Food for Thought from an Essay by Keith Hart
Keith Hart, best known for his work on "informal economy", defining the vitality of the urban entreprenuerial spirit he encountered as a young anthropologist in Ghana in the early 1970s has just posted an essay called The Digital Revolution and me. While enthusiasts should certainly read the whole, here are a few snippets that I found thoughtful observations that relate to the explorations on this blog.
We are living through the first stages of a world revolution as profound, in my view, as the invention of agriculture. It is a machine revolution, of course: the convergence of telephones, television and computers in a digital system whose most visible symbol is the internet. It is a social revolution, the formation of a world society with means of communication adequate at last to expressing universal ideas. It is a financial revolution, the detachment of the virtual money circuit from production, linked to the West’s loss of control over the world economy. It is an existential revolution, transforming what it means to be human and how each of us relates to the rest of humanity. It is therefore also a revolution in anthropology that will make everything we have done so far seem like the prehistory of our discipline....At about this time, in the mid-90s, the World Wide Web was making the internet more visual, personal and interactive. For two years I headed a Cambridge committee to explore the uses of audio-visual aids and information technology for teaching and research in the humanities and social sciences. People said there was no point in Cambridge University entering this brave new world; we were too old-fashioned and places like Middlesex Polytechnic had much more experience with online techniques. But I argued that over the centuries we had accumulated lots of beautiful stuff that could become a rich internet resource. In any case the digital revolution is not a linear development. Everyone enters it with their own bundle of specific advantages and drawbacks at a particular moment in time. The technology evolves, so that early users may be too adapted to older techniques, while latecomers can make more creative use of software that requires less specialist knowledge than before. The society made by the machine revolution is a river and you can never step into the same river twice.
...And so to the last few years, to the social networking revolution and Web 2.0: Google, Myspace, Facebook, Digg, Flickr, Twitter, Stumbleupon, Flock, Wave and all the rest. This is the heart of the revolution I want to join. I love Twitter for the chance to project myself as an editor of sorts, sending the best economic journalism from Europe to American traders, gold bugs and currency freaks. I meet an interesting class of anthropologists there. And I hone my subediting skills on the 140-space limit. Social bookmarking really turns me on. Classification of knowledge was hitherto done by experts and every piece of information had its unique place in a folder somewhere. Now tagging makes it possible for anyone to leave a mark on something they like or consider useful and you can find their guidance with increasingly sophisticated software. The people are generating the categories; and even a search engine like Google is becoming obsolete because its millions of hits are impersonal, less attuned to the user’s own profile.
...People ask me how I find time for my work with all this stuff. But, since exchanging Cambridge University for a Paris chambre de bonne 12 years ago, I have doubled my rate of publication over that of the previous three decades. My productivity as a writer benefits enormously from being online 12 hours a day. I can check anything in a fraction of the time. I stay at my work station longer when I can answer an email message there, keep an eye on a football match, surf the OAC for the latest developments. Sometimes the speed and diversity of my online connections generates a wave motion that carries my writing into unexpected regions of discovery. If this is the virtual social life, it will do for me. Bring on the revolution!
...What have I learned from all this? I could quote from the introduction to this website: The two great memory banks are language and money. Exchange of meanings through language and of goods through money are now converging in a single network of communications, the internet. We must discover how to use this digital revolution to advance the human conversation about a better world. Our common task is to make a world society fit for all humanity.
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