Just about everyone will now stipulate that Internet connectivity has changed the way business works, the way culture works, and the way most social systems behave. But what might happen if we doubled or tripled the number of people on-line? According to author Tom Hayes (summarized by Michael Malone):
…when the word’s entire labor force becomes interconnected via the Web,
all sorts of extraordinary networking effects will start emerging: the
world’s first million employee company, the first trillion dollar
corporation, an explosion in new inventions and patents arising from a
doubling of the world’s available intellectual capital, new fads and
trends emerging from the most unlikely places and racing around the
planet overnight, new centers of power. . .and dangerous new threats.
Google dramatically increased the probability of such massive global access to the Internet last week when it signed on to support o3b Networks, an initiative to bring high-speed wireless Internet to the ”other 3 billion” citizens of the world in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East. Says Malone:
The accomplish this, O3b plans to launch a network of 16 low-earth
orbit communications satellites by the end of 2010. This network, the
consortium claims will increase the world’s web-connected population to
just over 3 billion people. . .in other words, essentially what is
currently the world’s entire workforce.
What might happen to the arts as we know them when another billion or two artists, audiences, and entrepreneurs become connected? How might it shift the predominant cultural expressions exchanged on-line (now overwhelmingly Western culture)? And what might it mean for arts organizations who currently serve (or might serve) a global audience?
Round about 2011, I guess we’ll find out.
[ Thanks Drew for the link! ]
I wonder if this will actually happen. The world’s **entire** labor force interconnected via the Web??? Maybe, but we don’t live in a society in which everyone has a television — an invention that goes back 80+ years. Forgive me for being skeptical, but we were all told ten years ago that by 2008 all office workers would be telecommuting and all kids would be going to school online. Since no other technology has achieved 100% penetration, why should we believe the Web will?
A fair point, everycritic…we tend to be a bit breathless about technology predictions, and *entire* is likely over the top. But what if it were 70 percent? or even 60 percent? Might that still have a dramatic impact on the way society works? Note that there are now more than 3.6 billion mobile phone accounts in the world…certainly many representing multiple-mobile households. But that’s a ton of phones, which will increasingly feature wireless networking too.
Yes, I think it will ultimately have a dramatic effect but my personal guess is that the effect will be more nuanced and complicated than we tend to predict now. There’s an assumption that technology adaptation will grow unhindered. However, I read a series of predictions from technology experts a year ago. (Forgive me, I can’t cite them by name.) Interestingly, every one of them predicted a technology backlash within 10-15 years. Not that we were going to abandon digital technology by any means but that a segment of society would want to turn the focus away from technology. What with “Going Green” and the concern over what our gadgets are doing to the earth, (not to mention the economy shifts that will impact people’s ability to get connected) I find this prediction realistic. So then my question becomes how will the arts respond to not only those who are connecting but those who, for whatever reason, will not be connecting?
“launch a network of 16 low-earth orbit communications satellites by the end of 2010” I would imagine that it’s one thing to launch satellites and quite another to put Blackberries or laptops into the hands of millions of the poorest people in the planet living without food, clean water, or proper sanitation…..perhaps we might consider providing those basic rights first…? The other comment I have is that the classical arts aren’t another style of entertainment alongside the folk or popular entertainment arts. Just like the relationship of philosophy to daily thinking, the classical arts “eat” the popular arts for breakfast, and everything that they then create is a result of that digestion. It takes centuries to develop that sort of “meta” art form…and perhaps only a few generations to lose it? That would be true for the classical arts of any civilization.