Strategic Arts and Sciences Alliance
The Brand Name of the Media Revolution
|
Idiosyntactix Strategic Arts and Sciences Alliance The Brand Name of the Media Revolution |
|
[library]
letter_edLetter from the Editor
Electric circuitry has overthrown the regime of "time" and "space" and
pours upon us instantly and continuously the concerns of all other
men. . . . We now live in a global village.
Marshall McLuhan, 1967
It's been nearly 30 years since Marshall McLuhan trumpeted the advent of the information age and the transformation of society that would follow. For some of us on technology's trailing edge, the revolution has seemed a long time in coming. But, in fact, change has been insinuating itself into our daily lives all along, like a stray cat that after hanging around the back door for a few days winds up curled by the hearth. One day, as more and more of us embraced the seductive new technology, we awoke to find the typewriter--that homely icon of the office--had vanished, supplanted everywhere by computers. Executives, who before would not deign to touch a keyboard, were managing their own correspondence, altering forever the job description (and self image) of legions of secretaries.
Suddenly, it seems that everyone has discovered the information revolution and the flood of new terms that permit one to "talk the talk." In the course of 18 months, Vice President Gore proclaimed the opening of the information superhighway. Zonker, the perennial beach boy of Doonesbury, gleefully surfed cyberspace on the cover of a popular newsmagazine. Virtual reality became a reality. The federal government encountered stiff resistance when it sought a role in safeguarding the national information infrastructure on which the military depends if it is to conduct information warfare. And Congress is even now pondering whether (and how) to crack down on cyberporn.
A big step in making the information revolution real for the masses has been the commercialization of the Internet--the vast skein of computer networks that provides access to virtually limitless stores of information around the globe and that was, until recently, the nearly exclusive province of researchers and scholars. An even bigger step was the creation of a new communications medium, the World Wide Web, and programs, such as Mosaic and Netscape, that make it easy for unsophisticated users to point and click their way through the electronic maze, sending E-mail, joining discussion groups and browsing through a world of mostly free information.
It seems appropriate here to mention a curious bit of Internet history. In 1962 at RAND, Paul Baran developed the concept of packet switching, which permitted the linking of computers in distant geographic locations, as a way to maintain the integrity of the military command-and-control network in case of nuclear attack. Seven years later, the Advanced Research Projects Agency funded the first large-scale test of the concept and one of the first nodes was installed at RAND. The primary intent of the test was to enable researchers to share one another's computer facilities over long distances. However, by its second year of operation, users had changed the computer-sharing network into a dedicated, high-speed, federally subsidized, electronic post office. Because of its decentralized structure, expansion was easy and the net grew rapidly. In 1983, ARPANET split off the military part and the nonmilitary part grew into what is known today as the Internet.
In this issue of the RAND Research Review, we touch on some of the broad societal implications of the information revolution and look in greater detail at what it may mean for the conduct of war and the nation's security.
The Editor
.
.
.
[library]
.
.
.
.
.
.
