clay shirky

Eponymous Laws and the Invasion of Technology

Peter Cripps comment , , , , , , , ,

Unless you’ve had your head buried in a devilish software project that has consumed your every waking hour over the last month or so you cannot help but have noticed technology has been getting a lot of bad press lately. Here are some recent news stories that make one wonder whether our technology maybe running away from us.

Is this just the internet reaching a level of maturity that past technologies from the humble telephone, the VCR and the now ubiquitous games consoles have been through or is there something really sinister going on here? What is the implication of all this on the software architect, should we care or do we just stick our head in the sand and keep on building the systems that enable all of the above, and more, to happen?

Here are three epnymous laws* which I think could have been use to predict much of this:

  • Metcalfe’s law (circa 1980): “The value of a system grows as approximately the square of the number of users of the system.” A variation on this is Sarnoff’s law: “The value of a broadcast network is proportional to the number of viewers.”
  • Though I’ve never seen this described as an eponymous law, my feeling is it should be. It’s a quote from Marshall McLuhan (from his book UnderstandingMedia: The Extensions of Man published in 1964): “We become what we behold. We shape our tools and then our tools shape us.”
  • Clarkes third law (from 1962): “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” This is from Aurthur C. Clarke’s book Profiles of the Future.

Whilst Metcalfe’s law talks of the value of a system growing proportionally as the number of users increases I suspect the same law applies to the disadvantage or detriment of such systems. As more people use a system, the more of them there will be to seek out ways of misusing that system. If only 0.1% of the 2.4 billion people who use the internet use it for illicit purposes that still makes a whopping 2.4 million. A number set to grow just as the number of online users grows.

As to Marshall McLuhan’s law, isn’t the stage we are at with the internet just that? The web is (possibly) beginning to shape us in terms of the way we think and behave. Should we be worried? Possibly. It’s probably too early to tell and there is a lack of hard scientific evidence either way to decide. I suspect this is going to be ripe ground for PhD theses for some years to come. In the meantime there are several more popular theses from the likes of Clay Shirky, Nicholas Carr, Aleks Krotoski and Baroness Susan Greenfield who describe the positive and negative aspects of our online addictions.

And so to Aurthur C, Clarke. I’ve always loved both his non-fiction and science fiction writing and this is possibly one of his most incisive prophecies. It feels to me that technology has probably reached the stage where most of the population really do perceive it as “magic”. And therein lies the problem. Once we stop understanding how something works we just start to believe in it almost unquestioningly. How many of us give a second thought when we climb aboard an aeroplane or train or give ourselves up to our doctors and nurses treating us with drugs unimagined even only a few years ago?

In his essay PRISM is the dark side of design thinking Sam Jacob asks what America’s PRISM surveillance program tells us about design thinking and concludes:

Design thinking annexes the perceived power of design and folds it into the development of systems rather than things. It’s a design ideology that is now pervasive, seeping into the design of government and legislation (for example, the UK Government’s Nudge Unit which works on behavioral design) and the interfaces of democracy (see the Design of the Year award-winning .gov.uk). If these are examples of ways in which design can help develop an open-access, digital democracy, Prism is its inverted image. The black mirror of democratic design, the dark side of design thinking. Back in 1942 the science fiction author Isaac Asimov proposed the three laws of robotics as an inbuilt safety feature of what was then thought likely to become the dominant technology of the latter part of the 20th century, namely intelligent robots. Robots, at least in the form Asimov predicted, have not yet come to pass however, in the internet, we have probably built a technology even more powerful and with more far reaching implications. Maybe, as at least one person as suggested, we should be considering the equivalent of Asimov’s three laws for the internet? Maybe it’s time that we as software architects, the main group of people who are building these systems, should begin thinking about some inbuilt safety mechanisms for the systems we are creating?

*An eponym is a person or thing, whether real or fictional, after which a particular place, tribe, era, discovery, or other item is named. So called eponymous laws are succinct observations or predictions named after a person (either by the persons themselves or by someone else ascribing the law to that person).

Social Networking and All That Jazz

Peter Cripps comment , ,

I was recently asked what I thought the impact of Web 2.0 and social networking has had or is about to have, on our profession. Here is my take:

  • The current generation of students going through secondary school and university (that will be hitting the employment market over the next few years) have spent most of their formative years using Web 2.0. For these people instant messaging, having huge groups of “friends” and organising events online is as second nature as sending emails and using computers to write documents is to us. How will this change the way we do our jobs and software and services companies do business?
    • Instant and informal networks (via Twitter, Facebook etc) will set up, share information and disappear again. This will allow vendors and customers to work together in new ways and more quickly than ever before.D
    • Devices like advanced smart phones and tablets which can be carried anywhere and are always connected will speed up even more how quickly information gets disseminated and used.
    • Whilst the current generation berates the upcoming one for the time wasted sending pointless messages to friends and creating blog entries hardly anyone reads they at least are doing something different and liberating, creating as opposed to simply consuming content. So what if 99.99% of that content is rubbish? 0.01 or even 0.001 amongst a population of several billion is still a lot of potentially good and innovative thoughts and ideas. The challenge is of course finding the good stuff.
  • Email as an effective communication aid is coming to its natural end. The new generation who have grown up on blogs, Twitter and Facebook will laugh at the amount of time we spend sweating over mountains of email. New tools will need to be available that provide effective ways of quickly and accurately searching the content that is published via Web 2.0 to find the good stuff (and also to detect early potential good stuff).
  • More 20th century content distributors (newspapers, TV companies, book and magazine publishers) will go the way of the music industry if they cannot find a new business model to earn money. This is both an opportunity (we can help them create the new opportunities) and a threat (loss of a large customer base if they go under) to IT professionals and service companies.
  • The upcoming generation will not have loyalties to their employers but only to the network they happen to be a part of at the time. This is the natural progression from outsourcing of labour, destruction of company pension schemes and everyone being treated as freelancers. Whilst this has been hard for the people who have gone through that shift, for the new workers in their late teens and early 20’s they will know nothing else and forge new relationships and ways of working using the new tools at their disposal. Employee turnover and the rate at which people change jobs will increase 10 fold according to some pundits (google ‘Shift Happens’ for some examples).
  • Formal classroom type teaching is essentially dead. New devices with small cameras will allow virtual classrooms to spring up anywhere. Plus the speed with which information changes will mean material will be out of date anyway by the time a formal course is prepared. This coupled with further education institutions having to keep raising fees to support increasing numbers of students will lead to a collapse in the traditional ways of delivering learning.
  • The real value of networks comes from sharing information between as diverse a group of people as possible. Given that companies will be relying less on permanent employees and more on freelancers these networks will increasingly use the internet. This provides some interesting challenges around security of information and managing intellectual capital. The domain of enterprise architecture has therefore just increased exponentially as the enterprise has just become the internet. How will companies manage and govern a network most of which they have no or little control over?
  • The new models for distributing software and services (e.g. application stores, cloud providers) as well as existing ones such as open source will mark the end of the traditional package and product software vendors. Apple overtook Microsoft earlier this year in terms of size as measured by market capitalisation and is now second only to Exxon. Much of this revenue was, I suspect, driven by the innovative ways Apple have devised to create and distribute software (i.e. third parties, sometimes individuals create it and Apple distribute it through their App store).

For two good opposing views on what the internet is doing to our brains read the latest books by Clay Shirky and Nicholas Carr.