Part 3 of a series on rethinking science and technology for the 21st century

I’m fascinated by the power of communication.  The idea that someone’s perceptions and actions can be changed by information received through sight, sound or touch, is rather profound.  Even more so is the idea that, through exchanging information and ideas, people can influence and change the course of whole societies.

Communication—my third “C” in this series on rethinking science and technology for the 21st century—is powerful.  It always has been.  But rapid changes in how we communicate with each other are rewriting the rules on how that power is manifest.  And no-where are these changes as significant as in the development and use of new science and technology.

I’m not going to write extensively about how modern communications are changing the world here—there are a thousand and one commentators discussing the emergence of the Flat Earth, globalization, Web X.0 and other ramifications of living in an increasingly connected world.  But I do want to establish how communication is a critical factor influencing the future development and use of science and technology. Because when combined with the other two “C’s”—Coupling and Control—new challenges arise that are going to be tough to handle from a 20th century perspective.

In broad terms, the changing face of global communications is affecting science and technology in three ways:

First, advances in modern communication are revolutionizing “peer-peer” and “peer-lay” information exchange. Twenty years ago, rooting out scientific information was a physical adventure.  I remember cycling between libraries, chasing up reference trails, lugging weighty tomes around while wandering along seemingly endless shelves of books.  I could get quite nostalgic about time spent surrounded by piles of journals in musty Cambridge libraries.  Nowadays of course nothing is further than the click of a mouse away.  And it’s not just journals—the internet is flooded with a wealth of information which is richer than could ever be imagined 20 years ago.  Researchers have access to vast arrays of new information in their own field, as well as new findings in other disciplines.  The result is a cross-fertilization that is driving the generation of new scientific knowledge and technology innovation at an unprecedented rate.

But the same information is also available to non-experts—the “lay public.”  Now, anyone can in principle access in-depth information on the latest scientific breakthroughs.  And where they might struggle with esoteric science, there are a growing number of resources that translate and repackage the knowledge into more manageable chunks.  As a consequence, science and technology are being democratized.

It’s still a relatively select community that is benefiting from this increasing access to information.  But the day is quite possibly coming when the current intellectual hierarchies will begin to crumble, and a new science and technology order will emerge.

Secondly, advances in modern communication are revolutionizing the exchange of ideas. Ideas propagate along lines of communication and change individuals and groups who come into contact with them.  In the past, geographical and technological barriers have limited the growth and influence of ideas around the world.  But with the advent of Web 2.0 and whatever comes next, traditional barriers are being blown away.  And as a result, new ideas are spreading and potentially changing how people think and behave faster and more unpredictably than ever before.

This new interconnectedness will have profound implications on global society.  And this will include a clear impact on science and technology—one that we are already seeing.  Through advances in global communication, individuals and groups will form opinions and ideas on emerging science and technology as new knowledge and abilities are developed.  In effect, the old intellectual command and control model is disappearing.  Which means that the debate over how science is done, what areas of science are pursued, and which new technologies are developed (and how) is now very public, and very global.  And there is no guarantee that the participants will have the same understanding of or respect for hard data as the people generating them.

This global exchange of ideas leads into the third way in which advances in communication will affect science and technology: Decentralization. Advancing communication is empowering citizens to influence the course of science and technology in ways that transcend traditional boundaries.  If a group of people decide they don’t like a new technology, it’s relatively easy for them to mobilize and hinder the progress of that technology.  It happened with genetically modified organisms, and there have been concerns that it could happen in other areas like nanotechnology or synthetic biology (for example).  And with this increasing decentralized influence, scientists can scream and shout until they are blue in the face about the authority of hard data—if people don’t want something, it ain’t going to happen.

Which means that if science and technology are to be used wisely and beneficially over the next century, this new communication landscape needs to be understood and navigated.

In the original lecture on which this series is based, I used two examples to illustrate the implications of rapidly evolving global communication—one rather trivial, the other slightly less so.

First, I wanted to illustrate the rapidity with which communication networks are growing around the world, and how information and ideas propagate along these.  I chose Twitter, and one particular user; the British comedian and raconteur Stephen Fry—this is the trivial example.

The growth of interest in Twitter has been phenomenal, and only matched by the growth in stature of users like Stephen Fry (or to use his Twitter persona, @stephenfry).  For the uninitiated, Twitter builds on text messaging by allowing users to send messages of 140 characters or less to other users.  Any message you post can be read by anyone else, although it is delivered directly to your “followers.”  And likewise, any message posted by someone you “follow” is delivered directly to you.  You can then (if you so choose) decide to redirect—or “ReTweet”—that message to your own followers.

In this way a complex web of rapid global communication is established.

fry-twitter006

Four weeks ago when I was preparing to speak in Oxford, @stephenfry had the fifth highest following on Twitter—with around 280,000 followers.  It’s a testament to the growth of the medium that now—just four weeks later—he is 22nd in the popularity stakes (with 380,000 followers).  But the ranking is not important.  Think, for a moment, of the reach @stephenfry has if he comes up with a bright idea and posts it on Twitter.  380,000 people will receive and (hopefully) read this new nugget of information.  Some of them will pass it on—especially if it’s a good one.  And some of these will pass it on in turn, perhaps embellishing the idea.  The result is a web of nodes and connections that favor the propagation and evolution of ideas over a potentially vast number of people.

The top-subscribed Twitter user is currently @cnnbrk (breaking news from CNN) with 820,000 followers—more than the circulation of a small newspaper and climbing by over 12,000 followers a day.  Just imagine the reach of ideas propagated through this network, especially as they get picked up and pass on by other power users.

Twitter is just one example of how people are interacting through the web and information and ideas are propagating in ways that are completely alien to how the world worked a few years ago.  But there’s another side to this.  A flood of information with inadequate filtering and interpretation is simply noise, and becomes more ineffective the more of it there is.  For the communication revolution to go anywhere, there need to be new ways of handing the mass of information we are exposed to.

Not surprisingly, this is happening.  The second example here is just one of many where new innovations are helping to assimilate this flood of data.  It comes from Pranav Mistry in Patti Maes’ group at the MIT Media Lab, and is part of the Sixth Sense project:

[For a fuller explanation of what you are seeing, check out Patti Maes’ TED video]

What you see is an attempt to contextualize the mass of data available over the web, by using complex information collection, processing, retrieval and presentation.  The system comprises a video camera, projector and web-enabled phone, worn by the user.  By integrating all three components, the wearer can now interact with the web in a very intuitive and context-specific manner—almost as if there was an additional sense reaching out into cyber space.

sixth-sense007Using interactive systems like this—which I guarantee are going to become very sophisticated very fast—the door is opened to exchanging information, ideas and influence between real and virtual communities around the globe in ways which will have a profound impact on how we live our lives.  This combination of information and interactive processing is perhaps what makes this “C” such a powerful agent for change when it comes to science and technology.  But powerful as it is, the influence of communication is enhanced significantly by the third “C”—Control.

Over the next few posts, I’ll be exploring this idea of control in more depth.

Notes

Rethinking science and technology for the 21st century is a series of blogs drawing on a recent lecture given at the James Martin School in Oxford.  This is a bit of an experiment—the serialization of a lecture, and a prelude to a more formal academic paper.  But hopefully it will be both interesting and useful.  I’ll be posting a “rethinking science and technology” blog every week or so, interspersed with the usual eclectic mix of stuff you’ve come to expect from 2020science.

Previously: Coupling: Actions and consequences in a shrinking world

Next: Control: Gaining mastery over the world at the finest level

[Updated 4/8/09 – slide of MIT Sixth Sense system added]