A retrospective of a forecast – week 4

“Challenges of the global information society” by Pekka Himanen is a review presented at the attention of the Finnish Parliament’s Committee for the Future in 2004. Himanen, born 19 October 1973, is a Finnish philosopher, researcher of the “information age”, published in 20 languages.

This report lists the challenges Finland, as a European and welfare state country, may face in the awakening of the information society revolution; the focus is also expanded globally with ideas that do apply universally. In Himanen’s words: “The idea of the information society can be defined as a creative society that is based on interaction” and “What is most important to the information society is not new technology but a new way of doing things”; he does conclude that: “the most critical aspect in the development of the information society is the development of the deep-set structures of society”

In the author reasoning, there is an attempt to describe what the future may look like, a relative future since the report has been presented in 2004. While most of the underlying reasoning is still valid, it is already possible to assess, 17 years later, if any of Himanen’s ideas have been proved true or wrong.

The document is quite long and extensive, it starts analyzing the global trends, both demographic/economic and cultural, related to the changes in the information society evolution, then switches to the possible development scenarios offering three possible exemplar models to assess problems and futurable possibilities: the Finnish model, the Silicon Valley model and the Singapore model.

Focus is given on the European model of welfare-state and innovative entrepreneurialism in its fundamental values: caring, confidence, communality, encouragement, freedom, creativity, courage, visionariness, balance and meaningfulness.

Himanen than goes in deep expressing four key concepts of healthy social development in the new information society, a creative economy, a creative welfare society, humanly meaningful development and a global culture. Of all the material produced, there are two takeaways, two predictions he made, that deserve special mention, one is proven right, one false.

The author forecasted a word of increasing economic inequalities among people and countries, the so-called “global divide”; if this is at a certain margin true for the inequality inside the society with equities and income more and more centralized in fewer hands (especially in the US) is on the other side proven wrong when looking at inequalities among countries, the last 20 years have seen the economic rise of third and developing countries while in Europe and most of the “first world” the performance has been, to say it mildly, not excellent. Poverty at a world level is at is historical lower level today.

Himanen can really surprise the reader when he seems to predict the spread of a “culture of emergency”. In the last 15 years, analyzing the political narratives in the US and in Europe we can realize that’s perfectly true today; the author external view, coming from the distant 2004, can help us to better assess our present in a less biased way.   

All considered Himanen’s work resonate coherent and extensive, a good starting point for a better understanding of how the global information society may influence our lives.

 

The document https://web.archive.org/web/20170221105053/https://www.eduskunta.fi/FI/tietoaeduskunnasta/julkaisut/Documents/tuvje_1+2004.pdf

Siege to the fourth power – week 3

Newspapers represented an affordable, timely effective way to inform people around shared ideas, with no doubt they are one of the fundamental elements in the cradle of illuminism and modern democracy. The printed media have so many qualities that helped to improve human’s society but they also have the characteristic to require expensive organizations and can struggle to run a profit, hence they may end up being centralized in few hands of powerful oligarchs. The independence and the plurality of newspaper as always been an important issue in modern democracies. Even long-time established newspapers have always been prone to be influenced by the shareholders, political parties, companies paying for advertisement and the government itself in the case of state-owned ones.

The printed medium quickly became a powerful tool to influence masses opinion, we can safely consider them to be the first mass-medium that has been consciously used by the power for political purposes. In the last century, they start referring to the cast of journalists and their editors as the "fourth power" of the state. If someone thinks that radios, televisions and new social media have eclipsed the old fashioned printed papers in their political influence role can quickly be disproven pointing at how radio and television are filled in their talk-shows whit traditional newspaper journalists, who act as opinionmakers and how most of the social media political interaction is based on the re-sharing of contents from television talk-shows and newspapers themself, in their new digital form.

We can safely say that social media per se don’t pose a substantial threat on the ability of newspapers (and their patrons) to exercise the traditional influence in political dynamics, but maybe something else does, the blogs.

Blogs just as the traditional press can consist in the production of political contents and ideas of various quality and any extraction. Blogs differ from newspapers because they are inexpensive if not free to make and distribute, they don’t require an equity or a complex structure, only one person, the blogger, is enough to run one. Therefore, a blog can be independent as much as the blogger is, and today distributed for free on the Internet as long if their content is considered worthy to be shared by the users, the most valuable contents can become “viral”.

The case for a free blog to generate political influence and change is something already happening. The most famous example of a political blog is probably www.beppegrillo.it started by Beppe Grillo, a famous Italian comedian, in 2005. From his blog, Beppe Grillo was able to start the V-day protest movement, and subsequently, the “5 Stars” political party, scoring a quite remarkable 32% in the last Italian election. Interestingly in the first years of the “5 Stars” member were not allowed to communicate in any traditional media but restricted by the only use of the Internet, this rule is not applied anymore.

In a time of disintermediation of the social texture, blogs represent one of the possible challenges of the political power of the traditional press.

 

References

1.    https://www.beppegrillo.it/

How the slow snail outrun the fast machine - week 2

Once upon a time, teletypes were a thing, they were machines used to type text on paper, just like normal types but with the ''tele'' part as a plus.

Teletypes, or teleprinters, at the end of the 19^th century, were keyboards with built-in printers originally used in telegraphy. Differently from the normal telegraphic devices they had the innovation of a “user interface”, the keyboard, making them usable also by non-trained operators whit no knowledge of the Morse code. The ASR33 was the most common teletype model in History.

The year 1971, Ray Tomlinson, a computer scientist, managed to send the first email in History using two computers connected to two teletypes to print the message, this is when the @ was used for the first time as a fundamental component of an email address to join the name of the user with the name of the computer. We still use this format today in a fundamentally same way. Unfortunately, the first email text has been lost and forgotten.

Tomlinson opted for the @ because it wasn’t used yet in programs and operating systems so to not generate confusion and because of course, the symbol happened to be present on the teletypes he was using.   

Teletypes ended their business usage when the fax arrived, they survived for a while as an amatorial hobby, but they were effectively gone by the ’80 and ’90. Some interesting spin-off, though very limited for the number of users are the “airline teletype system” and the “telecommunications devices for the deaf” or TDDs.

The @ was probably invented by medieval monks as a shortcut for the Latin “ad” or the French “at”, used in their monasteries inventories, the meaning evolved to “each at” and “at the rate of” becoming mainstream in the modern era merchant world. It wasn’t included in the typing machines set for a long time until the 20^th century. Was Tomlinson to give at the @ the new universal purpose and a new contemporary life.

Due to his long story and elegant figure, @ has different names in different languages, “Monkey Tail” for the Dutch and “Snail” for the Italians.

Not only emails... , today the @ is also widely used on social media instant messaging, especially in group-chat at the scope to tag a particular person (eg. @name) into a particular message, to send a particular notification and to better ensure his attention and reply. Most notably @ is also the Twitter handle for user profiles.

On a semiology level, we can notice how the @ is assuming what can be described as the meaning to “communicate AT someone” person or social entity in general rather than be limited to the email world.

While the teletypes are clearly a far-gone technology of the past the @ is still kicking and alive in our daily e-communication practices.

This is the case of the snail who outrun the typing machine.

 

References

1.    http://www.columbia.edu/cu/computinghistory/teletype.html

2.    http://www.rtty.com/history/nelson.htm

3.    https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/the-accidental-history-of-the-symbol-18054936/

Three good ideas of insuccess - week 1

Hello dear internet sailor, and welcome to my little blog. My name is Lumix, in the coming weeks I'm going to share with you a journey through the E-SPEAIT sea, trying to produce some interesting contents and to navigate safely till the end of the spring semester.

As the title of this first blog suggests, today I'm going to write about three ideas, three good ideas, that have something in common: they all failed...

The first story of brilliant failure is the story of Betamax. The "Alfamax" of the case would be the VHS standard for video recording on tape cassettes, the one that pushed the Betamax standard by Sony out of the market.

Betamax entered the market in 1975 imposing itself as the best in quality in the market of video recording tape cassettes, by far the best video quality, but Sony was greedy and didn’t want to license the production out of its own brand, or maybe wasn’t greedy enough making the second mistake that made this "tape war" so famous. Sony, a serious company, said no to collaborations and business deals within the porn industry which in turn embraced the VHS technology, imposing a VHS reader in most of the houses…

Betamax was better, but who is going to buy a second (and more expensive) reader when already has a VHS one for the… you know what… stuff?

The defeat of Betamax by VHS is today studied in business schools as an example of how technological superiority and higher quality of the product is not enough to guarantee competitive advantage and to win market shares.

The second example of a visionary failure is when Microsoft tried to introduce tablet to the consumer market way before the iPad, with the first prototype in the year 2000 naming it “Tablet PC”. They predicted tablets to be the new things in the next 5 years, it didn’t happen and they gave up with the project, the market wasn’t responding. 

In 2010, ten years later, Steve Jobs launched the iPad, showing once again that markets can not only be followed but sometimes, they can be created…

The third and last example of a well-designed product that didn’t make it trough is Google+, the social network that in June 2011 aimed at replacing Facebook. It was a well-designed software with some interesting feature like the videocall service “Hangouts”, better than FB in managing phots and with a clearer and more effective management of privacy. Still, there are divided feeling around the +1 button.

Google plus had them all, but more than everything had all the other big G application (Gmail, YouTube, etc.…) at his support, with sometimes a bit overreaching push to ecosystem integration. None of this was enough to overcome the already impressive network economies FB had developed at that point, G+ was simply too similar to FB to give incentive for the user to migrate from a well established social network to an empty box. The service was disconnected in April 2019…

And that’s all for my first week blog, see you soon!