On 29th April Professor John Naughton, the first of our ‘Big Thinkers’, presented his view on the growth of internet and its implications for comms. He made 7 key points:
1. We need to see the ongoing changes in our digital ecosystem in some kind of long-term perspective. In that sense, what happened with print is probably the best historical analogy we have.2. Most people still don’t understand the Internet. Firstly they tend to regard the Web and the Internet as synonomous. They’re not. The Net is the infrastructure on what everything else runs and is much bigger and more important. Because of its open and permissive architecture, it’s an enabler of disruptive innovation. Disruption is a feature of the Net, not (as politicians, content industries and governments believe) a bug.
3. Ecology provides a better analytical framework than economics for thinking about what’s going on.
4.The emerging digital ecosystem is immeasurably more complex than the one it’s replacing. Only those who can handle that complexity will thrive in it.
5. The Web isn’t static. On the contrary, it’s constantly evolving before our eyes. Examples: the amount of javascript programs that now run inside a single web page; mash-ups; RSS.
6. The network — not the PC — is now the computer in many contexts.
7. We need paradigms (mindsets, mental frameworks) in order to operate effectively. But paradigms also blind-side us. Thus to broadcasters the idea of “user-generated content” is an oxymoron. It can’t happen in their paradigm. So they didn’t see YouTube, Flickr etc. until it was too late. Ditto for newspapers and blogging.”
Just stumbled across the UK government’s Big Thinkers blog and this post caught my eye. Good summary of the big picture. i.e. what’s going on with the shift to digital.
BTW John Naughton is a perfesser type in the UK with a fancy title – “Public Understanding of Technology.”
He blogs at http://memex.naughtons.org/
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