A slice from the minds of those who “get” the social-power-potential of the Internet. Ethan Zuckerman has kindly produced a series of blog posts outlining each speech:
1. His own article, The Cloud and Useful Illusions
2. Juliana Rotich, The Cloud and Environmental Change
3. Pablo Flores, Education and the Cloud
4. Teddy Ruge, the Online African Diaspora
5. Kristen Taylor, the Food Pornographer
6. Xiao Qiang and Evgeny Morozov with dueling views of digital activism
7. Hamid Tehrani, a nuanced view of social media in Iran
8. David Sasaki, the brave new world of the cloud
While I am still trying to grasp at this concept of cloud intelligence, I cannot help but remind myself that this type of interaction has its limits. Its use is primarily in introduction and in networking, but in terms of developing the substance on which human society changes, I think we will always have to stay in a physical, face-to-face environment – for the better.
And, Zuckerman ensures we keep reality in check:
But just because the tendency to choose a smaller world is a basic human frailty doesn’t mean we should accept it. The infrastructures that hold us together bind us, inextricably. Our problems are global ones – pandemic, global warming, terrorism – and so are our solutions. If we can imagine healing and bettering the world, we are imagining connecting with people across the globe to build solutions and find different ways of living.
The Cloud encourages us to imagine a world where infrastructure doesn’t matter, where ideas and solutions can come from anyone and anywhere. Perhaps this is the useful illusion that frees us from old ways of thinking, lets us embrace solutions that come from halfway around that world, that we might have rejected had we known its provenance.
I fear that, if we’re honest with ourselves, we’ll discover that the flow of ideas through the Cloud isn’t as frictionless and global as we might hope. The steep, sheer barriers of language render much of what’s posted online incomprehensible to us, the Chinese blog posts and the Spanish-language videos. On a polyglot internet, there’s more to read everyday, but less each of us, individually can understand. We’ve made great strides in making it possible for everyone to write online, releasing our words into the Cloud, but we’ve done far less work ensuring that we can read and understand what each other has to say.
And a final reality:
The Cloud is a prophecy. It’s a beautiful dream of the future where we find ways to connect every corner of the world. It asks us to overcome the challenges of language, to break out of our usual orbits and familiar flocks and discover new, global, connected solutions to new, global, connected problems. We need to imagine this future so we can build it. But we must remember what we’re imagining and what’s real. We must continually challenge ourselves and not merely embrace and celebrate a useful illusion.