Internet Science for Strategic Planning

Žiga Turk

University of Ljubljana, Faculty of Civil and Geodetic Engineering, Jamova 2, Ljubljana, Slovenia

Keywords: Information Technology, Internet Science, Strategic Planning, Future Studies, Policy Creation.

Abstract: The rapid development of information and communication technology (ICT) is perhaps the most influential

driver that is fundamentally changing the world and the societies we live in. ICT is (a) changing the

communication fabric that is linking the elements of societies together and is (b) automating human routine

work. The latter is enabling automation and creating an abundance of food, industrial products and

information. This abundance is pushing the value creation towards the creation of new knowledge and

meaningful (rather than only functional) products and services. Information, knowledge and meaning are the

three key commodities of the modern economy. Innovation and creativity are key processes creating these

commodities. The two activities are very significantly supported by information and communication

technologies.

ICTs are politically acknowledged on several levels of future planning: in R&D programs, development

strategies, future studies and visions. However, a scientific base for all this is lacking. The interaction

among ICT, innovation and society at large is a subject of research projects such as EINS and spawning the

birth of a new interdisciplinary science, Internet Science - that is studying the interaction between

information technology and society.

1 INTRODUCTION

The history of humanity shows a very clear trend

that an increasing number of people is involved in

the information professions - that is, the result of

their work is an information; not an agricultural or

an industrial product. They are sometimes referred

as “knowledge workers”.

The growing number of the knowledge workers

vis-a-vis industrial and agricultural workers is a

quantifiable indicator of society’s transition from

agricultural or industrial society into what is called

“the information society”. The growing contribution

of the information/knowledge/meaning to the value

of a product is another indicator of the transition of

the society from the material towards the

informational.

There are some who are charting the trajectory

forward; from information society towards

knowledge society and society of meaning (Pink,

2006) or emphatic society (Rifkin, 2009). However,

from the perspective of analysing processes and

technologies these are very similar to information

society.

The key commodity in the information society is

information. Information is created, communicated

and consumed. All these processes are supported by

media, tools and technologies. For example, an old

technology for communicating information is

sending around paper. A modern way is using what

we call ICTs by which we usually mean the

electronic and digital tools and services.

Communication technology has, too date,

undergone two major and two minor revolutions

(Turk, 2009):

 The first minor revolution was the invention of

paper, clay and other writing media thousands

of years BC.

 The first major revolution was the

democratization of this invention by the

introduction of cheap paper and printing press

in Europe some 500 years ago.

 The second minor revolution was the invention

of electronic communication like telegraph,

telephone, radio and TV in the late 19

and

early 20

century.

 The second major communication revolution

was the democratization of electronic

communication of texts, sounds and videos

using the internet.

While the impact of the minor revolutions was

significant, it was limited. The impact of the major

revolutions brought paradigm shifts to society as a

394

Turk Ž..

Internet Science for Strategic Planning.

DOI: 10.5220/0004950803940399

In Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technologies (WEBIST-2014), pages 394-399

ISBN: 978-989-758-023-9

 2014 SCITEPRESS (Science and Technology Publications, Lda.)

whole.

The ICTs are a key enabling technologies of the

so-called knowledge triangle, which includes

research, education and innovation, the three key

activities of the “information (or knowledge or

meaning) society”.

Better linking of the three apexes of the triangle

has been one of the goals of original as well as of the

Lisbon Strategy

(European Commission, 2009). The

goal of that strategy was “to make Europe the most

competitive and dynamic knowledge based economy

in the world”. It was based on the Schumpeterian

assumption that innovation is the key driver of

economic growth, and placed a big emphasis on

innovation, research and the knowledge economy.

The Bologna reform of the European Universities

that was taking place at the roughly same time

addressed the education apex of the triangle. A

strong impetus towards the innovation union was

also the Aho Report (Aho, 2006).

2 ICT IN POLICY PLANNING

2.1 Programs and Strategies

The ICT is broadly understood as a political

development priority, in the EU at least since the

Bangeman Report

(European Union, 1994). ICT was

prominently represented in the Lisbon Strategy. In

the Europe 2020 strategy, Digital Agenda for Europe

(European Commission, 2010) is one of the seven

flagship projects. “The overall aim of the Digital

Agenda is to deliver sustainable economic and social

benefits from a digital single market based on fast

and ultra-fast internet and interoperable

applications.”

In Project Europe 2030 (Reflection Group, 2010)

the economic importance of ICT is well understood:

“The EU must strengthen the Single Market against

temptations of economic nationalism and complete it

to include services, the digital society and other

sectors, which are likely to become the main drivers

of growth and job creation in a market of 500

million users and consumers” … “Digitalisation is

increasing the scope for outsourcing, and the ICT-

revolution may give ample scope for growth in

productivity for decades to come.” Also, the broader

impacts of the ICT are mentioned: “The availability

of multiple entry points through which citizens can

engage with the legislative process should provide

the EU with the legitimacy and flexibility it needs to

address the challenges arising from globalization in

a digital, interdependent, network-oriented and open

society” … “… more systematic use of digital

resources for e-governance”. Role of ICT in research

was also acknowledged by the European Council

(2009).

2.2 ICT in Foresight Studies

ICT is one of the most vibrant sectors of the

economy. It is therefore a subject of interest of the

financial sector. Also, since the sector is advancing

so rapidly it is opening up new issues with respect to

regulation.

The European Internet Foundation made some

predictions of the Industry by 2025 (European

Internet Foundation, 2009). For 2025 they predict

the “world driven by mass collaboration”. But warn:

“By 2025, the ”digital arms race” between those

intent on harm and those collaborating to prevent it

will have become a central feature of our justice and

law-enforcement systems”.

A high level group prepared Future Internet 2020

(European Commission, 2009a) vision: “By 2020

the Internet will be both laid out as public

infrastructures and dynamically created by the

objects connecting to one another. We need to see

the Internet of the Future as this seamless fabric of

classic networks and networked objects. The content

and services they facilitate will be all around us,

always on, everywhere, all the time. It will lead the

way to opportunities we never knew existed: new

ways of working; new ways of interacting; new

ways to be entertained; new ways of living. Next to

these future applications today’s Internet will look

clunky and primitive. For instance, multimedia

applications will move towards the bandwidth of

human perception and beyond.”

The bandwidth of human perception is estimated

at 500 Mbits/seconds which is easily met today by

the fiber to the home technology. Due to the

limitations of the human body there will be no need

for faster individual connections.

Several projects on the future of the internet take

place in the EU, the US and beyond. Towards the

Future Internet Project (Forge et.al., 2009) identified

four possible future scenarios: “1. Smooth Trip - the

rise of the internet economy as a whole life and

work style - a middle road in contrast to more

disruptive scenarios. 2. Going Green – internet

technologies are used to combat growing

environmental challenges. 3. Commercial Big

Brother – a heavily commercialized consumer

platform. 4. Power to the People – a forum for

democracy and freedom.”

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The Paradiso Project (2011) had an objective “to

explore how might or should our societies evolve in

the next decades (a probable paradigm shift) and to

derive from this analysis how can Information and

Communication Technologies (ICT), and the Future

Internet in particular, contribute to making this

future better.”

Internet technologies are perhaps most

speculated about. Gartner invented and keep

publishing the so called Gartner Hype Cycle that is

showing technology maturity levels. They are also

making shorter and medium term predictions

(Gartner, 2010) of the industry.

There is no mention of the ICT in the “The

World in 2025 Report” (European Commission,

2009b). The “Transformed World” (National

Intelligence Council, 2008) report mentions possible

technological leapfrogging of the developing world,

internet as means of spreading propaganda and

organizing NGOs, ubiquitous computing, role of

ICT in warfare.

2.3 Visions of ICT

The various visions of ICT development are largely

influenced by the fact that the industry keeps

progressing according to Moore’s law. Roughly

doubling capacity and speeds every 18

months.

This means an order of magnitude, tenfold, increase

in less than 5 years. No other industry follows this

cure, but an increasing number of industries are

hooked on this curve by getting digitized:

photography, music, movies, books, media …

anything that is information.

Zittrain (2008) paints a worried picture that the

future of the Internet may be as a number of closed

networks dominated by commercial players like

Apple and Facebook instead of an open

collaboration platform. He writes: “In the arc from

the Apple II to the iPhone, we learn something

important about where the Internet has been, and

something more important about where it is going.

The PC revolution was launched with PCs that

invited innovation by others. So too with the

Internet. Both were generative: they were designed

to accept any contribution that followed a basic set

of rules (either coded for a particular operating

system, or respecting the protocols of the Internet).

Both overwhelmed their respective proprietary, non-

generative competitors, such as the makers of stand-

alone word processors and proprietary online

services like CompuServe and AOL. But the future

unfolding right now is very different from this past.

The future is not one of generative PCs attached to a

generative network. It is instead one of sterile

appliances tethered to a network of control.” but

concludes “Our fortuitous starting point is a

generative device in tens of millions of hands on a

neutral Net. To maintain it, the users of those

devices must experience the Net as something with

which they identify and belong. We must use the

generativity of the Net to engage a constituency that

will protect and nurture it. That constituency may be

drawn from the ranks of a new generation able to see

that technology is not simply a video game designed

by someone else, and that content is not simply what

is provided through a TiVo or iPhone.”

Among the works on the impact of the internet

on politics and democracy, Morozov (2010) stands

out with a cyber-realistic view that Internet does not

necessarily bring democracy and freedom as some

cyber-utopians would claim.

Kurzweil (1998) predicted in 1998 for 2009:

“Personal computers with high-resolution visual

displays come in a range of sizes, from those small

enough to be embedded in clothing and jewellery up

to the size of a thin book. Cables are disappearing.

Communication between components uses short-

distance wireless technology. High-speed wireless

communication provides access to the Web.”

Kurzweil (ibid.) for 2019: »A $1,000 computing

device (in 1999 dollars) is now approximately equal

to the computational ability of the human brain;

Automated driving systems are now installed in

most roads. There are widespread reports of

computers passing the Turing Test, although these

tests do not meet the criteria established by

knowledgeable observers.«

Kurzweil (ibid.) for 2029: »A $1,000 (in 1999

dollars) unit of computation has the computing

capacity of approximately 1,000 human brains;

There is almost no human employment in

production, agriculture, or transportation. Basic life

needs are available for the vast majority of the

human race. There is a growing discussion about the

legal rights of computers and what constitutes being

"human. Machines claim to be conscious. These

claims are largely accepted."

And, finally, for 2099: »There is no longer any

clear distinction between humans and computers;

Life expectancy is no longer a viable term in relation

to intelligent beings.«

3 ICT AND SOCIETY

The interactions are too numerous to analyse in this

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context as the ICT penetrates all aspects of society.

One report that stands out defines the impact of the

ICT on freedom and security in the society as

follows (Schermer and Wagemans, 2011): “Our

modern-day Internet is an environment that allows

for great freedom, but with freedom comes

responsibility. If we want to keep the Internet an

open, safe, and vibrant online environment, we must

ensure that we take into account and protect the

rights and interests of all members of society. The

greatest challenge for Europe is to ensure the highest

degree of (online) freedom for all.”

The overall views on how important the ICT will

be for the future society differs.

On one hand, Peter Drucker (2001) wrote: “All

this suggests that the greatest changes are almost

certainly still ahead of us. We can also be sure that

the society of 2030 will be very different from that

of today, and that it will bear little resemblance to

that predicted by today's best-selling futurists. It will

not be dominated or even shaped by information

technology. IT will, of course, be important, but it

will be only one of several important new

technologies. The central feature of the next society,

as of its predecessors, will be new institutions and

new theories, ideologies and problems.”

Similar is the conclusion by the National

Intelligence Council in the “Global Trends 2025:

“Many stress the role of technology in bringing

about radical change and there is no question it has

been a major driver. We—as others—have

oftentimes underestimated its impact. However,

over the past century, geopolitical rivalries and their

consequences have been more significant causes of

the multiple wars, collapse of empires, and rise of

new powers than technology alone.”

On the other hand Yochai Benkler (2006) writes:

“Information, knowledge, and culture are central to

human freedom and human development. How they

are produced and exchanged in our society critically

affects the way we see the state of the world as it is

and might be; who decides these questions; and how

we, as societies and polities, come to understand

what can and ought to be done. For more than 150

years, modern complex democracies have depended

in large measure on an industrial information

economy for these basic functions. In the past

decade and a half, we have begun to see a radical

change in the organization of information

production. Enabled by technological change, we are

beginning to see a series of economic, social, and

cultural adaptations that make possible a radical

transformation of how we make the information

environment we occupy as autonomous individuals,

citizens, and members of cultural and social groups.

It seems passe´ today to speak of “the Internet

revolution.” In some academic circles, it is

positively naıve. But it should not be. The change

brought about by the networked information

environment is deep. It is structural. It goes to the

very foundations of how liberal markets and liberal

democracies have coevolved for almost two

centuries.”

Brynjolfsson and McAfee (2011) claim that we

are yet to witness the most important impacts that

the ICT will have on humanity. In the Moore’s law

they see its essential message – exponential growth

– and compare the growth of the impact to the

famous reward the inventor of chess was supposed

to be given by the emperor of India. One grain of

rice on the first square of the chessboard, two on the

second four for the third … and so on.

Brynjolfsson and McAfee claim that we are still

in the first half of the board where the reward, 2

grains of rice, was quite manageable. But “as the

technology moves into the second half of the

chessboard, each successive doubling in power will

increase the number of applications where it can

affect work and employment.” They pinpoint the

source of this impact: “When businesses are based

on bits instead of atoms, then each new product adds

to the set of building blocks available to the next

entrepreneur instead of depleting the stock of ideas

the way minerals or farmlands are depleted in the

physical world.”

4 THE EXPECTATIONS OF

FUTURE IMPACTS

The expectations of impact of ICT revolution on

society are two-fold. The thesis is that it empowers

the individual, the antithesis, that it empowers the

state. We will propose the answer that both may be

correct.

The thesis that technology empowers and brings

freedom to individuals is called by Morozov and

others “the techno romantic view”. It is based on

the assumption that ICT lowers the lowers

transaction costs for people and that democratic

availability of once exclusive technology puts

relatively larger power into the hands of the people

vis-à-vis the state. Democratic movements in

Modova, Iran, Ukraine, Tunisia, Egypt, the tea party

movement (USA), the OWS and the green

movement (DE) are given as an example.

The alternative view is “the techno-realistic

view”. The thinking is that ICT also lowers

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transaction costs for governments. As the lives of the

citizens and the work of the NGOs are increasingly

digitized, it is easier to gather information, censor,

and them crack-down. The internet architecture has

a few spots that can be controlled if needed. As

evidence, Cuba, China, Belarus, Iran and, recently,

the NSA, are cited as an example.

The “techno pragmatic” view states that it

depends. In democratic societies it empowers the

citizens and NGOs while in totalitarian societies it

empowers the state.

Regardless of the view, according to Scott’s

institutional theory institutions are social structures

(wider term than organizations). They have the

following basic aspects:

• regulative (setting and enforcement of rules),

• normative (values and social norms),

• cultural (interpretation of reality).

Because they are based on culture and values,

institutions are very stable but they do change.

Change of institutions (according to Tolbert and

Zucker, 1983) is shown schematically in Figure

below:

Figure 1: Cascade of change.

Historically it took centuries that the innovation of

cheap paper lead to its wide adoption (as for books

and newspapers). Businesses and individuals

adapted accordingly. It took a few violent

revolutions, however, some 300 years after the

innovation of paper that the normative context

(democracy, market economy) prevailed.

With the digital ICT much of the habitualization

and objectification happened already. However, we

are currently struggling even with the simple

normative changes (e.g. copyright). Major changes

to how society is organized are still to come. The

study of this should be a major topic of the emerging

internet science.

5 CONCLUSIONS

With respect to the impact of ICT on society, the

author is convinced that Peter Drucker, the National

Intelligence Council and others are wrong and that

the cyber-utopians are right. The changes in the ICT

will be one of the most important drivers of change

of the future world.

To put an argument very shortly: for any cell of

human society to work, its members must

communicate. This holds true for families,

businesses, local communities, states and countries

as well as the globe as a whole. A change in

communication possibilities influences these cells of

society. The deeper the change, the larger the impact

on societies.

The world has evolved into what it is –

politically, economically, militarily, and culturally –

around a material economy and analogue

communication. Location mattered, borders existed.

There is no such thing as distance and border in the

digital communication world. Today, the digital

economy is a small, but increasing part of the whole.

What can be digitized – knowledge and meaning –

constitute a growing share of the added value of

products and services.

There are problems as to where and how to tax

digital content, where and how should the digital

nomads – people who work at a distance digitally –

contribute to their social security, what “national”

law applies for things that are somewhere in the

internet, somewhere in the cloud; how to manage

intellectual property rights for the kind of property

where giving a copy to someone does not mean the

giver is deprived of her own copy etc. Societal

structures of the analogue world are not fit for the

digital world any more.

The material economy of the 19

century largely

took place inside a country. That county was a

natural unit for rules, regulations and laws. The

digital space is global. It will call for global rules

and regulation. In the absence of which the actors

that can play globally will rise in influence. This

includes corporations as well as individuals. Which

leaves us with the question of fair competition

among and between those.

The author believes this change will be profound

and will result in reinvention of all institutions of

society. The process already started (as per Tolbert

and Zucker) where citizens are free and where

businesses must adapt in order to be competitive.

The process is stalled where powerful institutions

and legal frameworks are blocking change and

leading to rigidities in society. In the next years and

decades, much will depend on how change will

happen in these areas – in highly governed and

regulated areas of society that include public

services, rule of law, education etc.

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5.1 Towards Internet Science

Knowledge about this is needed on all levels of

future thinking – from planning and strategies to

forecasting and visions. A science that would

provide an ontological, epistemological and

methodological base is badly missing. It is a science

that combines technologists with a clear

understanding of where technology push and

technology opportunity will be coming form, social

scientists with an understanding of societal

mechanisms, and humanities with a deeper

understanding of the human being.

Internet science could fill-in this gap – if it

becomes to computer science what urban planning

and logistics are to civil engineering. Not developing

the underlying technology on how to build the

infrastructure but taking technological infrastructure

for granted and studying how it can be used to

improve the lives of people, create new businesses

and interesting new work opportunities. The EINS

network of excellence is making an important step in

this direction.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

The work presented is supported, in part, by the The

Network of Excellence in Internet Science funded by

the European Commission.

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