This
document contains a list of trends I have identified based upon quotes
from managers, professionals, consultants, journalists, futurists, and
educators who study the digital dawn ... the beginning
of the digital age. Click on a topic to jump to the corresponding section
of the document.
Digital
Dawn
- "We are living
through an extraordinary moment in human history. Historians will
look back on our times, the 40-year span between 1980 and 2020,
and classify it among the handful of historical moments when humans
reorganized their entire civilization around a new tool, a new idea.
These decades mark the transition from the Industrial Age, an era
organized around the motor, to the Digital Age, an era defined by
the microprocessor -- the brains within today's personal computer.
The mid-1990s, perhaps even 1995, may come to be viewed as the defining
moment when society recognized the enormity of the changes taking
place and began to reorient itself. "
Source: Peter Leyden, "The
Historic Moment," in "On the Edge of the Digital
Age," Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune, 1995
-
"Literally,
we are going through a discontinuity right now. Since you started
writing your article, from the time you started to the time you
finish, we will have gone through a fundamental discontinuity in
the world. Right now. It's the Web. The network has emerged. ...
I mean it very profoundly. Our civilization is changing in these
six months to a year, right now. We have moved from the atomized
disconnected hierarchal civilization, to the networked interconnected
globalized civilization, literally in this year. It is happening
in 1995. We will look back 50 years from now and see this was the
critical moment of transformation."
Source: Peter Schwartz (President, Global Business Network),
quoted in "
On the Edge of the Digital
Age," Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune, 1995
-
"This
is a revolution that a lot of people don't see."
Source: Ira Brodsky, quoted in G. Christian Hill, "Look!
No Wires! The Cord Has Been Cut, and Communication May Never Be
The Same," Wall Street Journal, Feb. 11, 1994, Sec. R, p.
1
-
"For
Avram Miller, vice-president of corporate business development for
Intel, the big story of the present -- personal computers -- will
remain so, far into the future. 'The personal computer,' he says,
'will be to the 21st century what the automobile was to the 20th.
It will reorganize the way we live, play, and spend our lives. How
it will affect a particular business will vary with the business.
But one thing appears obvious -- some of the hottest places for
doing business will not be places at all, but will exist in cyberspace.
There will be a whole new world of virtual products and services
that live only in this other world, which we will create as we go
along. ... I know it sounds wild. It's as hard for us to understand
as the airplane was in the 19th century. Yet now we fly on planes
every day. Cyberspace will be a world 21st-century man will feel
at home in.'"
Source: Michael S Malone, "Chips Triumphant," Forbes
ASAP, February 26, 1996, p. 74.
-
ÒCapitalist
growth is based on an environmentally benign replacement of matter
and energy with knowledge and ingenuity. Every year entrepreneurial
forces yield more energy-efficient and information-intensive means
of production. Made of the three most common substances in the earthÕs
crust - silicon, oxygen and aluminum - microchips have been the
driving force of capitalist growth for 20 years. Microchip technology
is now converging with fiber optics -- also essentially made of
silicon -- to create a new information economy. In the form of computers
linked with fiber optics -- allowing telecommuting, home schools
and remote health care -- sand and glass replace oil and coal, hospital
beds and centralized medicine, ineffectively centralized schools
and colleges, environmentally wasteful agriculture and culturally
erosive television and entertainment."
Source: George Gilder, ÒLeisure & Arts -- Bookshelf:
YaleÕs Dr. Doom Looks Into The Impoverished Future,Ó Wall Street
Journal, February 25, 1995, p. A12
-
"For
the past few years the titans of media and communications have waged
a war for the digital future. With great fanfare, telephone and
cable TV companies have launched dozens of trials to demonstrate
their vision of speedy electronic networks, connecting homes to
a boundless trove of information, communication, education and fun.
Shambling towards their distant goal of a wired world, they have
been too busy to notice the unruly bunch of computer hackers, engineers
and students scurrying about at their feet. They should have paid
more attention. For while the giants have just been talking about
an information superhighway, the ants have actually been building
one: the Internet. ... What does that mean? This
survey will
argue that the Internet revolution has challenged the corporate-titan
model of the information superhighway. The growth of the Net is
not a fluke or a fad, but the consequence of unleashing the power
of individual creativity. If it were an economy, it would be the
triumph of the free market over central planning. In music, jazz
over Bach. Democracy over dictatorship."
Source: "
The Accidental Superhighway,"
The Economist, July 1, 1995
-
"It
really is a revolution and it really is big. There are revolutions
large and small but one this big probably hasn't come in at least
a hundred years and in the end we may look back and say this was
the biggest thing since the advent of the printing press in the
mid 1400s. One qualification though: it's very important to keep
in mind that revolutions take time and this particular revolution
we're in is going to take several decades to unfold and so it's
important not to confuse the local phenomena, current events, the
advent of the Internet and Mosaic and web browsers as the revolution
itself. The revolution is something deeper and bigger and occurring
over decades. ... Quite simply digital technology is the solvent
leaching the glue out of old much cherished social, political and
business structures. We're in a period where everything is changing,
everything is up for grabs and nothing makes any sense and probably
won't make any sense for two or three more decades. Now the good
news is that all of that uncertainty also spells opportunity. It's
created new opportunities for businesses, new kinds of jobs. This
is a full employment act for everybody touched by information technologies.
At a social level though it could be very good, but it could also
be very bad. We really are performing a great unwitting experiment
on ourselves and it's anyone's guess how it's going to come out.
... this revolution is more than unpredictable. We are performing
a great unwitting experiment that is changing our social structures,
our governmental structures and our business structures, everything,
absolutely everything is up for grabs and nothing's going to make
any sense at all for a couple of decades so we may as well sit back
and enjoy the ride."
Source: Paul Saffo
interview
by PBS Frontline on June 12, 1995
-
"
Many-to-many media, I think, are a revolution in the way the printing
press was a revolution. ... The printing press simply unlocked literacy.
What's important is not how you put those words together in a machine,
what's important is what a population does with it. When you collect
computers and telecommunications together, you created a global
many-to-many medium that unlocks the access to other people's minds.
You no longer have to be a television network or own a newspaper,
take a little computer bulletin board system and publish a manifesto
or an eyewitness report, you could be in Tienamen Square, you could
be anywhere in the world where news is happening and broadcast that
news to the world. I believe that it is as fundamental a power as
the printing press was. ... What made the medium valuable is that
every desktop can be a broadcasting station or a printing press.
You no longer have to rely on a central authority. Everybody can
communicate with everybody else."
Source: Howard Rheingold,
interview
by PBS Frontline on June 15, 1995
-
"The
discontinuity we are now living through will be every bit as disruptive
to our lives, and as beneficial, as the Industrial Revolution was
to the lives of our great-grand-parents. The way we compete will
change dramatically enough over just the next few years to alter
the very structure of our society, empowering some and disenfranchising
others. ... In a world in which communications and information are
practically free, the economic system will be driven more than ever
before by genuine innovation and human creativity. In such a world,
ideas will be the medium of exchange."
Source: Don Peppers and Martha Rogers, The One to One
Future: Building Relationships One Customer at a Time, Doubleday,
1993, p. 5
-
"
If anything, the computer is right now in the early throes of a
new phase of its revolution, as it becomes more an instrument of
communication, less one of computation. It is, after all, only in
the past few years that microelectronics has invented what amounts
to a whole new dimension of commerce and discourse. You do not have
to be a nerd or a mystic to see that historians will look back upon
the emergence of "cyberspace" as a turning point no less decisive
than the advent of the computer itself. A machine that transforms
communication impinges far more radically on people's lives than
one that transforms computation. Why mass media, when information
can be consumed in individualised packets? Must workplaces be "places"
at all? The next limiting factor is not going to be the ability
to imagine the future, or to invent it; many people think they can
imagine it all too well. It is their willingness to embrace it that
will matter most."
Source: "
That
Astonishing Microchip," The Economist, March 23, 1996
-
"This
is the fourth major social and economic revolution in the United
States that has stemmed from technology. The first was the development
of the nation's railroad system between the Civil War and World
War I. The second was the investment in industrial equipment between
1935 and 1973. The third was the computer era-mainframe through
personal computers-from the 1960s to the present. Each caused changes
that fundamentally altered lives, communities and the pattern of
history. Now, in the 1990s, the fourth major technological and economic
revolution, the revolution of interactive communications, is emerging.
It could well dwarf the earlier communications revolutions begotten
by the telegraph, telephone, radio and television."
Source: "
The Promise and Challenge
of a New Communications Age,"
Morino Institute, May 15,
1995
-
"It's
the third great revolution in the history of the world. First came
the neolithic revolution in agriculture. Then the industrial revolution.
Now we're moving to an information society. ... The information
revolution has changed people's perception of wealth. We originally
said that land was wealth. Then we thought it was industrial production.
Now we realize it's intellectual capital. The market is showing
us that intellectual capital is far more important than money. This
is a major change in the way the world works. Just like all the
farmers who disappeared during the industrial revolution, the same
thing is now happening to huge numbers of people in industry as
we move into the information age. ... We are witnessing a complete
change in the concept of wealth, and whenever that changes, you
have political change. People invested in yesterday will fight to
the last person. People trying to invest in the future will push
the agenda of social change."
Source: Walter Wriston, "
The Future
of Money," Wired, October 1996
- "Two former
Novell vice presidents have joined with several other industry executives
to form a company the group said will pursue opportunities relating
to the Internet's World Wide Web. Toby Corey, former vice president
of marketing for Novell's NetWare Products division, said 'We believe
that Web sites are essentially real estate lots in an unbounded
territory on a new continent.' ... Corey compares the effect the
Web will have on society to the changes that took place on the western
US frontier during the 19th century. 'Our civilization will change
in fundamental ways as the Web frontier is progressively settled.'
He predicts Web sites are where citizens will eventually go to vote,
register their automobiles, join town hall discussions or to check
out local schools before moving into a town as well as obtain products.
'For businesses Web sites will contain storefronts, agents and information
centers ... dramatically streamlining innumerable everyday business
functions and extending the market reach of virtually any business
to the entire planet.' Corey predicted that, for individuals, their
personal Web site will become an online homestead, where all live
communication is conducted, where text/audio/video messages are
sent and received, where personal information is presented to others,
and where the individual can store nformation that today might be
stored on the hard disk of a PC."
Source: Jim Mallory, "Former Novell Execs Launch Web Venture,"
Newsbyte News Network, December 18, 1995
-
"The
more direct path to creating new wealth in society - call it the
quantum growth leap - is through the development of entirely new
products and services, markets and businesses. Some of these new
markets, such as the Internet and World Wide Web, are already growing
at prairie fire pace but from such low bases that they don't yet
count for much. Yet the law of compounding numbers suggests that
businesses enjoying today's double-digit monthly growth rates will
reach sizable scale in the not-too-distant future, even assuming
that today's 15 percent-per-month growth rate in a field such as
Internet communications cools off to a mere 15 percent per year.
... So the digital gold rush is on, generating a madcap frenzy to
stake claims. That's why heretofore conservative communications
companies are willing to plop down billions of dollars at auction
for PCS licenses, using their arsenals of lawyers, investment bankers,
and Nobel Prize-winning 'game' theorists to muscle the competition
out of the way as they build crazy quilts of spectrum across the
continent. 'Nobody has any idea of what they're going to do with
the license, how they're going to use it, what value it has, if
any. But they have to act now, because now is the time the FCC is
allowing prospectors to stake their spectrum claims,' observes communications
consultant Hershel Shoesteck. Look at this process the way the managers
of the Bear Stearns's New Age Media Fund do: 'In our view, the creation
of a fully interactive nationwide communications network could open
up the largest market opportunity in history, possibly generating
several hundred billion dollars in new net GDP growth over the next
15 years.'"
Source: David Kline, "
The Alchemy of Wealth,"
Hotwired, December 18, 1995
- "In moving
data around the world, we're in for one helluva toboggan ride down
the price curve. Today's consumption of total in-place fiber-optic
cable capacity barely exceeds 6% to 7%. In the next seven years,
capacity is likely to grow by a factor of 10,000. This includes
today's huge and still growing oversupply in data-freight capacity
from twisted-pair phone lines, newer ISDN lines, terrestrial microwave
links, FM subcarrier transmission, and mobile radio. The real rogue
element is the satellite, with its 10- to 25-gigabaud ''data-squirt''
capacity. ...The real superhighway will be everywhere, like nitrogen
or moisture. Every man, woman, and child will be fully immersed
in a global digital medium. Apple's visionaries got it right when
they called it ''E-World.'' Our investigation of the long-term effects
of this one development-cheap bandwidth that will be leveraged by
every enterprise to continually reduce transaction costs-reveals
that it will destroy between 20 million and 25 million jobs in North
America. Hardest hit will be retail, wholesale, and the service
portions of every business. ... According to AT&T, 57% of your
current long-distance toll charge is the cost of accounting (billing,
etc.), and up to 95% of a transcontinental toll charge is for local-access
fees at the point of destination. ,,, When multimedia and cheap
bandwidth come together, a new trillion-dollar industry emerges:
Interactive telemedia. It represents the confluence of interests
shared by the engines of commerce and content creation. ... The
strategic software will not be Windows; it will be the hyper-adaptive
digital agent, originating in a handheld telecomputing device, that
will navigate cyberspace and bring home the digital bacon you fancy.
... Ultimately, what emerges is the global Interopolis-a new, rapidly
expanding republic of information. The strategy for finding and
keeping customers will be total customer satisfaction. Nothing less
will do. There will be very few pockets of ignorance left to exploit."
Source: Michael Moon, ÒDirt-Cheap
Bandwidth and the Coming Revolution,Ó Electronic Buyer News,
January 31, 1994, p. 44
-
-
ÒThe
Internet, specifically the Web, is moving from appearing as a neat
application to being the underlying information space in which we
communicate, learn, compute, and do business.Ó
Source: Tim Berners-Lee, quoted in ÒThe Internet: WhereÕs
It All Going,Ó Information Week, July 17, 1995, p. 31.
-
"The
agent of change will be in Internet, both literally and as a model
or metaphor. ... The user community of the Internet will be in the
mainstream of everyday life. Its demographics will look more and
more like the demographics of the world itself. As both Minitel
in France and Prodigy in the United States have learned, the single
biggest application of networks is e-mail. The true value of a network
is less about information and more about community. The information
superhighway is more than a short cut to every book in the Library
of Congress. It is creating a totally new, global social fabric."
Source: Nicholas Negroponte, Being Digital, Alfred
Knopf, 1995, p. 181
- "Information
technology was a good name 20 years ago when computing and handling
data were the end of the story. But now, the reason we deploy so-called
information technology increasingly has to do with managing relationships.
As in relationships among people, like on the Internet; or relationships
among companies, like on an electronic data interchange network;
or relationships among nations, like when central banks use clearing
and settlement networks. Most of what is called information technology
today has already outgrown the name and is now relationship
technology. ... If this technology is used for creating human
communities, the 21st century will be very different ... The opportunity
is there. The time has come to shift from the engineering approach
of information technology, which was totally warranted at the beginning,
to the human and relationship approach."
Source: Albert Bressand and Catherine Distler,
interview in "R-Tech," Wired,
June 1996, p. 139.
- "All memories
can be divided into those that are purely personal and private and
those that are shared or social. Unshared private memories die with
the individual. Social memory lives on. Our remarkable ability to
file and retrieve shared memories is the secret of our speciesÕ
evolutionary success. And anything that significantly alters the
way we construct, store, or use social memory therefore touches
on the very wellspring of destiny. Twice before in history humankind
has revolutionized its social memory. Today, in constructing a new
info-sphere, we are poised on the brink of another transformation.
In the beginning, human groups were forced to store their shared
memories in the same place they kept private memories -- i.e., in
the minds of individuals. ... So long as this remained true, the
size of the social memory was sorely limited. No matter how good
the memories of the elderly, no matter how memorable the songs or
lessons, there was only so much storage space in the skulls of the
population. Second wave civilization smashed the memory barrier.
It spread mass literacy. It kept systematic business records. It
invented the file cabinet. In short, it moved social memory outside
the skull. Today we are about to jump to a whole new stage of social
memory. The radical de-massification of the media, the invention
of new media, the mapping of the earth by satellite, ... all mean
we are recording the activities of the civilization in fine-grain
detail. ... The shift to Third Wave social memory ... is imparting
life to our memory ... it makes social memory both extensive and
active."
Source: Alvin Toffler, The Third Wave, William Morrow
and Company, Inc., 1980, pp. 192-193
- "Cyberia is
the place a businessperson goes when involved in a phone conversation,
the place a shamanic warrior goes when traveling out of body, the
place an ``acid house'' dancer goes when experiencing the bliss
of a techno-acid trance. Cyberia is the place alluded to by the
mystical teachings of every religion, the theoretical tangents of
every science, and the wildest speculations of every imagination.
Now, however, unlike any other time in history, Cyberia is thought
to be within our reach. The technological strides of our postmodern
culture, coupled with the rebirth of ancient spiritual ideas, have
convinced a growing number of people that Cyberia is the dimensional
plane in which humanity will soon find itself. ... A new scientific
paradigm, a new leap in technology, and a new class of drug created
the conditions for what many believe is the renaissance we are observing
today. Parallels certainly abound between our era and renaissances
of the past: the computer and the printing press, LSD and caffeine,
the holograph and perspective painting, the wheel and the spaceship,
agriculture and the datasphere. But cyberians see this era as more
than just a rebirth of classical ideas. They believe the age upon
us now might take the form of categorical upscaling of the human
experience onto uncharted, hyperdimensional turf. ... Whether or
not we are destined for a wholesale leap into the next dimension,
there are many people who believe that history as we know it is
coming to a close. It is more than likely that the aesthetics, inventions,
and attitudes of the cyberians will become as difficult to ignore
as the automatic teller machine and MTV. We all must cope, in one
way or another, with the passage of time. It behooves us to grok
Cyberia."
Source: Douglas Rushkoff, Cyberia: Life
in the Trenches of Hyperspace, Harper San Francisco, 1994
- "The importance
of the digital revolution is that it alters, in fundamental ways,
the availability of information in time and place, and the cost
of that information. The potential now exists to make information
available at any time the consumer desires (rather than when it
is convenient for the producer to distribute it). Consider, for
example, the difference between a continually updated on-line news
service and traditional home delivery of daily newspapers. Through
the use of improved wireline and, particularly, wireless networks
(such as the global telephone capability promised by the Iridium
satellite network), information can be available in any and every
place the consumer desires.(9) Digitization also promises to reduce
the cost of information transmission as it exploits steep learning
curves in the design and production of standardized electronic components,
and enormous economies of scale in network systems. Even if its
effects were limited to voice, video and data, digitization would
represent a powerful revolution. But it also has the potential to
transform an array of other businesses and industries. In effect,
the forces of digitalization act like the gravity of a "wormhole"
in Star Trek, pulling recognizable industries through it and transforming
them into something unrecognizable on the other side. In fact, as
entertainment and shopping are already being pulled through the
digitization wormhole, newspapers, education, gambling, and advertising,
among other businesses, are beginning to be pulled into its gravitational
field."
Source: P. William Bane, Stephen P. Bradley, and
David J. Collis, "Winners
And Losers: Industry Structure In The Converging World Of Telecommunications,
Computing And Entertainment," Multimedia Colloquium
1995, Harvard Business School
- "'What is
happening now is equivalent to what happened when the printing press
was invented in the 1400s,' he begins. 'The authority of the church
crumbled because we could all read the Bible in our own homes and
make up our own minds about God. Priest were suddenly just people.'
Television robs presidents of authority, he goes on, computers liberate
people from corporate authority, and CD-ROMS will soon rob teachers
of their power because students will have instant access to everything
teachers know. Says he: 'This will lead to a renaissance, which
in one way is great, because so much creativity will bubble up.
But it also heralds a very turbulent time. People are often frightened
when there is no authority around.'"
Source: Carla Rapoport, "Charles Handy Sees the
Future," Fortune, October 31, 1994
-
-
"A
growing number of people are now choosing these kinds of decentralized
models for the organizations and technologies they construct in
the world, and for the theories they construct about the world.
One such case began to unfold on December 7, 1991, when Russian
President Boris Yeltsin met with the leaders of Ukraine and Belarus
in a forest dacha outside the city of Brest. After two days of secret
meetings, the leaders issued a declaration: "The Union of Soviet
Socialist Republics, as a subject of international law and a geopolitical
reality, is ceasing its existence." With that announcement, Yeltsin
and his colleagues sounded the final death knell for a centralized
power structure that had ruled for nearly 75 years. In its place,
the leaders established a coalition of independent republics and
promised a radical decentralization of both economic and political
institutions."
Source: Mitchel Resnick, "
Changing
the Centralized Mind,"
Technology Review, July 1994
- "All over
the globe, the pinprick light of the networked society is glowing
and growing. At the start of the 1990s there were 1 million people
connected--or more often trying to connect across rickety copper
cables--to a kludgy, text-driven computer network choked with E-mail
and binary scientific gibberish. But as joining the Internet got
easier, its value--and population--multiplied. ... Even Bert Roberts,
chairman of U.S. telephone giant MCI, a company built on this wave
of liberalization, seems astonished when he relates that the 75
million phone numbers registered in 1995 equal the total number
distributed from 1876 to 1956. And Internet access is growing even
faster. 'It's taken us 100 years to get the phone network to the
point it's at,' says Fred Briggs, MCI's chief engineering officer.
'The Internet will get to that same level in five years.' Briggs
should know: MCI ran the original Internet backbone and watched
as year-to-year demand quadrupled. ... Call it the networked decade--the
last one of the century, chimed in by an overture of dial tones,
rings and beeps. ... the networked decade seems to have been prefigured
by a law of its own, Robert Metcalfe's Law of the Telecosm. Metcalfe,
whose Harvard Ph.D. dissertation led directly to his invention of
the Ethernet in 1973, has pegged the power of a network--literally
how much it can do--to the square of the number of connected machines.
... It is a breathtaking proposition that takes up, perhaps, too
little space on the page. But the implications from the simple logic
are easy enough to trace, and they will fill volumes of history
yet to be written: that the Internet as we know it today will be
over 100 times more powerful an informational tool by century's
end; that each newly connected PC boosts the power of the network
not geometrically but exponentially; that autarchy is forever dead.
Brazen, perhaps, but after decades of uninterrupted technological
acceleration, even the most pie-eyed technophiles are starting to
adjust to the Gs. All they can think to ask is, 'What on earth will
this mean?'"
Source: Pablo Bartholomew-Gamma, "The
Networked Society: Welcome to the Wired World," Special Report
from Time Inc. concerning the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland,
February, 1997
- ÒÔThis is
an important historical moment,' says Jeffrey Sachs, an economist
at Harvard University. ÔThe positive side is spectacular.Õ Barring
a major war or an environmental catastrophe, he believes, Ôeconomic
growth will raise the living standards of more people in more parts
of the world than at any prior time in history.Õ Domingo Cavalio,
he architect of ArgentinaÕs dramatic economic restructuring in the
1990s, echoes that notion. ÔWeÕve entered a golden age that will
last for decades.Õ he says predicting that Ôhistorians will come
to see the 1990s as the time of its birth. Even United Nations Secretary
General Kofi Annan, who often deals with troubled nations that have
had no growth for years, sees the world entering Ôa new golden age.ÕÓ
Source: G. Pascal Zachary, ÒGlobal Growth Attains
A New, Higher Level That Could Be Lasting,Ó Wall Street Journal,
March 13, 1997, p. A1
- "These appear
to be the times of bewildering transformation and change in the
structure and organization of modern Western economy and society.
It seems that capitalism is at a crossroads in its historical development
signaling the emergence of forces - technological, market, social
and institutional - that will be very different from those which
dominated the economy after the Second World War. Though not uncontroversial,
there is an emerging consensus in the social sciences that the period
since the mid-1970s represents a transition from one distinct phase
of capitalist development to a new phase. Thus, there is a sense
that these are times of epoch-making transformation in the very
forces which drive, stabilize and reproduce the capitalist world.
Terms such as 'structural crisis', 'transformation' and 'transition'
have become common descriptors of the present, while new epithets
such as 'post-Fordist', 'post-industrial', 'post-modern', fifth
Kondratiev' and 'post-collective' have been coined by the academic
prophets of our times to describe the emerging new age of capitalism.
... New or not, it seems indisputable that the salience of so many
of the icons of the age of mass industrialization and mass consumerism
appears to be diminishing. Under threat in the West appears to be
the centrality of large industrial complexes, blue-collar work,
full employment, centralized bureaucracies of management, mass markets
for cheap standardized goods, the welfare state, mass political
parties and the centrality of the national state as a unit of organization.
While, of course, each individual trend is open to dispute, taken
together they make it difficult to avoid a sense that an old way
of doing things might be disappearing or becoming reorganized. The
'post-Fordist' debate concerns the nature and direction of such
epoch-making change."
Source: Ash Amin, "Post-Fordism: Models, Fantasies
and Phantoms of Transition," in Post-Fordism: A Reader,
Ash Amin (Editor), Blackwell Publishers, 1994, p. 1
- "We are, I
believe, at the beginning of a Third Industrial Revolution that
will reshape not only our industrial processes, but also bring with
it great changes that will affect us all. The First Industrial Revolution
of the eighteenth century brought fundamental but primitive changes
in the allocation of people, resources, and energy. In the Second
Industrial Revolution, the revolutionary impact of automobiles,
photography, electric power, and industrial chemicals made the United
States a foremost industrial power. ... The history of the Third
Revolution begins with the information revolution brought about
by the computer and made effective as a revolutionary device in
the microprocessor which continues to drive the expansion and diffusion
of the new knowledge-based processes. But the Third Industrial Revolution
goes far beyond the computer and the microprocessor. Each decade
since the second world war has brought crucial developments in related
areas of CAD/CAM, fiber optics, lasers, holography, biogenetics,
bioagriculture, and telecommunications. The synergy of these new
scientific/industrial areas will change the way of life for the
next half-century and beyond.
Source: Joseph Finkelstein, Windows on a New
World: The Third Industrial Revolution, Greenwood Press, 1989,
p. xv
- "By 2047,
one can imagine a body-networked, on-board assistant-a guardian
angel that can capture and retrieve everything we hear, read, and
see. It could have as much memory and processing power as its master,
that is 1,000 million-million operations per second, (one petaops)
and a memory of 10 terabytes. Content and all electronically encodable
information will be in cyberspace. ... Zero cost, communicating
computers will just be everywhere, embedded in everything from phones,
light switches, motors, buildings, and highways to all seeing, all
changing pictures that can converse with us. They'll be the eyes
and ears for the blind and deaf, know exactly where they are, and
be able to drive vehicles. The only limits to cyberization are our
networks and our ability to interface computers with the various
parts of the physical world through sensor/effectors consisting
of direct connections, voice, gestures, and so on. Driven by a quest
for knowledge and the economics of new industry formation and efficiency,
cyberization is inevitable."
Source: Gordon Bell, "The Body Electric," Communications
of the ACM, February 1997
- "Anything
that gets information to people is threatening to existing power
structures. I was talking to Peter Drucker about the fact that no
one has figured out a way to catergorize things on the Internet.
He told me about a Czeck monk in the 15th century who invented alphabetization.
Before that, books were arranged wherever the monks wanted to put
them, so nobody else could find them. Then this guy had a brilliant
idea to go a-b-c. It revolutionized the organization of information.
He broke the monopoly of the monks. And you know what happened to
him? He got excommunicated for his trouble. Whenever there is a
shift in how wealth is created, the old elites give up their position
and a new group of people arise and control society. We're in the
middle of that right now."
Source: Walter Wriston, "The Defeat of the Elite," Forbes
ASAP, December 1, 1997, p. 156