An Information Revolution

The information revolution changes everything. The fact that we are able to access a lot of it on our personal devices means that the level of connectivity has reached a point that has never been reached before. Many of our daily activities have been impacted: the way we communicate with each other, the way we work, the way we shop, the way we consume the news, the way we travel, the way we think, the way we receive healthcare, the way the governments operate, the relations between countries, in war and in peace, the way crimes are committed.

The amount of changes we have been through since the early 1990s with the creation of the World Wide Web is astonishing. Many of these changes contribute to progress and make our lives easier. But there are also drawbacks, that should not be neglected. Some of them make us worry about our security, our integrity.

In the late 1990s, optimism prevailed. All changes that were underway were for the best, consumers were going to be in control, information was free and decentralized, everybody could access and generate information. We are witnessing changes in the political system that are described by Steven Johnson in Future Perfect¹.

In the late 2000s, social networking and smart phones have gained traction all over the world, reaching all classes of societies. The global economy was booming, even with the hiccup of the Great Recession of 2008.

As we approaching the late 2010s, the situation is more contrasted. E-commerce is now generalized, a paperless society is becoming real. But technology is also used to commit crimes, to foster terrorism, hacking is used by countries to interfere with the inner workings of others, cyberwar is starting to become a reality. Because any kind of content is allowed to go on the Web, there is not vetting process, and we see the best and the worst coexist on the network. We are in a situation similar to one where there would be no distinction between money production from legitimate national reserves and counterfeited money. But the decentralized nature of the Internet, which is a peer-to-peer network, makes it harder to come up with a central way to distinguish between what is legitimate from what is not. What we need to do is to invent mechanisms to establish trust in the information content, while preserving the generalized freedom of speech and the decentralized nature of the Internet. Historically, it parallels the emergence of the publishing industry, which established legal and financial mechanisms to legitimate creative works made available as books, in a time when printing shops started to disseminate. In this book, we'll focus on the aspect of accountability of information.

References:

• Peter F. Drucker, Beyond the Information Revolution, The Atlantic, October 1999.
• Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, Penguin Press, 2008.
• Clay Shirky, Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age (How Technology Makes Consumers into Collaborators), Penguin Press, 2010.
• Steven Johnson, Future Perfect: The Case for Progress in A Networked Age, Riverhead Books, 2013.