| Play from beginning |
| 00:00:00 | Interview with Howard Rheingold |
| 00:00:05 | Of course the most important change that the internet |
| 00:00:08 | brought has been a democratisation
of the ability to create |
| 00:00:14 | and distribute not only your opinions,
but all sorts of media. |
| 00:00:20 | It used to be that if you had a radio station
or TV station or printing press |
| 00:00:27 | you could broadcast your views
to a very large number of people |
| 00:00:31 | at quite a bit of expenseive
and a fairly small percentage of the population was able do that. |
| 00:00:37 | The internet made it possible for
everyone who had a personal computer |
| 00:00:42 | that was connected to the network
to in effect have a printing press, |
| 00:00:47 | and a broadcasting station and
a place of assembly a place where community |
| 00:00:53 | could take place, a market place. |
| 00:00:56 | That's a very radical change in the way
the printing press was a radical change. |
| 00:01:02 | For thousands of years,
scribal culture really hand-picked the people who were |
| 00:01:09 | given this code to transmit knowledge
across time and space. |
| 00:01:14 | In the wake of the printing press,
milions of people became literate |
| 00:01:19 | instead of thousands and
constitutions, democracies, science |
| 00:01:24 | as collective knowledge gathering,
the protestant reformation Ð very large scale social changes |
| 00:01:31 | Ð were enabled by a literate population. |
| 00:01:35 | So now we're seeing the beginning
of vast expansion of literacy, |
| 00:01:41 | not only in the ability to send words on a page,
but TV and audio |
| 00:01:50 | and software and music and movies
from any spot to any other spot. |
| 00:01:58 | Structurally,
that change is a very dramatic change |
| 00:02:04 | and socially it means that
we now have another population |
| 00:02:08 | that has a degree of literacy that will enable them
to organise forms of collective action |
| 00:02:15 | that they weren't able to organise before. |
| 00:02:17 | Just as you couldn't govern yourself, |
| 00:02:19 | you couldn't overthrow the monarchy
and create a constitution |
| 00:02:23 | without a literate population.
You couldn't create science as a collective enterprise, |
| 00:02:29 | you had to wait for Newton or
a Gallileo or an Aristotle to come along, |
| 00:02:34 | you couldn't enlist entire populations of people in that. |
| 00:02:38 | So I think the largest social question
is what forms of collective action - |
| 00:02:43 | and that could be political,
rise of democracy and nation states, |
| 00:02:48 | it could be economic, the emergence of market capitalism
in the wake of Gutenberg, |
| 00:02:55 | literacy Ð it's cultural:
public education afforded by cheap printing. |
| 00:03:04 | Those are the kinds of changes that
we ought to look at in the largest sense, |
| 00:03:10 | in regard to what the internet
provides as a communication medium. |
| 00:03:15 | Well we're benefiting from two technological bonanzas |
| 00:03:21 | the microchip, Moore's law,
making devices much more powerful and less expensive |
| 00:03:28 | every year, that means that a five year old's video game |
| 00:03:34 | has all the power that all the computers
in the world had not too long ago. |
| 00:03:39 | That's a tremendous advantage in terms of putting the ability |
| 00:03:44 | to produce and distribute culture
in the hands of many many people. |
| 00:03:49 | It used to be that you had to spend
hundreds of thousands of dollars on a video camera, |
| 00:03:53 | You had to spend hundreds of dollars per hour to edit it, |
| 00:03:57 | now all those capabilities are broadly available. |
| 00:04:04 | But it's not only I think the distribution of news,
media and cultural material |
| 00:04:11 | we're seeing with open source software production,
the rise of peer production software |
| 00:04:19 | we're seeing with Wikipedia,
the collective creation of knowledge or aggregation |
| 00:04:28 | of knowledge, what Yochai Benkler calls
«commons based« peer production, |
| 00:04:34 | may well be a third method of economic production
along with the market and the firm, |
| 00:04:40 | we're really in the earliest days of that,
so I think the wide spread availability |
| 00:04:46 | of devices that enable people to compute
and to capture and distribute media |
| 00:04:54 | we're only judging that on the basis
of what we know from the past, |
| 00:04:59 | we really need to look forward to what
entire populations of people are going to be able to |
| 00:05:04 | argue, are they going to be able to do scientific research? |
| 00:05:07 | Together we're now seeing with distributed computations,
that people lend their computing |
| 00:05:12 | power to big scientific efforts
to understand how proteins fold, |
| 00:05:16 | or the immune system works
or the weather systems propagate. |
| 00:05:21 | Entirely new economic systems
we have a very crude price system, |
| 00:05:27 | that allocates value according to what populations
are willing to pay for commodities, |
| 00:05:34 | what if we were able to find out what
individuals were willing to pay for commodities? |
| 00:05:40 | We're seeing subsistance farmers,
who are able to get one bit of information on their mobile phones |
| 00:05:45 | should I walk 3 hours in this direction with my crop
or 3 hours in that direction? |
| 00:05:51 | Or should I go to this port with my fish or that port with my fish? |
| 00:05:55 | That makes the difference between
feeding their children and not feeding their children. |
| 00:05:59 | So I think we need to think broadly
in terms of the kind of economic, political |
| 00:06:05 | and cultural power that can be wielded by populations. |
| 00:06:09 | formally that are only wielded by small numbers of people. |
| 00:06:16 | Centralised systems of communication
that are expensive to operate |
| 00:06:23 | naturally support a centralised
and hierachical power structure. |
| 00:06:29 | Those who can afford
or those who have the weapons |
| 00:06:34 | to control a newspaper printing facility
or a tv broadcasting system |
| 00:06:42 | have the power to inform and persuade; |
| 00:06:46 | that has proved to be a much more effective power |
| 00:06:50 | in many political instances than traditional weaponry. |
| 00:06:56 | When not just those who can afford
to persuade and inform and perhaps misinform |
| 00:07:05 | have the ability to spread information
we have a very different decentralised power regime |
| 00:07:11 | and certainly we are seeing a struggle
between the incumbent powers that be |
| 00:07:18 | and people who suddently have cultural
and political power they didn't have before. |
| 00:07:25 | I think if you belive in democracy
having more people involved in decisions |
| 00:07:30 | about their govenance is a good thing,
then in the long run this is a good thing. |
| 00:07:35 | But i think that democracy has its problems -
the mob is as dangerous as the tyrant |
| 00:07:42 | and i would not put too much trust
in the utopian decentralisation of power |
| 00:07:50 | without an accompanying kind of
education about the use of that power. |
| 00:07:57 | The world in which our bodies exist
does not cease to be important, |
| 00:08:02 | simply because we have this world of the mind. |
| 00:08:06 | A dictator or a criminal can come
to your house and take you away, |
| 00:08:12 | or kill you. I think it's important to understand
that physical power is not going away, |
| 00:08:20 | The rise of soft power means
that physical power is not the only way |
| 00:08:26 | to sway populations,
but I think we're going to see the co-existance |
| 00:08:32 | of hierarchies and networks
of centralised power and decentralised power |
| 00:08:39 | of hard power and soft power,
the ability of powerful and well financed players |
| 00:08:47 | to manipulate a distributed system should not be over looked. |
