to see students working on what hardly seemed to be “English.” Each student was incorporating teacher-specified modifications in font, color, style, and imported graphics to create a page on their computer screen. This was an English class? Wasn’t this the kind of thing that should be covered in art class or the computer lab? Why was it in English class?
Then I realized two things that made these students’ educational needs different from my experience. First, while they are growing up digital natives, students still need training in computer skills (just as growing up a native English speaker doesn’t mean I still didn’t need to learn English skills). The development of an intuitive relationship with networked computing comes through repeated interaction with networked computing—even in English class. Second, English class exists to help students learn to express themselves. For these students to be able to take advantage of how the network has become the greatest self-expression tool ever known, they will need to know how to create on the network, including these online formatting skills, and it will need to be second nature to them.
The ability of schools to access the new networks was one of the first issues we dealt with in my time at the FCC. As the agency responsible for supporting the connectivity of the nation’s schools and libraries, we discovered that almost two-thirds of American schools and libraries were stuck with twentieth-century networks in an era of twenty-first-century needs. Schools serving 40 million students simply did not have high-speed digital fiber links to their buildings to carry the traffic necessary to allow multiple simultaneous internet users in every classroom. We also discovered that although Wi-Fi might be available in every coffee shop and McDonald’s, even schools with high-speed fiber connections didn’t have in most of their classrooms the Wi-Fi needed to put connectivity on the student’s desk. And, of course, these problems were the most severe in schools serving rural and low-income areas. Our reforms created the opportunity for all students to have in-school access at their desks to the most powerful educational tool in history.
Previous pedagogy was designed to produce workforce skills necessary for routine, rules-based activities under hierarchical supervision. Today, our challenge is to produce a digital workforce for whom the network is an extension of themselves and an opportunity to apply abstract skills such as problem solving, analytical reasoning, and the communication of complex concepts. It is technology that makes the demands, and technology that enables new solutions. We just need to be smart enough to see and seize the opportunity for all students.
The Nature of Nations
“Networks are more powerful than nations,” a senior U.S. State Department official once told me.30
The modern nation-state is the combination of geography and a sense of community. By perpetuating and distributing a common language, the printing press helped create that sense of national community. The early railroad and telegraph further knitted that community together for commercial activity and the information exchange.
Ultimately, however, the railroad and telegraph gnawed at the power of geography and expanded horizons across borders. Today’s networks expand that orientation yet again, to a connectivity unfettered by maps and borders. When a single keystroke can circle the world in seconds, geography becomes irrelevant. In the process, the new networks have become a new challenge to the nature of the nation-state.
The modern nation-state is a seventeenth-century concoction. In 1648, after decades of war in pursuit of supranational empire, the European powers agreed to the Peace of Westphalia, in which they disavowed empire by affirming geographic national sovereignty. Exported to the rest of the world, national sovereignty defined the intervening centuries and was defended in battle.
By making geography irrelevant and creating new non-national communities, the internet has fragmented a world previously stabilized by national centralization. The result is a challenge to the nation-state from above by supranational networks and from below by super-empowered individuals and groups.
Significantly, the vehicle that challenges the nation-state was created outside of sovereign governmental structures. The internet is a set of technology standards developed by a non-national, multistakeholder technical community. Without sovereign direction, the networks of the twenty-first century were stitched together around common technical standards that were then imposed on the Westphalian world without permission.
The path to diminishing sovereignty began with the first electronic network. In 1865, the French government assembled representatives of other European nations operating state-owned telegraph networks. The attendees formed the International Telegraph Union (ITU) and agreed to a common set of regulations to bind their activities. It was the first supranational organization in which geography-based nation-states ceded sovereign authority to a common body.
The march from a telegraph union, to a coal union after World War II, and, ultimately, the modern European Union has been the pursuit of industrial-era scope and scale economics at the expense of geographic sovereignty. Such supranational structures formerly existed at the pleasure of the sovereigns. Yet in the new supranational digital network, technology is controlled by a community of technocrats who answer to no sovereign. This dichotomy creates awkward situations such as the European Union’s effort to harness its member nation-states into a Digital Single Market (DSM) that nonetheless respects differing national policies, precisely as the distributed, lightning-fast network challenges the relevance of unique national policies.
Alongside such supranational realities, the new networks ha
ve empowered those wishing to challenge the state from below. Social media has altered the nature of the interaction between government and the governed.
In 2009, the sprouts of protest in Iran, dubbed the Green Revolution, were organized internally and then reported to the world by social media. Online activity was such an important tool that when the U.S. State Department discovered that Twitter—a major organizing tool for the protesters—would be briefly taken down for routine maintenance, it urged the company to postpone the work so as not to disrupt the protesters’ ability to communicate.
As the Arab Spring of 2010–11 spread across North Africa, Cairo’s Tahrir Square became the center of protests against the Egyptian government. Like the Green Revolution, protest organizing occurred over social media apps on mobile phones. Ultimately, the government shut down the mobile networks.
In the United States, the new networks have redirected political activity the same as they have economic activity—away from centralization—and with similar destabilizing results. Traditionally, centralized networks supported centralized media, which in turn supported centralized, hierarchical political activity. But decentralized networks empower individuals at the expense of institutions. From Barack Obama’s groundbreaking use of social media in his 2008 campaign, to the ability of the Tea Party to set themes in Congress and campaigns, to the role of Twitter in Donald Trump’s campaign and presidency, to the Russian government’s use of social media to influence the 2016 presidential election, new networks have disrupted the role, functions, and importance of the political gatekeepers that previously provided stability.
The networks that expand citizen participation also undermine state sovereignty. The very networks that create economic opportunity, improve quality of life, and expand political participation also deliver the organization and management tools necessary for violent attacks on national stability.
If it seems, for instance, that twenty-first-century sectarian wars in the Middle East echo the religious wars that set Europe ablaze centuries ago, should we be surprised? Back then the printing press knocked down the walls that had constrained ideas and consolidated power. Today electronic networks allow insurgent movements to gain scale at speed and to combine military activity, social media, and terror attacks in a coordinated campaign. As Joshua Cooper Ramo has observed, “Network technologies do to terror attacks what gunpowder once did to projectiles. They make the impact larger.”31
While in some instances new networks may threaten stability, in others they reformat the operation and the sustainability of government in positive ways. In Estonia, for instance, a citizen can conduct her entire relationship with the government online, including voting. There are only three governmental activities that cannot be executed online in Estonia: notarizing a document, getting married, and getting a death certificate (at the other end of life, a birth certificate is created digitally at the blessed event and sent to the family online).
Often called “the most wired country in the world,” Estonia is the first “country in the cloud” where the state exists online.32 While Estonia has the advantage of both its small size (approximately 1.3 million people, or 75 per square mile), as well as a greenfield restart after the end of the Soviet occupation in 1991, it is the ultimate manifestation of the new Westphalia: a state on the map whose functions are in the network cloud.
For other nations, the Estonia-like technological opportunity is clear, but the governmental legacy of previous network revolutions slows things down.
The centralized networks of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries created big business, big cities, big markets—and big government. As scope and scale became the hallmarks of economic activity, government provided an offset. To accomplish this, government imported into governing the same scope and scale structural concepts that ruled the economy. Hierarchical, rules-based oversight became the modus operandi of government just as it was for the operation of industry.
Yet, while industry can be ruthless in implementing new procedures in pursuit of profit, democratic government revolves around a much slower process that buffers change by providing all interested parties an opportunity to affect the outcome. Having run a bureaucratic agency, I understand that full and open participation is—and should be—of paramount importance. But it sure slows innovation and efficiency.
During my tenure at the FCC we worked to develop what we referred to as a new regulatory paradigm. In times of slower-developing technology, regulators could engage in top-down micromanagement of markets. Today’s rapidly changing technology means that such an approach would not only slow innovation but would also be impossible to implement.
In this regard, we tried to learn from the disrupters themselves, the software developers. Early software development was linear and incremental; it was described as the “waterfall” approach because the development would slowly move downstream by stages until it was completed and went over the waterfall. Around the turn of the century, however, the waterfall was replaced by “agile” development in which the requirements and the solutions evolve in tandem. In agile software development the product is never done since it must always be responsive to new developments. Agile regulation means a similar articulation of essential principles and flexible enforcement if and as necessary, based on how technology and the market evolve.
Beyond the impact of networks on bureaucratic decision-making is their impact on the broader political process. The centralized economic and social realities that created the present structure of government are being replaced by new networks as surely as Amazon replaced the neighborhood bookstore.
When the founding fathers produced a republic rather than a pure democracy, they made the decision to create an intermediate layer of elected officials between the people and power. James Madison explained this in Federalist No. 10 as the “cure for the mischiefs of faction,” caused by “some common impulse of passion.”33
The centralized nature of the old information networks helped mitigate such passion by empowering curators such as editors or party leaders to structure debate by the way they assembled and organized information. Because the new decentralized networks are decidedly not curated, they replace such oversight with an unprecedented ability for individuals to organize and express themselves without permission or structure.
Created by the new networks, the aftermath of uncurated expression is a governing challenge for our era. “Winning is easy … governing is hard,” George Washington tells Alexander Hamilton in the Broadway hit Hamilton. It is an observation relevant today as new networks expand the ability to organize and fight while making it harder to govern.
My friend Wael Ghonim, who used social media to launch and coordinate the revolt in Tahrir Square, defined the challenge. “The same tool that united us to topple dictators eventually tore us apart.” Those who harnessed new networks in democratic expression in Egypt, Ghonim warned, failed to follow it with republican organization, in large part because organizing “anti” is easier than building “pro.”
After bringing down the government, Ghonim says, “we failed to build consensus, and the political struggle led to tense polarization…. Our social media experiences are designed in a way that favors broadcasting over engagements, posts over discussions, shallow comments over deep conversations…. It’s as if we agreed that we are here to talk at each other instead of talking with each other.”34
In Egypt, such “talking at each other instead of talking with each other” allowed those who were organized, the Muslim Brotherhood, to hijack the revolution and replace one autocrat with another. In the United States, the result has been to gridlock collective republican (small r) decision-making.
We are not immune to the reality that networks shape the nature of nations, the operation of governments, and the role of the governed. Throughout history, networks have defined nations and enabled empires. Our new information-based networks challenge us to preserve hard-won republican ideals even as we embrace digital chan
ge.
Information Insurgency
On June 1, 1980, Ted Turner inaugurated Cable News Network (CNN). I was invited to speak at the launch. Struggling to articulate the groundbreaking all-news format in the context of what was then a world of video content scarcity, I described CNN as “a telepublishing event marking a watershed in information provision.”35 It was a bit over the top rhetorically, perhaps, but the point still stands: CNN started bringing the diversity of print publishing to video.
It all seems so curious today as 300 hours’ worth of video is uploaded to YouTube every minute.36 But CNN was the network-driven precursor to the untamed distribution of video information that we take for granted today.
CNN broke the news monopoly of the three major television networks by taking advantage of the expanded capacity of cable networks. In the process it introduced velocity to the news cycle. Previously, news waited its turn to access the limited capacity of broadcast networks. That meant an evening thirty-minute (twenty-two minutes without commercials) daily news roundup. Monumental events, of course, enjoyed “breaking news” status to interrupt regular programming, but that was rare.
Cable networks, unconstrained by the scarcity of broadcast spectrum, enabled CNN’s all-news-all-the-time model. Events that would otherwise have waited went on immediately. As a result, the definition of what was “news” changed.
Immediately after the launch ceremony, Reese Schonfeld, the architect of CNN, took me into the control room to proudly point out live satellite coverage coming from a beach in South Florida in anticipation of a storm. Watching the sky and the tide to report on a storm that had not yet hit would previously not have been worthy of airtime; traditional television would have awaited the results. But with twenty-four hours of airtime to fill, the fact that the storm had not yet hit was news.
While CNN opened the time aperture that had previously constrained video reporting, it did not change the basic paradigm of curated news. Since the days of the first newspapers, the role of editor-curator had reigned supreme. Because of the limited space, someone had to make judgments about what was news and how much emphasis it would receive. For a piece of news to get on the front page of the newspaper, or on the TV networks’ thirty-minute nightly recaps—and even on CNN’s twenty-four-hour cycle—someone had to judge that it was more important than other pieces of news.
