| Doors of Perception 4 S P E E D - S P E A K E R T R A N S C R I P T -
Jan Wyllie: Perspectives on the Speed of Change It was around 1978 when I first saw that microcomputers and digitisation were going to form the multimedia of the future. I was working at the Canadian Trend Report at the time as a content analyst on a new category which we called Communications. How did I know? I was practising content analysis -- popularised in the US by John Naisbitt of Megatrends fame -- which uses systematic sorting, filtering and summarising techniques to enable its practitioners to see what is going on in many more subject areas (that is, see wider) from many more sources (that is, see deeper) than conventional more impressionistic means of research. At the time, our source base was the North American daily press. 1) "... There is no time...."
 The late 70s were a time of both intense excitement about the coming information age, as well as fear of the changes which the new communications media technologies would bring about in the job market. Futures envisaging a social order aimed at maximizing leisure and minimising work -- instead of the other way round -- were predicted and discussed, but never realised. As it turned out, it was the move towards the service sector and the effects of the new female workforce which drove changes at the time, not the technology. That is when I first realised that the speed technology changes is different from the speed people change ... and that despite the conventional wisdom -- then as now -- often people change faster than technology. By 1983, the really crucial technology for the Internet -- email, file transfer, robust computer conferencing software, as well as AltaVista type text databases and hypertext software for instant retrieval and information management -- were all on the market. Some people called information scientists even knew how to use it. People had begun buying PCs for word processing, spreadsheets and primative databases about two years previously. People in the know nearly all thought that the Information Revolution was about to happen. But it didn't. All that happened in 10 years -- in supposedly the fastest changing industry in the world -- was the slow and painful switch from from DOS to Windows. And, of course, the value for money for microchips soared. The reasons that information revolution did not happen became quickly and very painfully obvious to me -- as both a content analyst and as the Director of one of the first companies into text database software for Pcs. The problem was that the fatal side effect of being able to find anything virtually immediately when every single word is can be indexed creates acute information overload leading to anxiety and options paralysis. The availability of instantly accessible information increased thousands-of-fold overnight, while reading off screens and inferior dot-matrix printouts replacing professionally laid-out and illustrated paper made the assimilation of online information slow and more difficult than the print equivalent. There was already in 1983 too much potentially useful information leading to too little actually useful knowledge. As every Web surfer knows to his cost, the same is true now with the World Wide Web as a publishing medium. The only difference is that now many more people know that information overload is a primary problem when it come acquiring the knowledge needed to adapt intelligently to change. 2) "Lets not be sorry, and let the past become our fate...."
 My view now is that what makes the situation on the Internet so explosive is not the publishing / media opportunities -- where I regret to say a great deal of content design work still has to be done. The radical change agent now is that the Internet is about to provide 1) the added convenience, 2) the economic benefits and 3) the necessary critical mass to create a flowering of global and local marketplaces in which banks and multinational corporations hold no special advantages, and in which communities and buyers have the edge on corporations and sellers. Where this scenario goes ballistic is when trading groups -- local as well as virtual communities -- begin to issue their own currencies or barter money. An example of how quickly the concept can take hold is the explosive success of local exchange trading schemes or LETS in UK and Australian local communities without the benefits of any telecommunications links. Now, waves of such schemes are being started in France, Germany and the Netherlands. People can simply create their own capital by trusting their chosen communities. When the Internet as a trading mechanism really starts gathering force in a couple of years time, the change will be so total, quick and seemingly natural that people will hardly notice it.
 So what are the lessons of this story? The first goes against 30 years of conventional wisdom illustrated by a graph which shows technical change accelerating fast, compared with social change which is achingly slow. The email explosion suggests on the contrary that it is people who change the fastest, not technologies, once the human conditions of change -- convenience, economics and critical mass -- are met. The second lesson is that information overload is a serious block to intelligent adaptation. However, by using techniques, such as content analysis and ideograms in a free electronic trading market, it will be possible for people to become vastly more widely knowledgeable, making it possible to surf the waves of change which bring the future into being, instead of falling further and further behind them despite madly paddling to keep up. People will then be in a much better position, if not to control change, then at least to influence it, anticipate it and adapt to it. 3) "The future is at hand.... This is the time for action because the future is within reach.... This is the time because there is no time."
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url: DOORS OF PERCEPTION editor@doorsofperception.com |