|
|
|
Posted: June 2
(Rome) How do you know when you are in the middle of a revolution? And how do you know which revolution it is? I remember walking through a big empty room at Kuangchi Program Service, the TV studios that the Jesuits in Taiwan run. Grooves in the floor were all that remained as a memorial to the massive one inch video tape machines that used to pack the room, replaced by a computer and digital editing equipment. And I remember just a year ago revisiting the radio station in Chikuni, Zambia, probably as remote a place as one would want. They now have a mixing board which responds to pre-recorded settings to give each announcer his or her specific EQ settings to get just the round sound quality without fussing with lots of nobs. The very latest equipment in an unlikely setting. And there are so many other indicators of the impact of the digital revolution at all levels of production in the communication field.
The latest hint of the future was an article I read in a newspaper saying that Cisco was planning to go into the consumer market. Revolutionary, eh? Who is Cisco, you are thinking. They are the world leader in making switches and firewalls –the hidden equipment that makes the internet possible. Normally only companies and internet service providers would use their products, but now this company sees communication via the internet becoming so central to ordinary life that they want to stake out some of this new turf. The spokesman for Cisco said “he believed Cisco's investment in consumer awareness was merely following the transition of the Internet into an everywhere-everyone channel for communications.” I was struck by that phrase: everywhere-everyone.
Another phrase in the article was “social networking” which means the pervasive connection of people not just for work purposes but for even the ordinary details of life. When I was in Washington a few weeks ago, several of us wanted to go out to dinner. We could not find the phone number of the restaurant to make a reservation, so we just went online (a wireless Wi-Fi connection, naturally), connected to a reservation service, and immediately confirmed a table for the time we wanted. When we got to the restaurant, the maitre’ d just tapped on a touch screen to check our reservation. I did not think much of this example at the time, but looked at it in the context of the Cisco article, it seems indicative of the pervasive change already going on. But this is just the beginning, according to the Cisco spokesman.
Social networking is just today's rest stop on the way to micropersonalization of information and entertainment, and that means every consumer is a mass market of one. The Internet has replaced knowledge-sharing in such a permanent and dramatic way, he said, that the next generation of invention and innovation will come from "the network," not from individuals, whether it be in the fields of biology, information technology or rocket science.
back to previous entries