Which is why the arrival of Shoshana Zuboff’s new book is such a big event. So our contemporary state of awareness is – as Manuel Castells, the great scholar of cyberspace once put it – one of “informed bewilderment”. But they’re like the blind men trying to describe the elephant in the old fable: everyone has only a partial view, and nobody has the whole picture. Lots of scholars are thinking, researching and writing about this stuff.
Library shelves groan under the weight of books about what digital technology is doing to us and our world. And although it’s now gradually dawning on us that this really is a big deal and that epochal social and economic changes are under way, we’re as clueless about where it’s heading and what’s driving it as the citizens of Mainz were in 1495. Why choose 1495? Because we’re about the same distance into our revolution, the one kicked off by digital technology and networking. Printing shaped and transformed societies over the next four centuries, but nobody in Mainz (Gutenberg’s home town) in, say, 1495 could have known that his technology would (among other things): fuel the Reformation and undermine the authority of the mighty Catholic church enable the rise of what we now recognise as modern science create unheard-of professions and industries change the shape of our brains and even recalibrate our conceptions of childhood. Hindsight is the only exact science in this business, and in that long run we’re all dead.
And the problem with living through a revolution is that it’s impossible to take the long view of what’s happening. W e’re living through the most profound transformation in our information environment since Johannes Gutenberg’s invention of printing in circa 1439.
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