You’ve come a long way, but you ain’t seen nothin’ yet

Says Vint Cerf in his Op-ed piece about the Internet

I have no doubts that its social repercussions will take decades to be fully understood, but it has already done much to benefit the world. It has provided access to information on a scale never before imaginable, lowered the barriers to creative expression, challenged old business models and enabled new ones. It has succeeded because we designed it to be both flexible and open. These features have allowed it to accommodate innovation without massive changes to its infrastructure.

 Cerf goes onto to write

There are more than three billion mobiles in use today and more than 80 per cent of the world's population live within range of a network. In areas where wireline or WiFi access barely exists, many new users will first experience the internet through a mobile phone. In developing economies, people are already finding innovative ways to use mobile technology. Grameen's micro-finance and village phone programmes in Bangladesh and elsewhere are known and respected around the world, but there are many less famous examples. During the Kenyan elections, Mobile Planet provided its subscribers with up-to-the-minute results by text message. As the cost of mobile technologies fall, the opportunities for such innovation will continue to grow.

We're nearing the tipping point for mobile computing to deliver timely, geographically and socially relevant information. Researchers in Japan recently proposed using data from vehicles' windscreen wipers and embedded GPS receivers to track the movement of weather systems through towns and cities with a precision never before possible. It may seem academic, but understanding the way severe weather, such as a typhoon, moves through a city could save lives. Further exploration can shed light on demographic, intellectual and epidemiological phenomena, to name just a few areas.

This is the networked society. "A medium of communication is not merely a passive conduit for the transmission of information but rather an active force in creating new social patterns and new perceptual realities" writes Robert Logan in The Alphabet Effect. In the film the web is Us/ing Us. Robert Wesch Professor of Social Anthropology at Kansas University argues that, text is linear when written on paper. In digital it is different. Digital is more flexible. Digital text is moveable, and above all digital text can Link. The alphabet has been described as masculine whereas, the network society – is female. 

And new technologies do not come out of nowhere.  As both William Powers, and Carlota Perez argue. They are indeed human creations in the first place and they succeed, or not, to the extent that they meet human needs. In other words, as much as communications media influence the way people of a particular time and place live, the reverse is also true: People have tremendous influence over how technologies evolve.

So if we looked at the needs of the humans prior to the invention of the wheel, or Gutenberg arriving with the printing press, which led to the reformation, technology was directed towards very pressing human needs. Industrialisation emancipated us from nature’s very hegemony over us and so we now look to social networks and social media to do something else - for us – because the needs of humans cannot be accommodated only within the context of an industrialized – consumer oriented world. The old model was – we make – you buy. You purchase to passively; read, watch and consume. When you pause to think about it what we are experiencing right now, fundamentally challenges that logic – social media, and theories about engagement marketing are defined by; collaboration, listening, participation and co-creation.

Perez points out that at a certain point in a technology life cycle, we the people take that technology and direct it towards very specific goals and purposes, like the tools of web 2.0 and its moniker social media. Marshall McLuhan argues in the Gutenberg Galaxy that technologies are not simply inventions which people employ but are the means by which people are re-invented. The invention of movable type was the decisive moment in the process of re-invention from feudal man to reformation man.

we're at the cusp of a truly global internet that will bring people closer together and democratise access to information. We are all free to innovate on the net every day and we should look forward to more people around the world enjoying that freedom.