The Fourth Revolution

As John Man writes in his excellent book on Johannes Gutenberg, there are four distinct turning points on the road from grunt to e-mail: the invention of writing, the invention of the alphabet, the invention of movable type and printing and the fourth revolution - the invention of the internet.

It is the social and political as well as technical aspects of this fourth revolution which started having widespread impact in the mid 1990s that attracts my interest. Since I became aware of the internet in around 1992 and my early work on what in retrospect were rather primitive websites in 1994, I can only be grateful to be alive at a time of such intense change. I wonder how Johannes Gutenberg would feel?

With two billion people having access to the internet worldwide (in 2010) and rapidly rising, we are only at the start of a revolution which is likely to have an influence on our society in ways that we cannot yet predict.

Meanwhile the political world grapples with the impact of the internet on copyright and surveillance (to name but two of the current political hot potatoes). In the wider public arena societal issues such as privacy and how we archive an increasingly digital world will need to be considered as part of how we operate as a society.

There is plenty to think about as we ride the roller-coaster of the fourth communication revolution.