i in the Sky: Visions of the Information Future

Citation

Line, M.B. (2001), "i in the Sky: Visions of the Information Future", The Electronic Library, Vol. 19 No. 5, pp. 352-356. https://doi.org/10.1108/el.2001.19.5.352.6

The editor has done a remarkable job in persuading 41 people, including luminaries such as Charles Handy, Stevan Harnad and Kevin Warwick, to contribute to this book of short essays on how they see the information future – in some cases long term, in some short, in some simply “the future”. No‐one knows, of course, what the future will be – few past predictions have been at all accurate, as Raitt points out; but it is fun to read what others think, especially when they are drawn, as here, from a fairly wide range of backgrounds – nearly half are academics of one kind or another, but information‐related business is quite well represented. Their speculations range from the cautious to the wild – but then, today’s world would have seemed wildly impossible to previous generations (well, maybe not to writers like H.G. Wells). Writers variously discuss what will happen, what might happen, and what ought to happen. Many of them seem to see the future as little more than greater exploitation of existing technology.

The essays range in length from three pages (Handy – a disappointing piece) to 12 (Wiig’s personal perspective – excellent). Authors define “information” differently. Some stick to advances in the technology, some look more at their impact. A few seem to have been written off the cuff, but most are clearly the product of considerable thought. The contributors come mainly from the UK and the USA; there is only one who comes from a less developed country, and his perspective is quite different – we could have done with a few more of these (to be fair, McQueen writes about China).

Consensus would not be expected in this diverse set of scenarios, but there are broad areas of agreement (or rather, no dissent). IT will be ubiquitous, information of every conceivable kind will flood us, communication will be faster, computers will be embedded in many objects (including ourselves, according to Warwick), and information services will be more user‐centred and, above all, customised. The prospect of computers more intelligent than ourselves is touched on by one or two writers (in fact, many important decisions are already in effect made by computers, in that decision‐makers often do not question the results of computer analyses of complex issues).

I was surprised to find little reference to IT’s massive impact on globalisation (is it perhaps thought that the main impact has already occurred?); surprised, too, that only one writer dealt with the impact of IT on learning (and thus on teaching and educational institutions), and no‐one pointed to the variety of new skills that children will pick up in learning to use computers. There are (sensibly) few suggestions that electronic communication, even at its most sophisticated, will replace physical meetings, whatever distance or cost they involve (people like travelling and meeting one another), or that electronic publications will replace print; as with many past advances in technology, new ones will tend to supplement rather than replace.

Nearly all of the essays are worth reading, but two that I especially liked were those by Colson on “ateliers” – studios of a mix of talents and practices, uncontrolled by formal bodies – and Nilles on “Work, information technology, and sustainability”, which sets IT in a broad economic and social context and calls for leadership to cope with the “growing info‐tsunami”.

This book won’t make you much wiser as to what the future will look like, but you will learn quite a lot about IT and its possibilities, for good or ill.

There are quite a few misprints, references are not standardised, and there is no index. And please, what is a MOO (p. 165)?