As We Progress: Network Innovation and Social Change

Technologically-enriched communication environments are already changing many aspects of the human social fabric, including the bonds of friendship, the definition of neighborhood, the give-and-take of education, and the transacting of business. As the virtual network grows in scope, expressiveness, and functionality, it will affect our sense of sociability, our understanding of world affairs, and our engagement in the global economy. In the past, point-to-point connectivity of the mail system and the telephone allowed us to reach across a distributed social landscape to specifically selected people and sites. At the same time, the one-way nature of capital-intensive "mass media" communications -newspapers, radio, and television -created a power structure dominated by the opinions of a few. As we enter the brave new world of the World Wide Web, the old paradigms of media control are breaking down. No longer is the creation and distribution of information restricted to large firms, governments, academics, or wealthy entrepreneurs. Individuals are able to receive and to publish what they want, when they want, where they want, and for whom they want at a reasonable cost. As the network becomes "smarter," the highly distributed community of audience will be formed and reformed based on the manipulation of meta-data which conveys the interests of the consumer and the economics of efficient entrepreneurial effort to the system. Now, the system becomes an active player and the very concept of information becomes nebulous. By "information" do we mean streams of coherently organized story content, or small chunks of decontextualized data collected in a repository, or meta-information culled by the system? Can the system decide whether story content should be presented in the background or the foreground plane of consciousness? Who owns the meta-data, and how can we be sure that it will be used on our behalf? Finally, as the base of power shifts from individuals to the collective systemic network activity, how will we value human individuality and artistic expression?