The Fourth Great Communication Revolution
Here’s my prediction. Sometime in the indeterminately near or distant future, someone will publish a book. The work, a thick and weighty volume, will be titled simply: “A History of the Internet”. It will chart the evolution of the web: its humble origins in computer networking; the first browsers, search engines, e-commerce platforms; the highs and lows of its reach and influence; and finally, how the technology has settled and its place in present (that is to say, future) society.
But here’s the thing: Google will be in chapter one.
So will Facebook, Amazon, Twitter, and all the other giants of today. In fact, the entire thirty-odd year history of the internet as we know it will be covered in the first section of the book, the introductory part, dealing with the ‘early web’. Hundreds or thousands of pages will follow. And no-one alive has any idea what will fill them.
Naturally I cannot know if my prediction will eventuate[1]. But just supposing that it might leads to an incredible thought — this is only the beginning. We stand at the dawn of the internet age, and in the coming decades or centuries we’ll witness changes that will make the first thirty years seem like a warm-up act.
The first three revolutions
This isn’t just blind futuristic speculation. Instead it comes from an examination of the past, specifically three turning points in the history of human communication.
Trying to pinpoint what makes us human is surprisingly difficult to do. It’s not the size of our brains, our opposable thumbs, nor seemingly any other piece of physiology. One school of thought argues that what separates us from the animals is in fact our language. Irresponsibly sidestepping the complexities of this theory, I will simply note that anatomically modern humans have been around for 200,000 years, and yet only in the last 5000 has our species technologically exploded. It may well be that we owe our modern humanity to three distinct advances in the technology of language: the development of writing, the creation of syllabic alphabets, and the invention of the printing press.
As we’ll see, each of these events was a profound moment in history, a giant stride in the relentless forward march. The truly striking aspect however is not the technologies themselves, nor even their social impact. No, the endlessly fascinating idea is that human beings changed, fundamentally, in response to each one. Our psychology shifted. Our very way of thinking.
That technology influences thought will be evident to anyone who has even a cursory knowledge of history. But technologies of language specifically can have such drastic effects as to almost defy understanding. This will be our focus as we examine each revolution in turn, before turning our eyes to the fourth.
Writing
The dawn of writing precipitated the end of an age of mythology. Until this point, all information was passed down face-to-face, as stories, folklore, traditions. Imagine: the most inquisitive minds of the pre-writing age might have spent their entire lives travelling from village to village, tribe to tribe, speaking with elders, learning from local experts, gathering all there was to know of human knowledge. Though ancient lifespans were far shorter, it is conceivable that one person might amass all the wisdom of a few generations of people from several hundred different tribes within a few thousand kilometres of his or her place of birth. But then, this gargantuan achievement, this wellspring of knowledge contained within one brain, would simply disappear: the scholar would die.
Enter writing. Suddenly, knowledge was cumulative. No longer did information die with the one who carried it, instead it could be recorded for posterity in symbols and pictures. Gone was the exclusive authority of elders: texts assumed much of this role. Texts which could be passed down across ages, and moved from place to place. Information began to accumulate across both geographical space and generational time. In other words, recorded history began.
It is difficult to imagine just how enormous a shift this would have caused in human psychology. Time and space themselves would have grown, as people began to contemplate the length of history and the breadth of the earth. It may even be that this was the birth of abstract thought itself, as humans began to conceive of objects, people, and times not in their immediate sensory world. The mind took a quantum leap forward.
Alphabets
It’s probably no exaggeration to say that alphabets led directly to the idea of education. Pictorial languages with thousands of symbols, like hieroglyphics, had previously afforded none but a select few the chance to be educated; literacy was prohibitively time-consuming. Knowledge, therefore, remained the exclusive domain of a few scholars and rulers. To the masses, wisdom was something heard from others, not acquired for oneself.
Everything changed with syllabic alphabets, where symbols represent sounds instead of entire words. Vastly more people can learn twenty characters than two thousand. Normal people (albeit those with intellect and good fortune) could suddenly read, learn, and educate their children.
It may seem like a small change, pictorial writing to alphabetic. But do not be fooled: this shift was nothing short of momentous. With pictures, each one learnt is one new concept. But with alphabetic symbols, a new one may double the words you can form! It’s the difference between linear and exponential growth: one stays on the chart, the other skyrockets off it. With alphabets, the pace of knowledge accumulation took an exponential turn.
Though not universally accepted, it has further been theorised that the added layer of abstraction in syllabic alphabets led directly to the sharpening of Western thought patterns. Deductive logic, codified law, monotheism, objective history, and even individualism have all been directly attributed to ‘the alphabet effect’. These vast cognitive strides shattered prior norms of thought and reason. Once again, human psychology had radically transformed.
The printing press
If alphabets spawned countless new ideas, the printing press is what spread them. As with all inventions, the printing press was born from a confluence of circumstance and ingenuity. Chinese rag paper and block printing technologies arrived in Europe via the Muslim world at around the time the continent was being ravaged by the Black Death. Unthinkable devastation aside, the plague actually accelerated development of the printing press in multiple ways. Untold fatalities left more inherited wealth to those who survived, and since nothing said “I’m rich” in the Middle Ages like new clothes, the garment industry thrived. Naturally, as clothes wore out, there was a plentiful supply of rags — the chief ingredient in paper. In addition, the primary copiers of texts by hand — priests — were dying like everyone else, creating an acute shortage of scribes. Both factors coincided with an explosion in Renaissance art, and thus the development of many new technologies for making cheaper and better paint (read: ink). All told, the time was ripe for the printing press to show up and change everything.
It did.
Unprecedented access to books and records broke the religious monopoly on information distribution. Historic ideas, previously isolated, could now be easily shared with the world. Swiftly came the Industrial Revolution, Enlightenment, and the birth of modern science. Political revolutions swept Europe; modern democracy took hold. Again, the collective mind of civilisation expanded, once more altering the very patterns of human thought. A dam of information had burst open, and the world bathed in the ideas that poured out.
Which brings us to now.
The shape of the internet
No one would doubt the internet is a revolutionary technology. But the first question must be: is it in the same league as the previous three? Were other tools not equally world-changing? The telegraph? Wireless radio? How, if at all, is the internet unique? Dozens of possible answers come to mind, but it’s the architects of the internet themselves who point to a single one: its shape.
We don’t imagine the web having form, but it does. Like a finely woven tapestry, it is intricate and complex, yet organised and beautiful. Conceptually, it resembles an hourglass: wide at top and bottom, narrow in the middle (image search “TCP/IP hourglass”). And in this shape lies its great power: universal compatibility.
Early internet architects had a great problem to solve. Hundreds of different physical technologies underwrite the internet. Millions of applications run on it. The problem is, like the Tower of Babel, each speaks a different language. How to ensure they can all talk to each other harmoniously?
Their solution was both simple and elegant: the hourglass. Physical wires and routers form the broad bottom, abstract web applications the wide top. They can afford to be diverse and varied, because they all funnel through the narrow centre, Internet Protocol, a single common language which unifies it all so that everything just works.
Ever wondered why there are no compatibility issues on the web?[2] This should not be obvious: most things need adaptors, drivers, different software versions. Not so, the internet. Its very structure allows access by anyone, in any way, to build anything, and release it to everyone. Truly ingenious.
From this simplicity of form follows almost every benefit one might name: ease of use, low cost of access, ubiquity, even sheer speed and power. But perhaps most important is versatility. It is this factor which, at the risk of gratuitous hyperbole, has the potential to change the entire world and everyone in it.
The fourth revolution
To be sure, the internet has already changed the world. The Great Library at Alexandria, the Bodleian Library, the United States Library of Congress: all were eclipsed by the web sometime in the nineties. The greatest repository of knowledge ever assembled sits at our literal fingertips, and grows every day. Instant global communication extends not only to active tasks like calling and texting, but to real-time passive information sharing: our devices talk to all corners of the world many billions of times a second, just in the background.
Though one could be forgiven for thinking the modern internet is nothing but a place to find cat pictures and express righteous anger in 140 characters, doubtless it has already changed humanity.
But let’s flip ahead a few pages of our hypothetical book. What will we find? 2017 provides only clues, mere hints at the boundless possibilities of the versatile web. The ‘Internet of Things’ promises to program everything in our world and put it to work. Personalised devices could monitor our health in real time and pre-empt disease, radically altering the fundamentals of medicine. Blockchain, the technology behind bitcoin, might render swathes of professionals obsolete: lawyers, bankers, agents of any kind. Wireless brain to brain communication may even eliminate speech itself.
Guesses of course, all of them. Some likely, some less so. All at least plausible, conceivable. But what of the inconceivable? What of the advances so far ahead that they lie beyond the horizons of present possibility? To paraphrase a wonderful quote, we tend to overestimate technology in the short term but underestimate it in the long term. We probably won’t all own self-driving cars in twenty years. But in two hundred years, there will exist technologies as foreign to us as would be a smartphone in the 1800s.
Each of the first three revolutions brought conceptual shifts which would have defied prior understanding. One can only guess what the next one will bring, what the final unwritten chapters will describe. Social upheavals? World-altering ideas? Brand new modes of abstract reasoning? We simply cannot say. Prediction is fraught with danger; change itself is the only sure thing.
In the face of such unknowability, such possibility, a dual question lingers, niggling at the furthest reaches of our imagination. When the fourth great communication revolution has run its course, when the book has been written and published, when the world settles into its new reality, will we recognise what has become of the internet? And far more importantly, more compellingly, more fatefully: would we even recognise ourselves?
Notes
[1] To be sure, this is not an original prediction. Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, is famously quoted saying that it’s “day one” of the internet era, a view which has informed his strategy of gaining maximum market share across multiple industries even at the cost of selling products at a loss.
[2] As always, there are exceptions. But usually it’s because they have been externally imposed, like sites not available in particular countries. It isn’t that the technology can’t handle it, it’s that someone chose to block it.
Originally published at ideasrepeated.wordpress.com on February 23, 2017. If you liked this, and haven’t seen my blog before, I’d love to hear from you.