How is the internet changing the way you think?

Every year John Brockman poses a provocative question to the members of his Edge community, which includes me (he is my literary agent). Past questions have included “What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?” and “What have you changed your mind about?”. This year’s question is: “How is the internet changing the way you think?”. There were 172 answers from “an array of world-class scientists, artists, and creative thinkers”. Here’s mine.

IT HAS SHARPENED MY MEMORY
The internet has not changed the way I think. The old stone-age mental software still seems to be working surprisingly well in the 21st century, despite claims to the contrary. What the internet has done, however, is sharpen my memory.

A quick search with a few well chosen keywords is usually enough to turn a decaying memory of a half-forgotten article, scientific paper or news item into perfect recall of the information in question. Previously, these things at the penumbra of recollection could only be recovered with a great deal of effort or luck. The internet has, in effect, upgraded my memory of such marginal items from haphazard and partial to reliable and total.

The future (and history) of newspapers, continued

Argh! New technology is going to kill newspapers! In this week’s Christmas issue of The Economist I explain why people were worried about this — in 1845 — and what actually happened. The new technology in question was the telegraph, and newspapers co-opted it, rather than being destroyed by it. Will that also happen with the internet? As I have argued here previously, the internet is different because it does challenge the last-mile delivery of newspapers. (The telegraph was not a threat to papers in the end because although it delivered news faster, it could not distribute it to subscribers. The internet can do both.) So the internet may well kill newspapers; but newspapers are merely one business model for the delivery of news, and there is no reason why they should survive. The death of newspapers is not the same as the death of news. Already we are seeing new models emerge that do not depend on paper. Some publications will make the leap; many will not. If I was setting up a newspaper today I’d want it to look a lot like Bloomberg: global network of reporters, cash-cow terminals/financial information business to pay the bills, and (now) a consumer brand in the form of BusinessWeek. As this article argues, Bloomberg has a lot going for it, and it may prove to be the greatest competitor to The Economist in the medium term. Something for the next editor-in-chief to worry about, perhaps.

“The Victorian Internet” on NPR’s “Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me”

My book was used to set three questions about “old social media” (ie, the telegraph) for Rick Sanchez of CNN on the “Not My Job” slot on “Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me”. What was the single non-military application that Napoleon allowed the French telegraph network to be used for? Which object did a woman try to send by telegraph in the 1870s? And what kind of messages did the Atlantic cable of 1858 carry for the first few weeks after being connected? You can find out here. I was actually asked to suggest some questions myself by Peter Sagal, the host, but my suggestions weren’t funny enough (except for the sauerkraut). Oops — that’s one of the answers.

More “Edible History” coverage

It’s been a bit quiet around here lately, in part because I’ve been in rural Uganda researching mobile phones. It was also a good opportunity to see subsistence farming close up, and find out what farmers in the developing world are doing on the ground. Anyway, in the past month the Los Angeles Times has run a Q&A with me in which I am described, strangely, as “the ultimate foodie”. Time Out picked “Edible History” as one of its “best new food books”. The Guardian ran a favourable review. The Daily Telegraph picked up the “farming was a big mistake” discussion. The Financial Times included the book in its “hottest holiday reading” selection.

I also wrote an Op-Ed for the Los Angeles Times, drawing parallels between 18th-century concerns about the potato and modern worries about genetically modified crops. Yup, historical analogy again. There was one point I didn’t have room for, which is worth mentioning. I am in favour of GM in theory although, as I note in the piece, so far the technology has not really delivered the goods in practice. That said, I think one of the risks of an over-reliance on GM is that monocultures are vulnerable to the appearance of an unexpected disease or predator. The Irish Potato Famine is, of course, the single best example of the danger of monocultures in food history. So that’s another lesson from the history of the potato.

How can we learn from it? What we need is lots of different GM crops to provide variety, rather than dominance of a few strains from a couple of big companies. And there’s no reason, as I point out, why future GM crops might not come from government research labs, which could do a lot to neutralise anti-capitalist opposition to GM. If the government of Mexico or India, say, produces a GM wheat that is drought-tolerant and requires very little fertiliser or pesticide, gives away the seeds to farmers and allows them to reuse seeds from one year to the next, wouldn’t that be a good thing?

The internet threatens newspapers — in 1845

Digging around in an online archive of old American newspapers, I came upon an article entitled “The Electro Magnetic Telegraph — A Great Revolution Approaching” from the New York Herald, published on May 12th, 1845. I quoted some of it in The Victorian Internet, but re-reading it I was struck by how closely it reflects what is happening today, and I think it’s worth quoting at greater length:

If this mode of transmitting intelligence fully succeeds and comes into universal operation — as no doubt it will — an entire revolution in many of the present institutions and elements of society will be effected.

In regard to the newspaper press, it will experience to a degree, that must in a vast number of cases be fatal, the effects of the new mode of circulating intelligence. The telegraph may not affect magazine literature, nor those newspapers that have some peculiar characteristic. But the mere newspapers — the circulators of intelligence merely — must submit to destiny, and go out of existence. That journalism, however, which possesses intellect, mind and originality, will not suffer. Its sphere of action will be widened. It will, in fact, be more influential than ever. The public mind will be stimulated to greater activity by the rapid circulation of news. The swift communication of tidings of great events will awake in the masses of the community still keener interest in public affairs. Thus the intellectual, philosophic and original journalist, will have a greater, a more excited, and more thoughtful audience than ever.

This prediction was wrong, of course. The telegraph did not destroy newspapers — it provided them instead with a vast new supply of information. It became worthwhile to produce several editions of a newspaper a day. If there was a fast-moving story, people might buy more than one paper a day. The telegraph was great at delivering news, but it could not deliver it directly to subscribers, since it was an expensive, hard-to-use point-to-point medium. So the telegraph actually strengthened the newspapers’ existing business model, which was to aggregate news for readers, and  readers for advertisers.

Today the problem for the newspapers is that the modern-day telegraph, the internet, does undermine their model, because it’s easy to use and ubiquitous. Indeed, the newspapers have been undermining it themselves by making their content available free online, where there are fewer advertising dollars available. In recent days there has been a lot of fuss about whether newspapers should deny news aggregator sites, such as Google News and Digg, the right to link to their stories. As many observers have pointed out, but very few newspaper bosses seem to have realised, this would be idiotic, because aggregators drive a lot of traffic to news sites. Having fewer readers would hardly improve matters; what is needed is a new business model. I think newspapers will have to start charging for their content in some form, and that will be easier to do if they have something distinctive to offer. But many newspapers have been going the other way, following the herd and rewriting wire copy in response to what seems to be popular on Digg or the Drudge Report.

The article from 1845 had it right. Newspapers “that have some peculiar characteristic” (such as the Wall Street Journal, which does charge readers) will be better positioned. And journalism “which possesses intellect, mind and originality, will not suffer.” Of course, I’d like to think that applies to The Economist, which has just had a bumper year, and is generally doing well. The gloomy prediction of the death of “mere newspapers” at the hands of new technology turned out to be wrong in 1845, but seems to be coming true 164 years later.

The internet in 1901, and Twitter in 1935

Here’s the best map I’ve seen so far of the Victorian Internet. I had a black-and-white map from a few years earlier in some editions of the book, but this one is more detailed, later, and in colour. It’s also from 1901, the last year of Victoria’s reign, so this shows the full extent of the “Victorian” internet. It’s interesting to see how the cables follow existing trade routes, and how much capacity there was on the North Atlantic route. That hasn’t changed. But on this map Africa is relatively well connected, which is no longer the case today — though some new fibre links are on the way. (Hat tip to Digg.)

And while we’re on the subject, here’s a machine that essentially did what Twitter does, but did it in 1935. (Hat tip to Dan Hollings, via Michele.) Have I mentioned that I love this stuff?