Digital Dawn CyberTrends
Professor
John M. McCann
Fuqua School of Business
Duke University
Additions to this document since November 6, 1997 are preceded with the 
icon.
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
Flashback:
Prophets of the Computer Age
Two prescient Atlantic articles -- Vannevar Bush's "As
We May Think" (July 1945) and Martin Greenberger's "The
Computers of Tomorrow" (May 1964) -- heralded the dawn of the computer
age.
- "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.
- “Capitalist 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 earth’s 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, “Leisure & Arts -- Bookshelf: Yale’s Dr. Doom
Looks Into The Impoverished Future,” 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, “Dirt-Cheap
Bandwidth and the Coming Revolution,” Electronic Buyer News, January
31, 1994, p. 44
- “The 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.”
Source: Tim Berners-Lee, quoted in “The Internet: Where’s It All
Going,” 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
species’ 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
- “‘This is an important historical moment,' says
Jeffrey Sachs, an economist at Harvard University. ‘The positive side is
spectacular.’ Barring a major war or an environmental catastrophe, he
believes, ‘economic growth will raise the living standards of more people
in more parts of the world than at any prior time in history.’ Domingo
Cavalio, he architect of Argentina’s dramatic economic restructuring in
the 1990s, echoes that notion. ‘We’ve entered a golden age that will
last for decades.’ he says predicting that ‘historians 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 ‘a new golden age.’”
Source: G. Pascal Zachary, “Global Growth Attains A New,
Higher Level That Could Be Lasting,” 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
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