Great Depression or Cyclical Certainty?

Is the current financial crisis an isolated incident, or is it a symptom of the Information Age?



When Michael Vlahos penned “Entering the Infosphere” a decade ago, the excitement surrounding the strange new technology called the Internet was only beginning to percolate with the general public. Prior to this, the Internet primarily lived in obscure journals, technology magazines and in the back rooms of very savvy R&D departments, whose visionaries saw possibility where others implied skepticism. The Internet, albeit a clunky and less functional version of what we use today, had barely begun to make its way onto college campuses and into households, and even still, people were somewhat unsure what to do with it. Vlahos sees his version of the Infosphere through the prism of the Internet and all of its worldly potential. He states that “the Infosphere is shorthand for the fusion of all the world’s communications networks, databases and sources of information into a vast, intertwined and heterogeneous tapestry of electronic interchange…The Infosphere has the potential to gather all people and all knowledge in one place” (Entering the Infoshpere, pg 2). Vlahos contends that the Infosphere is distinguished by its pronounced lack of a physical space. In other words, if the Industrial Revolution defined itself by the formation of large cities, factories and other fixed places of business, then the Infosphere lays its cultural claim in direct contrast. The Infosphere’s omnipresence renders physical presence less important, yet it outlines a new kind of “place” that is defined by how people organize, connect and communicate using a new set of tools. Vlahos says, “The Infosphere changes us through a strange, but not alien, blending of technology and culture. We think of technology as something apart from us, as creating discrete artifacts that we put to use. But the Infosphere is not discrete; in fact, it is potentially all-encompassing” (Vlahos, pg. 3). Indeed, Vlahos goes on to suggest that for the Infosphere, and the Internet, to become fully realized within society, it must be all-encompassing and it must be easy to use and offer social, cultural and business opportunities.

As we know today, the Internet, wireless communications and the Infosphere have blossomed far beyond what Vlahos’ and many others initially envisioned. In 2005 Wired Magazine’s Kevin Kelly wrote, “The scope of the web is hard to fathom. The total number of Web pages, including those that are dynamically created upon request and document files available through links, exceeds 600 billion. That’s 100 pages per person alive” (Wired, August 2005). In a relatively short period of time, a global brain of sorts has sprung to the forefront of our culture and what makes it so remarkable is that its growth was largely driven not by a single entity but by volumes of people connecting with one another. The Infosphere and it’s related technologies have come to reshape 1st World society so thoroughly that certain aspects of it are nearly unrecognizable compared to just two decades ago. Blogging, ecommerce, mcommerce, Second Life, ipod, Wikipedia, WiMax, Glocalization, MySpace and so forth represent not only a new vocabulary, but a cross-section of common practices that are integral to culture and business today. Indeed, Vlahos’ notion that the Internet must be a place of commerce and socialization has come to fruition, manifested in the countless ways in which the two are inextricably intertwined online--perhaps there’s no better example than Second Life, a virtual world of social connectivity and real and imagined commerce. The Infosphere’s meteoric rise to the forefront of our culture has been enabled by a few key technological developments such as the exponential increase in computing speeds and broadband and wireless technology that has allowed people to surf the internet anywhere, anytime. These advancements have undoubtedly provided the foundation for recent innovations and, most certainly, future developments.
The concept of Media Myopia is crucial within the discussion of the Infosphere as well as the development of the Information age. Media Myopia basically states that new technologies, and the implementations for those technologies, are confined within the framework of the technologies and practices being replaced, thus predicting the future of new innovations prone to errors in judgment, or more plainly put: “the true meaning and magnitude of effect that any given technological advance is going to have-- on society in general and marketing in particular-- is misconceived, misconstrued and grossly under and/or over- estimated” (Forrest, et al. 1991) This concept, I think, applies not just to technological advancements but also to changing and pervasive business practices related to technological advancements and to the general shifting of waves. Technological and cultural change—Toffler’s idea of waves of change—carry with them a certain degree of myopia as well. History has shown that the incoming wave seems to move slightly faster than our ability to understand it, process it and predict its implications. The shock of the Great Depression was due, in large part, to a lack of fully formed economic concepts, practices and predictive elements necessary for a developing and flourishing industrial economy. The roaring 20’s were a period of great technological, cultural and social growth that culminated, unfortunately, with the crash of the stock market and the ensuing Depression. The events of the Great Depression could be viewed as a collision of waves, a fork in the road, if you will. Society was confronted with a choice, regress back into an agrarian lifestyle because of economic hardships or embrace the principals and tools of a new wave (Industrialism) to deal with new problems and obtain a higher standard of living. As we know, the answer to the Great Depression was not regression, but progression towards a more fully formed Industrial society--which was enabled and largely driven by the moral and political imperatives of World War II. By embracing Industrialism our society was forced to adapt and develop the ancillary fundamentals (economics, accounting, politics…) to a new wave. What that period in history represented was a Myopia on a grander scale, not just in terms of technology, since people were reluctant/unable to embrace or understand that a new wave was approaching, yet it was still able to sweep over society as if it was never in doubt.

These days, any conversation of the Great Depression must include parallels to today. We find ourselves, yet again, at the intersection of two waves. The Information Age has stormed into our society over the last two decades, aided by historic technological advancements such as personal computing, the internet and wireless telecommunications, while Industrialism’s significance wanes. The Information Age has provided a foundation for new businesses, new business models and a flourishing economy filled with opportunity. The current financial hardships we are experiencing (which have been nervously--although unfairly, I believe--compared to the Great Depression) require that we ask a few key questions: Is history repeating itself? Does generational myopia provide the framework for these sequences? How can we embrace the new wave to solve our current issues? How can we adapt our support systems (economics, accounting, social sciences, politics…) to the prevailing principals of the Information Age? I won’t use this posting to speculate on the answers to these questions, rather I just wanted to point out that these are important times, that history has shown us that our periods of great cultural and societal change often brings with it a collision that challenges our notion of ourselves and uses our Media/technological/generational myopia against us. Also, I don’t believe that these periods of collision are a bad thing, rather an unfortunate necessity in an economic system designed to regulate itself. The only potentially dangerous question is this: Does our fast-moving, open source Infosphere create a cycle of economic bubbles (.com, sub-prime…) because it essentially forces our collective culture to move faster than our ability to understand it, process it and predict it?