Digital Guide (Introduction)

This guide has seven parts:

This part - the Introduction - provides an overview and highlights what's new and noteworthy.

Part 1 - basics - offers pointers to some basic texts about digital technology: machines, software and networks

Part 2 - etopia - looks at some of the visionaries of the information society - Toffler, Gilder, Negroponte, Dyson, McLuhan, Barlow - and some of the harder-headed writing about life in the age of the internet

Part 3 - spaces - considers the 'city of bits' and the notion of cyberspace: everywhere and nowhere, out of control or business as usual?

Part 4 - bodies - points to some of the more interesting (and loopier) writing about mind and body in the digital environment. If you are interested in theorising about artificial intelligence, gender in cyberspace or the cyborg this is the page for you

Part 5 - community - deals with how 'being digital' affects nations and communities, including the digital ghetto and the digital divide

Part 6 - futures - points to writing about emerging technologies and their implications, including truly pervasive computing and artificial intelligence, and comments on technology forecasting

being digital, being analogue?

What does it mean to 'be digital', to adopt the jingle popularised by Nicholas Negroponte? What are the features of life in what Esther Dyson characterises as 'Release 2.0', a wired (and increasingly wireless) universe that's presumably fundamentally different to everything that's gone before? If you graze the information in our guides you'll see that we differ strongly from many of the gurus. We view technological and other changes as evolutionary, rather than revolutionary. Our perspectives - and the solutions we offer to our clients - are firmly grounded in reality. They are not the result of digital delirium. We provide analysis, rather than prophecy; less exciting but more useful.

From our perspective key features of 'being digital' in the coming decade are:

connectivity: an environment where digital technologies mean the 'death of distance, where access (by people and by machines) to data is ubiquitous, where the price of communication networks and devices falls in inverse proportion to demands on that infrastructure (more computing power, greater bandwidth), and where as a consequence there's a premium on information rather than data, on 'content' rather than noise. Most Australians have grown up in a world where information was available in teaspoon-sized amounts. In future we'll bathe in a sea of information, a change that poses new problems as well as opportunities. What are the implications for privacy when data about your grocery purchases is seamlessly, instantly, automatically processed in Fujian? Or, more prosaically, when everyone seems to have a web site, how to make sure people visit yours?

pervasive computing: a world where some degree of intelligence, local or through a communication network, is a feature of many of the devices with which we interact on a day to day basis. We're skeptical about prophecies of 'video to your toaster', of fridges that use the web to automatically restock themselves, or mobile phones that make investment decisions while displaying reruns of Seinfeld. Australia is a leader in the adoption of technologies such as EFTPOS and the ATM. We don't expect that your fridge will be conversing about Voltaire (or Boy George) with our toasters. We do expect a world where computing continues to flow beyond the desk-top, where there are new opportunities for the small and intelligent, and where 'smart' devices affect the way we live.

a global information economy: characterised both by global markets and by 'markets-of-one', where 'symbolic analysis' (rather than the extraction and processing of tangible commodities) is the basis for economic growth, and where perceptions of the role of government (and other institutions) change along with their responsibilities. Information, with apologies to cyberlibertarian John Perry Barlow, doesn't "want to be free": it's a commodity over which governments, communities and businesses will continue to struggle.

the age of uncertainty: history is in one sense the record of the interaction between people (markets, institutions, laws) and technologies. The nature of that interaction is often uncertain, its implications problematical. In this site we've referred to historical precedents and highlighted studies such as Brown & Duguid's The Social Life of Information as tools in understanding what's happening at the moment and how things may evolve. Negroponte's provocative but wrong: technology may be digital but people 'live analogue'. In making sense of the present and helping our clients plan for the future we look into our crystal ball and prophesy .... more of the same. Government will continue to grapple with the legal implications of technology (slowly, iteratively but often effectively). Some businesses will seize new opportunities. Others will fail, though their vision may be correct and their ideas percipient. What we can say is that change will continue, on a day to day and long term basis.

Contrary to many pundits, 'being digital' and living & working in the information economy doesn't mean

the end of the corporation (or small business)

that nation states will evaporate and national/international legal regimes will dissolve

the death of 'old media' groups ("dinosaurs on the information highway") or formats (adios "dried tree-flakes encased in dead cow")

the end of retailing as we know it, particularly retailing that addresses consumer concerns regarding service, price etc

we'll all be 'free agents', at one with the zen of the net and drinking the perfect macchiato

It also doesn't mean the end of much of the silicon snake oil being peddled by experts and critics, although life would be much poorer without such entertainment.

next part (1: basics)