New Year Resolutions for 2004

Wah seh! So fast year too-zeeloh-zeeloh-forr aleady ah.....time to make my ten leh-so-loo-shun hor.....

1. Go jogging at Fort Canning Park at 7am every morning (yah rite!)

2. Master the art of Body Combat and impress the Spinning instructor

3. Go on at least one missionary trip to Vietnam/Cambodia/Thailand

4. Know the bible front to back, back to front

5. Sleep before 12am every night (no eyebags!)

6. Eat more organic food

7. Pursue the heart of God

8. Learn how to wakeboard and lindy-hop

9. Finish at least 75% of my book

10. And lastly, most importantly, to contribute to the "50,000 births Singapore needs annually to replace its population naturally and to have enough manpower for the economy, defence and other needs" by having one of my own. Ha ha!

 
I was misinformed about the information revolution
By Richard Tomkins, Financial Times

What has the internet ever done for us? All right, so it has facilitated the spread of global terrorism, given rise to an enormous expansion of the pornography industry and introduced the words "spam" and "penis enlargement" into everyday speech. But where is the revolution we were promised during those wildly optimistic days of the 1990s dotcom frenzy?

Next Thursday, the Economic & Social Research Council, a body funded by the British government, is planning to launch a GBP6.5m programme of academic research into the ways society has been changed by the internet and the digital age. It claims it is the world's biggest such project.

With the ordinary arrogance of a columnist, I am tempted to say I could have saved the ESRC the bother. If it is a revolution the council is looking for, it will search in vain. For all the hyperbole over the internet, its effects on society have been insignificant compared with those of the industrial revolution's great inventions and discoveries such as electrical power, the telegraph, the motor car and television.

Unlike the damp squib known as the information revolution, the industrial revolution physically and tangibly transformed the lives of ordinary people. Agrarian, handicraft economies that had stayed unchanged for thousands of years were transformed into economies based on industry and machines. Mass production brought huge increases in the output of material goods. And the revolution was accompanied by sweeping social and political changes resulting from mass migration to the cities, improvements in transport and communications and the growth of international trade.

When the dotcom boom started, people thought the internet would change the way people lived, played and worked, too. Online commerce and media would replace conventional shops and newspapers, it was said. The internet would allow office workers to work from home, eliminating the daily commute. Digital technology would produce labour-saving devices such as smart fridges that would go online to replenish themselves.

For many seers of the internet age, that was just the beginning. Since knowledge was power, and the internet spread knowledge, traditional social forms in which people were ruled by governments would be undermined and disappear - as would the traditional nation state, its boundaries rendered meaningless by the networked reality of people now more closely bound to virtual communities than to physical ones.

And what happened?

First, let us acknowledge that the internet has at least made a difference to big business. The reason is that business is information intensive, so improvements in information technology have allowed companies to manage supply chains, logistics, inventories and data more efficiently - though the savings obtained should perhaps be balanced against the cost of running big IT departments and the time wasted by employees surfing the web, sending e-mails and dealing with spam.

But if we are talking about social change, the most striking thing about the internet is the sheer banality of its effects on the lives of ordinary people. When electricity came along, it gave rise to countless other inventions that transformed society, such as light bulbs that turned night into day, machines that helped people with their work and media such as radio and television that entertained and informed them. The internet, in contrast, just lets people do things they are already doing in a slightly different way: they download a piece of music instead of buying it from a record store, e-mail a friend instead of picking up the phone and buy an airline ticket electronically instead of calling a travel agent. It is useful and convenient, yes. But revolutionary?

This, surely, is the point about the information age. While business is information intensive, our personal lives are not, so the information revolution has left us almost untouched. For all the feeling of hectic change that the dotcom boom once generated, the world around us has changed much less in the past 50 years than it did in the 50 before that. We still drive cars powered by the internal combustion engine, a technology dating back more than a century. Most of us live in houses built generations ago. We still go to work, come home, eat dinner and play with the children. We still go shopping, read newspapers, wear clothes, sleep in beds, vacuum the floors, eat off plates and wash with soap and water.

To be fair, the internet has made one difference: it has made our personal lives a little more information intensive than they used to be. Few people with access to the internet would visit the doctor or buy a car without first doing extensive online research. And many derive comfort from networking with others on websites set up for people who share common interests. Examples include www.restrooms.org, which provides solutions to common public lavatory problems; www.whosoever.org, an online magazine for gay and transgender Christians; www.showmeyourwound.com, where people compare stories and pictures of injuries they have sustained; and www.dullmen.com, where boring, mild-mannered men share thoughts and experiences.

In that context, perhaps the ESRC's most interesting area of research will turn out to be whether the internet's benign effects outweigh the bad. We can probably all think of ways in which the web has made our lives a little easier or more enjoyable. But we cannot ignore the fact that much of its content ranges from the lowbrow to the thoroughly debased. Unlike other media such as newspapers and television, the web is neither edited nor regulated, so it has become a free-for-all for every imaginable kind of deception, depravity and stupidity as much as for information, enlightenment and engagement.

I know what the seers will say: it is early days yet. Perhaps the democratising effects of the internet will eventually lead to a revolution as information-empowered web surfers seize the reins of political power. At the moment, however, they seem more intent on stealing music and peeking up Anna Kournikova's skirt. It is not a promising start.