Write a 3 page RESEARCH PAPER in MLA format using Times New Roman, 12 pt. font.
Utilizing the sources below, use proper in-text citations (MLA format) to answer the main question:
Anderson, Chris. 2008. “Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business.” Wired 16(3).
Britt, Phillip. “Marketers Emphasizing E-Commerce Over Advertising: Gartner Uncovers More Investment in Digital Commerce than Digital Ads.” CRM Magazine, vol. 23, no. 8, Oct. 2019, p. 15. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=asn&AN=138976519&site=ehost-live.
Frank, Robert H. 2007. Excerpts from The Economic Naturalist. New York: Basic Books.
Linde, Frank and Wolfgang G. Stock. 2011. Information Markets: A Strategic Guideline for the I-Commerce. New York: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co.
McCain, Roger. 2005. “Economics of Information Products” in Essential Principles of Economics.
Seng, Dave, Digital Economics: The Commerce of Information in the 21st Century. Cognella Press, 2018.
“The Information Revolution.” Information: a Very Short Introduction, by Luciano Floridi, Oxford University Press, 2010, pp. 3–18.
Ariel
IP: 129.82.28.195
llllllllllll l l l l l~l l l l~~lml l lllll!lll l l l llllllllllilllll
Status
Rapid Code
AZU
H2K
Batch Nat Printed
H2K
New
Pending
Branch Name
Main Library
Main Library
Main Library
Start Date
8/21/2014 10:22: 50 AM
8/21/2014 10:23: 11 AM
8/22/2014 6:34:21 AM
CALL#:
LOCATION:
306.42 F663i 2010
H2K :: Main Library :: g
TYPE:
Book Chapter
Information : a very short lntraductlon / Luciano F!orldl.
BOOK TITLE:
USER BOOK IBLE:
H2K CATALOG TITLE:
CHAPTER TITLE:
lnformation a very short Introduction /
Information : a very short Introduction / Luciano F!oridi
The lnfom1atlon revolution
BOOK AlfTHOR:
E □m□ N:
VOLUME:
PUBLISHER:
PAGES:
2010
3 – 18
ISBN:
9780199551378
YEAR:
LCCN:
OCLC #:
CROSS REFERENCE ID:
VERIFIED:
BORROWER:
[TN :1344930] [ODYSSEY:150.135.238.6/ILLJ
AZU : :
Main Library
This material may be protected by copyright law (Title 17 U.S. Code}
8/22/2014 8:34:21 AM
Indeed, Warren Weaver (1894H978), one of the pioneers
of machine translation and co-author v.ith Shannon of
The Mathematical Theory qf Communicatum, supported a
tripartite analysis of information in terms of
Chapter 1
The information revolution
technical problems com:eming the quantification of information
and dealt with by Shannon’s theory;
2) semantic problems relating to meaning and truth; and
3) what he called ‘influential’ problems eo~ceming the impact and
effectiveness of information on human behaviour, >1.1rich he
thought had to pucy an equally important role.
1)
Shannon and Weaver provide two early examples of the problems
raised by any analysis of information. The plethora of different
interpretations can be confusing, and complaints about
misunderstandings and misuses of the very idea of information
are frequently expressed, even if apparently to no avail. This
book seeks to provide a map of the main senses in which one
may speak of information. The map is drawn by relying on an
initial account of information based on the concept of data.
Unfortunately, even such a minimalist account is open to
disagreement. In favoux of this approach, one may say that at
least it is much less controversial than others. Of course, a
conceptual analysis must
somewhere. This often means
adopting some working definition of the object under scrutirty.
But it is not this commonplace that I ·wish to emphasize here.
The difficulty is rather more daunting. Work on the concept of
information is still at that lamentable stage when disagreement
affects even the way in which the problems themselves are
provisionally phrased and framed. So the various ‘you are here’
signals in this book might be placed elsewhere. The whole
purpose is to put the family of concepts of information firmly
on the map and thus make possible further adjustments and
re-orientations.
start
The emergence of the information society
History has many metrics. Some are natural and circular, :elying
on recurring seasons and planetary motions. Some are social or
political and Jin ear, being determined, for exam?le, by ~e
succession of Olympic Games, or the number of years smce the
founding of the city of Rome (ab urbe condita), or the ascension of
a king. Still others are religious and have a V-shape, counting years
before and after a particular event, such as the birth of Christ.
There are larger periods that encompass smaller ones, named
after influential styles (Baroque), people (Victorian era),
particular circumstances (Cold War), or some new technology
(nuclear age). What all these and many other metrics have in
common is that they are all historical, in the strict sense that
they all depend on the development of systems to record events an.d
hence accumulate and transmit information about the past.
No records, no history, so history is actually synonymous with
the information age, since prehistory is that age in human
development that precedes the availability of recording systems.
It follows that one may reasonably argue that humanity has been
living in various kinds of information societies at least since the
Bronze .Age, the era that marks tbe invention of¼Titing in
Mesopotamia and other regions of the world (4th millennium sc).
And yet, this is not what is typicaJly meant by the information
revolution. There may be many explanations, but one seems
more convincing than any other: only very recently has human
progress and welfare begun to depend mostly on the successful
and efficient management of the life cycle of information.
The life cycle of information typicaJly includes the following
phases: occurreme (discovering, designing, authoring, etc.),
transmission (networking, distributing, accessing, retrieving,
transmitting, etc.), processing and management (collecting,
validating, modifying, organizing, indexing, classti:Yifig, filtering,
updating, sorting, storing, etc.), and usage (monitoring,
modelling, analysing, explaining, planning, forecasting,
decision-making, instructing, educating, learning, etc.). Figure I
provides a simplified illustration.
g
Now, imagine Figure 1 to be like a clock. The length oftime that the
evolution of information life cycles has taken to hr;ing about the
information society should not he surprising. Acc6rding to recent
estimates, life on Earth will last for another billion years, until
will be destroyed by the increase in solar temperature. So imagine
an historian writing in the near future, say in a million years. She
may consider it normal, and perhaps even elegantly symmetrical,
that it took roughly six millennia for the agricultural revolution
to produce its full effect, from its beginning in th,e Neolithic
(10th millennium BC), until the Bronze Age, and then another
six millennia for the information revolution to beai- its main
fruit, from the Bronze Age until the end of the 2nd millennium AD.
During this span oftime, Information and Communication
Technologies (ICTs) evolved from being mainly recording
systems – writing and manuscript production – to being also
communication systems, especially after Gutenberg and the
invention of printing – to being also processing and producing
systems, especially after Turing and the diffusion of computers.
Thanks to this evolution, nowadays the most advanced societies
highly depend on information-based, intangible assets,
1
it
4
1. A typical mformation life cycle
information-intensive services (especially business and property
services, communications, finance and insurance, and
entertainment), and information-oriented public sectors
(especially education, public administration, and health care).
For example, all members of the G7 group – namely Canada,
France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the
United States of America – qualify as information societies
because, in each country, at least 70% of the Gross Domestic
Product (GDP) depends on intangible goods, which are
information-related, not on material goods, which are the physical
output of agricultural or manufacturing processes. Their
functioning and growth requires and generates immense amounts
of data, more data than humanity has ever seen in its entire history.
The zetta byte era
6
J
i
In 2003, researchers at Berkeley’s School of Information
Management ·and Systems estimated that humanity had
accumulated approximately 12 exabytes of data (1 exabyte
corresponds to 1018 bytes or a 50,000-year-long video of DVD
quality) in the course ofits entire history until the commodification
of computers. However, they also calculated that print, film,
magnetic, and optical storage media had already produced more
than 5 exabytes of data just in 2002. This is equivalent to 37,000
new libraries the size of the Library of Congress. Given the size of
the world population in 2002, it turned out that almost 800
megabytes (MB) of recorded data had been produced per person.
It is like saying that every newborn baby came into the world with ·
a burden of 30 feet of books, the equivalent of 800 MB of data
printed on paper. Of these data, 92% were stored on magnetic
medi8.;, mostly in hard disks, thus causing an unprecedented
‘democratization’ of information: more people own more data
than ever before. Such exponential escalation has been relentless.
According to a more recent study, between 2006 and 2010
the global quantity of digital data will have increased more than
six-fold, from 161 exabytes to 988 exabytes. ‘Exaflood’ is a
neologism that has been coined to qualify this tsunami of bytes
that is submerging the world. Of course, hundreds of millions of
computing machines are constantly employed to keep afloat and
navigate through such an exaflood. All the previous numbers
will keep growing steadily for the foreseeable future, not least
because computers are among the greatest sources of further
exabytes. Thanks to them, we are quickly approaching the age
of the zettabyte (1,000 exabytes). It is a self-reinforcing cycle and
it would be unnatural not to feel overwhelmed. It is, or at least
should be, a mixed feeling.
ICTs have been changing the world profoundly and irreversibly
for more than half a century now, with breathtaking scope and at
a neck-breaking pace. On the one hand, they have brought
concrete and imminent opportunities of enormous benefit to
people’s education, welfare, prosperity, and edification, as well as
great economic and scientific advantages. Unsurprisingly, the US
Department of Commerce and the National Science Foundation
have identified Nanotechnology, Biotechnology, Information
Technology, and Cognitive Science (NBIC) as research areas of
national priority. Note that the three NEC would be virtually
impossible without the I. In a comparable move, the EU Heads
of States and Governments acknowledged the immense impact
of ICTs when they agreed to make the EU ‘the most competitive
and dynamic knowledge-driven economy by 2010’.
On the other hand, ICTs also carry significant risks and generate
dilemmas and profound questions about the nature of reality and
of our knowledge ofit, the development of information-intensive
sciences Ce-science), the organization of a fair society (consider the
digital divide), our responsibilities and obligations to present
and future generations, our understanding of a globalized world,
and the scope of our potential interactions with the environment.
As a result, they have greatly outpaced our understanding of
their conceptual nature and implications, while raising problems
whose complexity and global dimensions are rapidly expanding,
evolving, and becoming increasingly serious.
A simple analogy may help to make sense of the current
situation. The information society is like a tree that has been
growing its far-reaching branches much more widely, hastily, and
chaotically than its conceptual, ethical, and cultural roots. The
lack of balance is obvious and a matter of daily experience in the
life of millions of citizens. As a simple illustration, consider
identity theft, the use of information to impersonate someone else
in order to steal money or get other benefits. According to the
Federal Trade Commission, frauds involving identity theft in the
US accounted for approximately $52.6 billion oflosses in 2002
alone, affecting almost 10 million Americans. The risk is that,
like a tree with weak roots, further and healthier growth at the
top might be impaired by a fragile foundation at the bottom. As a
consequence, today, any advanced information society faces the
pressing task of equipping itself with a viable philosophy of
information. Applying the previous analogy, while technology
keeps growing bottom-up, it is high time we start digging
deeper, top-down, in order to expand and reinfoi;ce our conceptual
understanding of our information age, of its nature, of its less
visible implications, and of its impact on human and
environmental welfare, and thus give ourselves a chance to
anticipate difficulties, identify opportunities, and resolve
problems.
displaced the Earth and hence humanity from the centre of the
universe. Charles Darwin (1809-1882) showed that all species of
life have evolved over time from common ancestors through
natural selection, thus displacing humanity from the centre of the
biological kingdom. And following Sigmund Freud (1856-1939),
we acknowledge nowadays that the mind is also unconscious and
subject to the defence mechanism of repression. So we are not
immobile, at the centre of the universe (Copernican revolution),
we are not unnaturally separate and diverse from the rest of the
animal kingdom (Darwinian revolution), and we are very far
from being standalone minds entirely transparent to ourselves,
as Rene Descartes (1596-1650), for example, assumed
{Freudian revolution),
The almost sudden burst of a global information society, after a
few millennia of relatively quieter gestation, has generated new
~
~
i
and disruptive challenges, which were largely unforeseeable only a
few decades ago. As the European Group on Ethics in Science
and New Technologies (EGE) and the UNESCO Observatory on
the Information Society have well documented, ICTs have made
the creation, management, and utilization of information,
communication, and computational resources vital- issues, not
only in our understanding of the world and of our interactions
with it, but also in our self-assessment and identity. In other
words, computer science and ICTs have brought about a
fourth revolution.
The fourth revolution
Oversimplifying, science has two fundamental ways of changing
our understanding. One may be called extrovert, or about the
world, and the other introvert, or about ourselves. Three
scientific revolutions have had great impact both extrovertly and
introvertly. In changing our understanding of the external world
they also modified our conception of who we are. After
Nicolaus Copernicus (14,73-1543), the heliocentric cosmology
One may easily question the value of this classic picture. After all,
Freud was the first to interpret these three revolutions as part of
a single process of reassessment of human nature and his
perspective was blatantly self-serving. But replace Freud with
cognitive science or neuroscience, and we can still find the
:framework useful to explain our intuition that something
very significant and profound has recently happened to human
self~understanding. Since the 1950s, computer science and
ICTs have exercised both an extrovert and an introvert
influence, changing not only our interactions with the world
but also our self-understanding. In many respects, we are not
standalone entities, but rather.interconnected informational
organisms or inforgs, sharing with biological agents and
engineered artefacts a global environment ultimately made of
information, the infosphere. This is the informational
environment constituted by all informational processes,
services, and entities, thus including informational agents as well
as their properties, interactions, and mutual relations. If we need a
representative scientist for the fourth revolution, this should
definitely be Alan Turing (1912-1954 ).
9
g
}
:i
Inforgs should not be confused with the sci-fl vision of a ‘cyborged’
humanity. Walking around with a Bluetooth ,vireless headset
implanted in our bodies does not seem a smart move, not least
because it contradicts the social message it is also meant to be
sending: being constantly on call is a form of slavecy, and anyone
so busy and important should have a personal assistant instead.
Being some sort of cyborg is not what people will embrace, but
what they will tcy to avoid. Nor is the idea of inforgs a step
towards a genetically modified humanity, in charge of its
informational DNA and hence of its future embodiments. This is
something that may happen in the future, but it is still too far
away, both technically (safely doable) and ethically (morally
acceptable), to be seriously discussed at this stage. Rather, the
fourth revolution is bringing to light the intrinsically informational
nature of human agents. This is more than just saying that
individuals have started having a ‘data shadow’ or digital alter
ego, some Mr Hyde represented by their @s, blogs, and https.
These obvious truths only encourage us to mistake digital ICTs
for merely enhancing technologies. What is in question is a quieter,
less sensational, and yet crucial and profound change in our
conception of what it means to be an agent and what sort of
environment these new agents inhabit. It is a change that is
happening not through some fanciful alterations in our bodies,
or some scien~e-fictional speculations about our posthuman
condition but, far more seriously and realistically, through a
radical transformation of our understanding of reality and of
ourselves. A good way to explain it is by relying on the
distinction between enhancing and augmenting appliances.
Enhancing appliances, like pacemakers, spectacles, or artificial
limbs, are supposed to have interfaces that enable the appliance
to be attached to the user’s body ergonomically. It is the beginning
of the cyborg idea. Augmenting appliances have instead
interfaces that allow communication between different possible
worlds. For example: on one side, there is the human user’s
everyday habitat, the outer wor1d, or reality, as it affects the
10
agent inhabiting it; and on the other side, there are the dynamic,
watery, soapy, hot, and dark wor1d of the dishwasher; the equally
watecy, soapy, hot, and dark but also spinning world of the
washing machine; or the still, aseptic, soap1ess, cold, and
potentially luminous wor1d of the refrigerator. These robots can
be successful because they have their environments ‘wrapped’ and
tailored around their capacities, not vice versa. This is why it
would be a silly idea to try to build a droid, like Star Wars’ C3PO,
in order to wash dishes in the sink exactly in the same way as a
human agent would. Now, ICTs are not enhancing or augmenting
in the sense just explained. They are radically transforming
devices because they engineer environments that the user is then
enabled to enter through (possibly friendly) gateways,
experiencing a form of initiation. There is no term for this
radical form of re-engineering, so we may use re-ontologizing
as a neologism to refer to a vecy radical form of re-engineering,
one that not only designs, constructs, or structures a system
(e.g. a company, a machine, or some artefact) anew, but that
fundamentally transforms its intrinsic nature, that is, its
ontology. In this sense, ICTs are not merely re-engineering but
actually re-ontologizing our world. Looking at the history of the
mouse (http://sloan.stanford.edu/mousesite/), for example,
one discovers that our technology has not only adapted to, but
also educated, us as users. Douglas Engelhart (born 1925)
once told me that, when he was refining his most famous
invention, the mouse, he even experimented with placing it
under the desk, to be operated with one’s leg, in ordeno leave
the user’s hands free. Human-Computer Interaction is a
symmetric relation.
To return to our distinction, while a dishwasher interface is a
panel through which the machine enters into the user’s world, a
digital interface is a gate through which a user can be present in
cyberspace. This simple but fundamental difference underlies
the many spatial metaphors of’virtual reality’, ‘being online’,
‘surfing the web’, ‘gateway’, and so forth. It follows that we are
11
witnessing an epochal, unprecedented migration of humanity
from its ordinary habitat to the infosphere itself, not lea.st because
the latter is absorbing the former. As a result, humans will be
inforgs among other (possibly artificial) inforgs and agents
operating in an environment that is friendlier to informational
creatures. Once digital immigrants like us are replaced by digital
natives like our children, the e-migration will become complete
and future generations will increasingly feel deprived, excluded,
handicapped, or poor whenever they are disconnected from the
infosphere, like fish out of water.
What we are currently experiencing is therefore afourth
revolution, in the process of dislocation and reassessment of our
fundamental nature and role in the universe. We are modifying our:
everyday perspective on the ultimate nature ofreality, that is, our
metaphysics, from a materialist one, in which physical objects
and processes play a key role, to an informational one. This shift
means that objects and processes are de-physicalized in the
senae that they tend to be seen as support-independent (consider a
music file). They are typified, in the sense that an instance of an
object (my copy of a music file) is as good as its type {your music file
of whlch my copy is an instance). And they are assumed to be by
default perfectly clonable, in the sense that my copy and your
original become interchangeable. Less stress on the physical
nature of objects and processes means that the right of usage is
perceived to be at least as important as the right to ownership.
Finally, the criterion for existence – what it means for something
to exist – is no longer being actually immutable (the Greeks
thought that only that which does not change can be said to
exist fully), or being potentially subject to perception (modern
philosophy insisted on something being perceivable empirically
through the five senses in order to qualify as existing), but being
potentiaJly subject to interaction, even if intangible. To be is to be
interactable, even if the interaction is only indirect. Consider the
following examples.
12
In recent years, many countries have followed the US in counting
acquisition of software not as a current business expense but as an
investment, to be treated as any other capital input that is
repeatedly used in production over time. Spending on software
now regularly contributes to GDPs. So software is acknowledged
to be a (digital) good, even if somewhat intangible. It should not be
too difficult to accept that virtual assets too may represent
important in vestments. Or take the phenomenon of so-called
‘virtual sweatshops’ in China. In claustrophobic and overcrowded
rooms, workers play online games, like World of WarGTaft or
Lineage, for up to 12 hours a day, to create virtual goods, such as
characters, equipments, or in-game currency, which can then be
sold to other players. At the time of writing, End User License
Agreements (EULA, this is the contract that every user of
commercial software accepts by installing it) of massively
multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPG) such as
World ofWareraft still do not allow the sale of virtual assets.
Tbis would be like the EULA of MS-Word withholding from users
the ownership of the digital documents created by means of the
software. The situation will probably change, as more people invest
hundreds and then thousands of hours building their avatars
and assets. Future generations will inherit digital entities that
they will want to own. Indeed, although it was forbidden, there
used to be thousands of virtual assets on sale on eBay. Sony,
more aggressively, offers a ‘Station Exchange’, an official auction
service that ‘provides players a secure method of buying and
selling [in dollars, my specification] the right to use in game coin,
items and characters in accordance with SO E’s licence agreement,
rules, and guidelines’ (http://stationexchange.station.sony.com/).
Once ownership of virtual assets has been legally established, the
next step is to check for the emergence of property litigations.
This is already happening: in May 2006, a Pennsylvania lawyer
sued the publisher of Second, Life for allegedly having unfairly
confiscated tena of thousands of dollars’ worth of his virtual land
and other property. Insurances that provide protection against
risks to avatars may follow, comparable to the pet insurances one
13
r
can buy at the local supermarket. Again, World of Warcraft
provides an excellent example. With almost 12 million monthly
subscribers (2009), it is currently the world’s largest MMORPG
and would rank ’71st in the list of 221 countries and dependent
territories ordered according to population. It5 users, who (will)
have spent billions of man-hours constructing, enriching, and
refining their digital properties, will be more than willing to
spend a few dollars to insure them.
ICTs are actually creating a new informational environment in
which future generations will live most of their time. On average,
Britons, for example, already spend more time online than
watching TV, while American adults already spend the equivalent
of nearly five months a year inside the infosphcre. Such population
is quickly ageing. According to the Entertainment Software
Association, for example, in 2008 the average game player was
35 years old and had been playing games for 13 years, the
average age of the most frequent game purchaser is 40 years
old, and 26% of Americans over the age of 50 played video
games, an increase from 9% in 1999.
Life in the infosphere
Despite some important exceptions (e.g. vases and metal tools in
ancient civilizations, engravings and then books after Gutenberg),
it was the Industrial Revolution that really marked the passage
from a world of unique objects.to a world of types of objects, all
perfectly reproducible as identical to each other, therefore
indiscernible, and hence dispensable because replaceable without
any loss in the scope of interactions that they allow. When our
ancestors bought a horse, they bought this horse or that horse,
not ‘the’ horse. Today, we find it obvious that two automobiles
may be virtually identical and that we are invited to buy a model
rather than an individual ‘incarnation’ of it. Indeed, we are fast
moving towards a coI11ITiodification of objects that considers
14
repair as synonymous with replacement, even when it comes
to entire buildings. This has led,- by way of compensation, to
a prioritization of informational branding and of reappropriation: the person who puts a sticker on the window of
her car, which fa otherwise perfectly identical to thousands of
others, is fighting a battle in support of her individualism. The
information revolution has further exacerbated this process.
Once our ,vindow-shopping becomes Windows-shopping, and no
longer means walking down the street but browsing through
the Web, our sense of personal identity starts being eroded as well.
Instead of individuals as unique and irreplaceable entities,
we become mass-produced, anonymous entities among
other anonymous entities, exposed to billions of other
similar informational organisms online. So we self-brand and
re-appropriate ourselves in the infosphere by using blogs and
Facebook entries, homepages, YouTube videos, and flickr
albums. It is perfectly reasonable that Second Life should be a
paradise for fashion enthusiasts of all kinds: not only does it
provide a new and flexible platform for designers and creative
artists, it is also the right context in which users (avatars)
intensely feel the pressure to obtain visible signs of self-identity
and personal tastes. Likewise, there is no inconsistency between
a society so concerned about privacy right5 and the success of
services such as Facebook. We use and expcfae information about
ourselves to become less informationally anonymous. We wish to
maintain a high level of informational privacy, almost as if
that were the only way of saving a precious capital that can
then be publicly invested by us in order to construct ourselves as
individuals discernible by others.
Processes such as the ones I have just sketched are part of a
far deeper metaphysical drift caused by the information revolution.
During the last decade or so, we have become accustomed to
conceptualizing our life online as a mixture between an
evolutionary adaptation of human agents to a digital
environment, and a form of postmodern, neo-colonization of
15
that space by us. Yet the truth is that ICTs are as much changing
our world as they are creating new realities. The threshold
between here (analogue, carbon-based, qff-line) and there (digi.tal,
silicon-bCU3ed, online) is fast becoming blurred, but this is as
much to the advantage ofthe latter as it is of the former. The digital
is spilling over into the analogue and merging with it This
recent phenomenon is variously known as ‘Ubiquitous
Computing’, ‘Ambient Intelligence’, The Internet of Things’,
or ‘Web-augmented things’.
j
~
‘.§
The increasing informatization of artefacts and of whole (social)
environments and life activities suggests that soon it will be
difficult to understand what life was like in pre-informational
times (to someone who wa.s born in 2000, the world will always
have been wireless, for example) and, in the near future, the ·very
distinction between online and offline will disappear. Th~ common
experience of driving a car while following the instructions of a
Gia bal Positioning System clarifies how pointless asking whether
one is online has become. To put it dramatically, the infosphere is
progressively absorbing any other space. In the (fast-approaching)
future, more and more objects will be I’I’entities able to learn,
advise, and communicate with each other. A good example (but it
is only an example) is provided by Radio Frequency IDentification
(RFID) tags, which can store and remotely retrieve data from an
object and give it a unique identity, like a barcode. Tags can measure
0.4 millimetres square and are thinner than paper. Incorporate
this tiny microchip in everything, mcluding humans and animals,
and you have created ITentities. This is not science fiction.
According to a report by market research company InStat, the
worldwide production ofRFID will have increased more than
25-fold between 20.05 and 2010 and reached 33 billion. Imagine
networking these 33 billion ITentities together with all the
hundreds of millions of PCs, DVDs, iPods, and other ICT devices
available and you see that the infosphere is no longer ‘there’ but
‘here’ and it is here to stay. Your Nike Sensor and iPod already
talk to each other (http://www.apple.com/ipod/nike/).
16
At present, older generations still consider the space of
information as something one logs-in to and logs-out from. Our
view of the world (our metaphysics) is still modem or Ni,wtonian:
it is made of’dead’ cars, buildings, furniture, clothes, which are
non-interactiv_e, irresponsive, and incapable of communicating,
learning, or memorizing. But in advanced information societies,
what we still experience as the world offline is bound to become a
fully interactive and more responsive environment of wireless,
pervasive, distributed, a2a (anything to anything) information
processes, that works a4a (anywhere for anytime), in real time.
Such a world will first gently invite us to understand it as
something ‘a-live’ (artificially live). This animation of the
world will then, paradoxically, make our outlook closer to that
of pre-technological cultures, which interpreted all aspects of
nature as inhabited by teleological forces.
This leads to a reconceptualization of our metaphysics in
informational terms. It will become normal to consider the world
as part of the infosphere, not so much in the dystopian sense
expressed by a Matrix-like scenario, where the ‘real reality’ is
still as hard as the metal of the machines that inhabit it; but in the
evolutionary, hybrid sense represented by an environment such
as New Port City, the fictional, post-cybernetic metropolis of
Ghost in the Shell. The infosphere will not be a virtual
environment supported by a genuinely ‘material’ world behind;
rather, it will be the world itself that will be increasingly
interpreted and understood informationally, as part of the
infosphere. At the end of this shift, the infosphere will have moved
from being a way to refer to the space of information to being
synonymous with reality. This is the sort of informational
metaphysics that we may find increasingly easy to embrace.
As a consequence of such transformations in our ordinary
environment, we shall be living in an infosphere that will
become increasingly synchronized (time), delocalb:ed (space), and
correlated (interactions). Previous revolutions (especially the
17
-,II
agricultural and the industrial ones) created macroscopic
transformation in our social structures and architectural .
environments, often without much foresight. The information
revolution is no less dramatic. We shall be in trouble ifwe do not
take seriously the fact that we are constructing the new
environment that will be inhabited by future generations. At the
end of this volume, we shall see that we should probably be
working on an ecology of the infosphere, ifwe wish to avoid
foreseeable problems. Unfortunately, it will take some time and a
whole new kind of education and sensitivity to realize that the
infosphere is a common space, which needs to be preserved to the
advantage of all. One thing seems indubitable though: the digital
divide will become a chasm, generating new fa= of
discrimination between those who can be denizens of the
infosphere and those who cannot, between insiders and outsiders,
between information-rich and information-poor. It will redesign
the map of worldwide society, generating or widening
generational, geographic, socio-economic, and cultural divides.
But the gap will not be reducible to the distance between
industrialized and developing countries, since it will cut
across societies. We are preparing the ground for tomorrow’s
digital slums.
Chapter 2
The language of information
Information is a conceptual labyrinth, and in this chapter we
shall look at its general map, with the purpose of finding our
bearings. Figure 2 summarizes the main distinctions that are going
to be introduced. Some areas will be explored in more depth in the
following chapters.
Navigating through the various points in the map will not make for
a linear journey, so using a few basic examples to illustrate the less
obvious steps will help to keep our orientation. Here is one to
which we shall return often.
It is Monday morning. John turns on the ignition key of his car, but
nothing happens: the engine does not even cough. The silence of
the engine worries him. Looking more carefully, he notices that the
low-battery indicator is flashing. After a few more unsuccessful
attempts, he gives up and calls the garage. Over the phone, he
explains that, last night, his wife forgot to switch off the car’s lights it is a lie, J obn did, but he is too ashamed to admit it – and now the
battery is flat. The mechanic tells John that he should look at the
car’s operation manual, which explains how to use jump leads to
start the engine. Luckily, John’s neighbour has everything he needs.
He reads the manual, looks at the illustrations, speaks to his
18
19