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POSTCARDS
FROM THE DIGITAL FRONTIER: Remarks
by David Bollier I won't pretend to offer conclusive answers, even if this is a boom time for dime-store futurists. But I have struggled many years to assemble a crude overview of the emerging digital culture, and I have some strong convictions about the forces shaping the new world. It will either be a refreshing change or a gross imposition that I speak to you today not as a fellow librarian or theologian, but as an informed generalist. To be more precise, I am a journalist, citizen advocate and strategic consultant who wades through a variety of thickets, many having to do with digital technologies. I write reports for the Aspen Institute Communications and Society Program; engage in political advocacy with Ralph Nader and his colleagues; collaborate with TV producer Norman Lear on public affairs projects; consult sporadically with foundations and nonprofits; and have been known to wear such hats as "business journalist" and "civic philosopher." It may interest some of you, as well, that I am the son of John Bollier, who pioneered a few digital trails for ATLA as development director. My talk today is fashioned as a travelogue in which I offer some conceptual postcards from the digital frontier. Grand treatises are increasingly problematic when it comes to the ever-mutating digital universe, which is nothing if not protean. Yet some provisional theories or paradigms are essential if we're going to anticipate and master the genuinely new forces that are remaking our organizations, markets, federal policies, and cultural norms -- and, perhaps most importantly but invisibly, our very sense of ourselves. I deliberately won't answer the question, What does this mean for libraries?, because I'm no expert on library science, let alone theological library science. But I do know that some of the most important issues facing libraries are coming from the worlds beyond library science and its traditional expertise. So, as someone who prowls the digital frontier with some attentive diligence, I offer some speculative analyses of emerging trends: postcards that are succinct and suggestive, but only a glimpse of something bigger. How Electronic Networking is Changing the "Fitness Landscape" Wagon trains heading westward in the 1800s usually had scouts who traveled miles ahead to explore the upcoming terrain and report back to the travelers. This capacity is becoming increasingly urgent for libraries and other nonprofit institutions-the ability to aggressively scout out the new terrain and develop long-term strategic plans. There is no such thing as business-as-usual anymore. The velocity of change is simply too great. Yet surprisingly, many organizations still do not have the institutional capacity to reconnoiter the future and plot long-term strategies. This is a serious vulnerability. How best to conceptualize the forces shaping the digital culture? As I see it, the driving force of change is not just the personal computer, or the Internet, or high-speed telecommunications, but the promiscuous co-mingling of all of these and affiliated technologies. Taken together, I believe the most novel, influential dimension of these technologies is electronic networking: how they interconnect everyone on a global scale in new time permutations and allow the exchange of vast quantities of complex data, imagery and words. Our culture is growing a new central nervous system. One of the most cogent bodies of analysis for explaining the dynamics of electronic networking is "complexity theory," which has come to serve as a common second language for many digital theorists. Complexity theory had its origins in the 1980s at the Santa Fe Institute, an iconoclastic think tank which has served as an incubator of post-Cartesian scientific thinking in physics, economics, biology and other sciences. Complexity theory is significant because it offers a coherent way of describing the new environment of electronic networking, among other things. Most of its principles derive from biology and other natural systems, which are then applied to manmade systems such as computer software, markets and organizations. For example, the Darwinian principle of natural selection is used to analyze organizations and their ability to survive in a competitive marketplace. The most successful organizations will have superior "feedback loops" to acquire and interpret external knowledge, and learn to become highly adaptable to changes in their environment. James F. Moore, in his book, The Death of Competition, urges executives to look for strategic guidance from biological models, and to apply the principles of dynamic ecosystems to the functioning of their organizations. "As a manager," Moore writes, "you must not only have a plan for your own product or service, but a plan to help out the entire ecosystem. Some leading companies are now introducing what they call 'precursor products,' which are specifically designed to draw customers into a co-creating, co-evolving relationship with the company. Then they can concurrently create supply chains, complementary products and services, and customer and lead supplier constituencies." For many thinkers, the rise of complexity theory is an epoch-shattering departure from the Newtonian world view of orderly cause-and-effect to a messier, non-linear world of constant change. This is a major change in cultural, not to mention organizational, epistemology. Instead of thinking in terms of individual entities that interact in mechanical ways, complexity theory describes a fluid world of interconnected organisms that are constantly adapting to a larger "fitness landscape" - the features of the natural environment that reward certain adaptive traits and punish non-adaptive traits. A great many new Internet-based ventures and Fortune 500 firms are actually using complexity theory to revamp their organizational structures in order to improve their performance. Instead of trying to create and control uniformity through Taylorite management schemes, these companies are trying to understand and control variability. These companies disdain vertical hierarchies because, in today's world, hierarchy tends to be less effective. Hierarchy may appeal to those in powerful positions, but it tends to impede the flow of fresh information from the frontlines of the marketplace and falsely presumes that only the top executives at headquarters know best. But in fact, hierarchy is poorly equipped to act in today's world because it is unable to leverage expertise that is decentralized, which is precisely the competitive advantage of electronic networks. That is why a new breed of business organizations are trying to become more flexible and integrated with their customers and vendors. The very boundaries of their organizations are becoming more porous and irregular. They are striving to become more comfortable with ambiguity, change and improvisation. These new skills are needed because electronic technologies are blowing down the barriers that once gave strict definition and boundaries to organizations, professions and academic disciplines. Entrepreneurs are able to enter established markets much more easily using the Internet, and in many cases, to create entirely new markets online. Amateur journalists like Matt Drudge can put up a website and reach national audiences that at one time only major broadcast networks could reach. Electronic networking has vastly expanded the scope of commercial marketplaces, the volume and diversity of information that can be accessed and exchanged, and the types of social relationships one can have. This is creating entirely new tensions between stability and innovation, and between the local and the global. Organizations and people need continuity and stability, but as never before, but they also need to innovate and change constantly in order to survive. Everyone lives a local life in a real geographic place, but now people's identities are strewn across a global stage of colleagues, friends and strangers. These are fundamentally new tensions. Dee Hock, the founder of VISA International, calls the emerging breed of organizations "chaordic" - meaning, they function in the zone between chaos and order. They are receptive to the latent creativity that exists in chaos yet are stabilized by sufficient order. According to Hock, there are only two "pure" chaordic organizations in the world, the Internet and the VISA credit-card network that he founded. Chaordic organizations, he writes, are distinguished by being equitably owned by all participants. Power and function must be distributive to the maximum degree so that no individual or institution can dominate deliberations or control decisions. The organization must be infinitely malleable yet extremely durable. And it must be able to embrace diversity and change. It is not a coincidence, to my mind, that "chaordic" principles closely resemble the ideals of Jeffersonian democracy, one of the hardiest, most adaptable concepts of modern governance ever invented. As it happens, the principles of "chaordic" organization find a good illustration in the early Christian church. French Bishop Jacques Gaillot told The New Yorker that the early Church resembled "a kind of Internet itself, which was one of the reasons it was so difficult for the Roman Empire to combat it. The early Christians understood that what was most important was not to claim physical power in a physical place but to establish a network of believers -- to be online." A network of believers dedicated to a shared purpose: it is the very definition of community. And that is what organizations of the future must nurture if they are going to survive in a rapidly changing environment. They must be able to act as an organic, coordinated community held together by social and moral commitments that engage people at the deepest level. The New Social Architecture of Electronic Networks This brings me to another postcard from the digital frontier: the new social architecture of the networked world. The social psychology of the online world is rapidly becoming a new field of inquiry if only because electronic networking is re-configuring our experiences of time, distance and community. Electronic networking is eroding traditional boundaries between public and private, work and home, and work and education. The technologies are forcing deep structural changes in how we carry on our daily lives, forcing the question of how to design the new living/working/recreational/public/private spaces that any society needs. Fittingly enough, one of the best explorations of this challenge is offered by urban planner and architect William Mitchell, Dean of the MIT School of Architecture and Urban Design. In his book, City of Bits, Mitchell describes how software is transfiguring the very design of buildings and urban spaces, and thus the way that we come together in public and socialize. Such shifts can be seen in Columbia University's decision to scrap its plans to build a $20 million addition to its law library and instead buy a state-of-the-art supercomputer to scan and save thousands of old books. One of Churchill's famous remarks was that we make our buildings and our buildings make us. Now, says William Mitchell, it's time to update that bit of wisdom: "We make our networks and our networks make us." Now that software design is exploding, postmodernism has swept far beyond the worlds of art and literature. The centrifugal forces of postmodernism now describe our daily lives and work, as seen in the multiplication and fragmentation of personal identities, the weird juxtapositions of unrelated realms of human endeavor, the absence of organizing principles, and the intangibility and transience of life. This topic is endlessly fascinating and complex, but I'd like briefly to explore several of its most powerful, practical aspects. Trust
and Electronic Networking Establishing a new trust infrastructure will require a new blend of technical protocols, a common legal regime that binds all parties, broad institutional support and a social consensus about how to conduct business over the Internet. Buyers and sellers need to be able to verify the identities of people they deal with. Consumers must have ways to judge whether seller representations are reliable. And there must be legal remedies for breaches of trust. Privacy is an unresolved issue as well. Users of web sites must feel confident that web sites are not secretly collecting private information about them or sharing it with third parties without authorization. Online money transactions must be utterly secure and trustworthy. There has been a great deal of progress in resolving the technical issues of "hard trust," which involves authentication, encryption and security in transactions. But the "soft trust" issues of human psychology remain vexing, because they involve a complex social negotiation and agreement to new cultural norms. The problem is especially troublesome because trust "weaves" in and out of the virtual world and the physical world in odd ways. In finance, for example, certain transactions cannot be digitized, but require personal interaction in a room. Sociality is embedded in market transactions in many complex, subtle ways, and cannot be summarily abstracted into digital forms. I have no answer for another trust issue facing librarians: how to judge the reliability of information sources. The very structures that warrant the trustworthiness of information-academic associations, journals, and so forth-are themselves being transformed as newcomers arrive on the scene. I suspect that the technical and socio-psychological bases for establishing trust in the digital world will become increasingly urgent for libraries in the future. The
New Consumer Sovereignty Consumers are becoming so empowered, in fact, that the historic boundaries that once separated "consumers" from "producers" is blurring. Using the Web, companies are actively consulting with users before products are even offered, and users are actively queried about how existing products could be improved. The plummeting market entry costs are allowing some enterprising consumers to become producers themselves. This is illustrated by the proliferation of electronic "zines," or self-published online magazines dealing with narrow, highly idiosyncratic interests. The rise of the empowered consumer-especially of information users-poses some real dilemmas for libraries. Historically, libraries have served as a warranting structure for bodies of knowledge-an arbiter of the academic canon. Now that the information explosion is shaking the foundations of the publishing world, which has historically served as its own warranting structure, libraries face new challenges in defining their core missions. This is particularly so now that libraries are being tossed onto the same playing field as commercial vendors of information and the vast, higgledy-piggledy universe of the World Wide Web. On what basis, then, should libraries differentiate themselves from commercial vendors and compete? What standards of academic quality and selection should prevail in the new information universe? How should the public mission of libraries be squared with their economic needs, especially as the marketplace becomes dominant? Tough questions. I would suggest that the framework for answering these questions will have a lot to do with finding new hybrid structures that can accommodate market forces, institutional affiliations, and scholarly communities in new ways. We will have to be both more open-minded about organizational structures and more vigilant about our core purposes. The
Fate of the Commonweal As more products become sold as commodities and as Internet auctions for cars, airline tickets, and other products become more commonplace, many futurists predict the rise of the "friction-free" marketplace. While this market utopia may have great appeal and genuine advantages, it also has a number of disturbing implications which have not been so widely explored. If markets are aggregated on a national or even global scale, what does that mean for local markets that were once protected by their relative isolation? Will there be an electronic Wal-Mart effect, in which massively capitalized national or global companies use the Internet to siphon away business from local travel agents, stockbrokers, bookstores and other small businesses? The social dislocations of a friction-free marketplace could be immense. The alternative to a friction-free marketplace might be a winner-take-all marketplace, in which only one dominant player can survive in a given market while everyone else is consigned to small niches. Microsoft is a good example of this, and some predict online books and travel may shake out in a similar way. Whether it is friction-free or winner-take-all, or both, the future of online commerce poses some ominous challenges to the public good-even as the delivery of goods and services becomes more efficient. The commonweal faces another assault as market values come to crowd out public values that we have traditionally pursued through government. The presumption that markets are efficient and responsible, and that government is bad, inefficient and even corrupt means that leadership on behalf of public goods has become inherently suspect. Now that the management of prisons is being privatized; now that public schools may be imperiled through vouchers; and now that countless other services of government are besieged, the urgent question arises: Who is going to advocate the public good in the emerging digital culture? A bellwether example here is the telecom industry's fight against special discounts for schools and libraries. Even though telecom companies agreed to this provision in the Telecommunications Act of 1996 as a condition of deregulation, now they want to renege on that deal, and curb or eliminate the so-called e-rate. However this particular battle turns out, my point remains: the fate of the common good faces serious challenges in the new digital culture, which tends to privilege market values over all others. How can we begin to develop more than nominal commitments to real geographic places and to larger public, enduring values when electronic networks seem to be pulling us in another direction? This question is timely because the fragmentation of our national life into literally thousands of cyber-communities and dozens of TV channels have serious implications for our national culture. What will hold us together? More than we realize, the scarcity of media outlets that prevailed for decades helped forge a somewhat cohesive national identity. Diverse groups of people were aggregated and enticed to share the same experiences. We all watched Walter Cronkite and the moon walk and "All in the Family." It's hard to believe that anything approximating those common national experiences can be found today, short of paroxysms like the Persian Gulf War. The flip side of unfettered consumer choice may be relentless national fragmentation. So what will be the means by which a highly diverse nation of 260 million people retain a sense of shared commitments, a democratic heritage and common values, especially when our politics is undergoing a similar splintering? That's an open, disturbing question. The
Erosion of National Sovereignty Now that commerce can flow across geographic borders in large volumes and at rapid speeds, national governments face new dilemmas in collecting taxes and controlling monetary policy. In her book, Losing Control?, Columbia Professor Saskia Sassen describes how the growing virtualization of economic activity in finance, such as currency markets, threatens to overwhelm the ability of both the state and international bodies to control catastrophic volatility. The recent Asian downturn may have been a garden party compared to what's ahead. Furthermore, Professor Sassen warns, "a growing body of evidence signals that economic globalization has hit some of the major conditions that have hitherto supported the evolution of citizenship and particularly the formation of social rights." The business class is trumpeting the triumph of the market over communism and socialism. But let's not delude ourselves into thinking that the sweatshops in Southeast Asian are a solid platform for building democratic capitalism. For the moment, at least, multinational corporations are more intent on asserting their own "economic citizenship" over the claims of national sovereignty and democratic citizenship. Reasserting Values that Lie Beyond the Market It's a sobering picture. While a natural reaction might be fatalism or denial, I think there are genuine opportunities to advance a more humane, democratic vision of the digital culture than the marketplace alone has yet to generate. The Internet ethos, after all, remains quite strong, despite the incursions of electronic commerce and marketplace values. That ethos-described by social anthropologists as "the gift economy"-has greater power than is commonly recognized. A gift economy is a social system of exchange based on the voluntary exchange of "gifts," as exemplified by the sharing of information on the Internet or the emotional support given by Alcoholics Anonymous. People give something without any guarantee of return. This behavior utterly defies the orthodox economic "rules" which claim such voluntary behavior can occur only with financial incentives through the marketplace. In fact, the Internet is so robust precisely because people are giving of themselves without demanding a specific contractual payback. This is the very essence of community and civility. It works because people trust that they will share in the "free wealth" that the community generates and freely passes among itself-much as an academic community (before the sanctioning of entrepreneurialism) freely shares among itself and shuns those who financially profit at the expense of the community. I
believe that the gift economy has a fighting change to challenge the excessive
dominance of marketplace values. But it will require greater leadership by citizens,
nonprofits and other institutions than we have seen to date. In particular, it
will require wider participation in the greatest gift economy of all, our democratic
process. Can we muster a sufficient show of civic organizing and political strength
to secure certain public-spirited values that the marketplace simply will not
develop or sustain? 1.
Users' rights in intellectual property. 2.
Competition in operating systems software. 3.
Open architecture of the Internet. 4.
Public service obligations for the digital broadcast spectrum. 5.
Concentration of media ownership. 6.
Citizen access to government information. Let me just end by saying that libraries must not be bystanders to these larger struggles over the shape of our new digital culture. While all of us have to stick to our knitting and keep our organizations healthy, sometimes we will not be able to achieve our goals, especially in the academy or the nonprofit sector, unless we develop the strategic sophistication to engage on many of these larger issues. Then, we must begin to show new and creative leadership in public policy arenas where the ground rules for electronic commerce and other electronic networking are being forged. Thank
you.
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