The Pew Internet and American Life Project has a new report out, The
Future of the Internet II. The report is the sequel to a 2003
report of the same name, which itself was inspired by Ithiel de Sola Pool's
1983 Forecasting
the Telephone: A Retrospective Technology Assessment, a look back at
what the experts of the time made of the telephone in its early days.
The Pew researchers asked a group of somewhat self-selected technology-savvy
respondents to react to seven different scenarios, from whether a global network
will even exist in 2020 to whether by that time we'll have "lost"
people all together into virtual-realty spaces. The responses include fears
of a growth in multiple personalities that will give rise to "cyberpsychiatry,"
that privacy will soon be nothing more than an illusion, yadda yadda. There's
even the hope (I think) that there might come a day when every newborn baby
is seeded with an RFID chip.
I skimmed the report because it was kinda boring
and too science-fictiony for my tastes. But from what I saw, one thought.
What I see as the most likely turn of events isn't mentioned in the report
-- that by 2020 we'll have evolved into ever more hardened and extremist
sorts of human beings. It's, of course, a complicated and yet not all
too original thought and I'll admit that I'm only going to scratch
the surface of it in this post. The one mention I see in the report of the broad
idea is this:
These technologies allow us to find cohorts that eventually serve to decrease
mass shared values and experiences. More than cultural fragmentation, it will
aid a fragmentation of deeper levels of shared reality.
- Denzil Meyers, Widgetwonder
But then again it's not so much shared cultural experiences that I'm
interested in here. The days of everyone watching I Love Lucy or whatever
it might have been are probably over and done with. It's rather that the
Internet medium seems to reward most and just be better-greased for
promoting the organization of people and ideas around similar, highly-structured,
and particularly dogmatic world views. I'm thinking poltical bloggers,
yes, but also establishment political reporting done online and even modern
social networking sites like Facebook. Real life is fluid and squishy and shades
of gray -- that's one of the things I like best about it -- but I don't
know how well that's going to survive on the Internet.
Take the aforementioned Facebook. The
ask made of college freshmen is to define their likes and dislikes, political
leanings, favorite books and movies, relationships and even who your friends
are for all the world to see. It might be too much, I think. Too rigid for an
18 year-old. It would have been too much for 18 year-old me, for sure -- at a time where
I was just working to sort myself out, poke and prod myself to see what the
future Scola might be, to then make the evolving me public to my entire social
context. (Even if that context is just limited to my university -- in fact,
maybe especially if it's just limited to that narrow little social
field.) And to do it in the language and categories and drop lists pre-selected
for me! Those were liminal
times, baby, as they should be. But I don't know if there's room
for people be liminal or evolving any more, at least on the Internet. I don't
think that's a small deal. In fact, I think it's a very big deal
indeed.
I'm too US-centric in my thinking on this, I know. And too influenced
by my exposure to electoral politics done online, most likely.
Fidel Castro is getting up there in years, having turned 80 this past August. In 2003, President Bush created the Commission for Assisistance to a Free Cuba. The group's stated mission is to rid Cuba of Castro if at all possible, but also to prepare for the eventual post-Castro world. (Though it might not be that post-Castro -- Fidel's brother Raul is considered the leading contender to take power.) The head of the commission is Caleb McCarry, a former chief of staff to the House International Relations Committee under Henry Hyde.
In presenting the commission's second annual plan for Cuba, McCarry was asked by a reporter if it made sense to partner with Cubans moving forward, given their scant experience in having dominion over their own lives. Yup, it is, he said, adding:
Cubans are demanding their rights. Cubans are asking their government to give them freedoms that Americans take for granted in our own nation.
I'll give you a specific example. Guillermo Fariñas is an independent journalist. It also happens his background is that he's a wounded Angola war veteran. And he's been on a protracted hunger strike. What for? He's asking for uncensored internet access for ordinary Cubans. Cubans are making their demands known to the government and it is they who will define a democratic future for their country. And the Compact and the report are a very concrete expression of the support of the United States for their efforts. (emphasis mine)
I've been following what's been happening with Fariñas via Google News alerts since I wrote a story on it a while back, so it was great to see this mention of him. Good to hear, too, a somewhat-senior U.S. official raise the issue of an uncensored, unfragmented, Internet.
Reporters without Borders -- Reporters sans Frontières for the more French among us -- reported on July 4th that Fariñas is still being treated at the Villa Clara hospital in Cuba. He's back on an intravenous food drip, after having disconnected it several days earlier.
