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THE RILEY REPORT - September 2007
from Thomas B. Riley RTRiley6@cs.com
www.rileyis.com
Following is the Riley Report for September 2007. Please feel free to pass this on as you see fit. If you wish to use any part of the Report in an offline publication please acknowledge the author or contact the author for permission if it is to be fully republished offline. If you are not currently subscribed to the Riley Report (there is no charge) you may email RTRiley6@cs.com and simply put "subscribe" in the body of the text.
This month’s report assesses the ways in which technologies are contributing to our changing cultures globally. The most important element of this change has been the way people now perceive the world around them. Most especially, it has brought attitudinal change and created social networks on a scale we have not seen in previous times in our history.
Cultural Change and Technology
By Thomas B.
Riley
Speed is the mantra of our age. Speed of change is the defining factor of our continuously
and rapidly evolving culture. The
source of this massive cultural upheaval is partly the evolution of our new
technologies in the past few decades. Technology
has significantly altered the way we see and engage ourselves in the modern
world.
The Internet is a 24-hour phenomenon. It is now estimated
there are over a billion people connected to the Internet and this is probably a
conservative estimate. Millions of
people are doing some activity at any moment of the day on the Internet.
People no longer rely solely on a computer to get on the Internet.
Cell phones, blackberries, personal digital assistants, iPods and laptops
are keeping us all connected and on the move.
Email had been considered the “killer application” on the Internet
until just a few months ago. There are now millions of blogs online
expostulating on any given topic or subject that the writer wants to forward.
Text has been predominant but the major tool is increasingly becoming visual.
My Space,
Facebook, YouTube[1]
are all vehicles to download videos. These are just a few examples of the
movement towards online videos, as their purpose is the creation of social
interaction, which has resulted in people interacting from around the globe.
These three sites are the best venues for individuals who are offering real time
events.
On the surface this development appears to be an extension
of television. The difference in this evolution is that the visual phenomenon of
posting videos and watching video streaming online is in the hands of
individuals who will watch events in their own time frame, not by some schedule
on a television station devised by corporate giants. In the last few months
there has been an increase in the number of media and TV sports web sites that
offer real time web casting. This
represents a tsunami of change. Already,
you can see, for example, senior politicians from around the world jumping into
the online video phenomenon. This is an effort, in some respects, to be noticed or
propound a political message or bring more people into the democratic process
online.
People now see themselves as world citizens even sitting in
their chairs at the office, school, internet café, university, home or wherever
they are linking up. Access to information and communication technologies (ICTs)
has brought a new way of viewing and experiencing the world.
People walk on the streets, checking out messages or downloading
streaming videos on their handheld devices whether it is a PDA, a cell phone or
a blackberry. Innovations to ICTs
have brought constant change. This
is good for the world economies and it is of particular benefit to the groups
and individuals who use these technologies.
There are good and bad aspects to the devices flooding the
world. For many in the private
sector it can mean being on call twenty-four hours a day. What was once a more structured world in terms of working
hours and habits has now been converted to a world of speed.
By this is meant, for example, that one’s boss in a company may decide
at 11 PM at night to send a message to an employee demanding that something get
done immediately. True, if one’s
handheld device is not on then the employee can get the message the next
morning. But the work culture is
now round the clock and the employee is probably expected to have the
communication device on in order to respond. Time is now the essence and everything to the workaday world.
This is one small example of the human price of technology. Another
complaint is that there are too many people spending too much time using these
new technologies. But this is a puerile complaint, as people have used the
technologies of their particular eras and “wasted” their time all through
the centuries. The difference in
our current time span is instant access.
Yet, the real importance of these new technologies is not
the medium itself. Rather, the true
change in the culture is the way we now interact in the world.
One example, is the way groups have come together online.
There are thousands of networks crisscrossing the world on just about any
given subject. People discuss
topics of personal or professional interest with people located in many
different parts of the world. People
use the Internet when wanting to set out travel plans.
The Google map will direct you to where you want to go, whether the
destination is local or thousands of miles away. GPS locators are now being used
in cars in many parts of the world.
Millions of people are literally on the move at any one
time, either within their home country or travelling abroad.
Our ICTs allow this use of the Internet to find information on locations
they would like to go, to find the best airplane deal or the reasonable
accommodation at their destination. This
has made tourism a top factor in the economies of many countries.
The most significant aspect of the principle of cultural
change has been the way people now interact with each other and perceive the
world. The death of distance was
once positioned as being the rise of jet air travel and travel in space.
Now, in the cyberspace world, people are experiencing the new phenomenon
of shrinking distance at their finger tips. Time is different for those who live
in the bubble of this 24-hour phenomenon. One
example of this change is that governments, in building e-service applications,
understand that online services are available round the clock.
The days of 9 to 5 services are slipping away, though at this point in
time, physical office services are still very much with us.
The goal of governments is to eventually be virtual when dealing with the
public. Human offline interaction
will continue to be available for the percentage of the population who are not
online and do not want to participate in the cyberspace evolution.
(Note: developing and poor countries are far behind in many respects –
world agencies understand this and are working assiduously to use viable mobile
and innovative technologies to
bring services to poorer countries).
The factual exposition of the nature of new technologies is
that these instruments of profound change for human civilization are only tools.
The agents of change are the people around the globe who use them.
Technologies have become extensions of human personalities.
There is now a time space dimension in which individuals unconsciously
live. For example, if you log onto
your computer in the morning you can be checking your email which could contain
messages from around the world; send an instant message, log onto news web sites
either locally, nationally or globally. It
is irrelevant to someone if you sent a message at 8 AM eastern standard time and
is read within a few minutes later by your designated recipient in the UK at 1
PM British Standard Time. Thus,
time as we have known it has been altered, as information whizzes around the
world in all times zones every second of the day.
The worldwide web is secondary in the real world of
applications. The true web is that
in the minds of millions of people who are part of this late twentieth and early
twenty-first century phenomenon. This
worldwide semantic is similar to the physical world’s spiders who build giant
webs. The latter is miniscule
compared to the mental web humans have now developed.
We as a society have yet to understand the true nature of this evolution.
Advances in new technologies are rapid, with new products
leaping onto the market and becoming the “must buy” item.
This contributes to the semantic web linking people around the globe.
We are witnessing the biggest evolutionary change in history in a very
short period of time. We are
experiencing a Modern Renaissance. It
is too early to predict what the future will bring as a result of these changes.
At this point in time it seems that such a cultural shift can bring us
even more changes. It is not the
technologies which will change us but our actions over time as global citizens
using these technologies.
[1] http://myspace.com, http://www.facebook.com and http://youtube.com are asocial networks that bring people from around the world together.
Thomas Riley is available for consultations, preparation of reports, presenting workshops or delivering speeches at conferences and seminars on e-government, e-governance and e-democracy. Please contact me at the email address below for further details.
Thomas B. Riley
Executive Director and Chair
Commonwealth Centre for E-Governance
www.electronicgov.net
President, Riley Information Services Inc.
www.rileyis.com
email:
rtriley6@cs.com
Author: Time's End
www.amazon.com
(see under books: Thomas B. Riley)
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