The Ed Techie

Digital resilience

<Image http://www.flickr.com/photos/revdancatt/449142212/ by Rev Dan Catt>

Reading some of the posts and papers from Joss Winn and Richard Hall brought the concept of resilience to my attention. I'm probably deviating from their intended use of the concept, but it has been a useful way of thinking about how academia responds to the impact of digital, networked and open technologies and approaches. I was also struck by Joss' comment at Open Ed: "Resilience does not mean withstanding" (Scott Leslie also liked this). This is a useful way of thinking about how new technologies (and more importantly the approaches they facilitate) can influence scholarship, as often the reaction is to think about what we will lose and set about resisting, or withstanding, change. The argument I have been making in my book is that engagement with technology is the key to maintaining ownership of scholarship.  I have used it in one section of the concluding chapter of my book, so thought I'd share this here.

In his 1973 paper on the stability of ecological systems, Holling defined resilience as “a measure of the persistence of systems and of their ability to absorb change and disturbance and still maintain the same relationships between populations or state variables.” It is a perspective that has been evolved beyond the ecosystems Holling applied it to, and has found particular relevance to sustainable development and climate change. Hall and Winn (2010) have applied the concept of resilience to education, and open education in particular. Walker et al (2004) propose four aspects of resilience:

1. Latitude: the maximum amount a system can be changed before losing its ability to recover
2. Resistance: the ease or difficulty of changing the system; how “resistant” it is to being changed
3. Precariousness: how close the current state of the system is to a limit or “threshold.” 
4. Panarchy:  the influences of external forces at scales above and below. For example, external oppressive politics, invasions, market shifts, or global  climate change can trigger local surprises and  regime shifts.

This is a useful means of considering the response of academia to the potential impact of new technologies. This applies across four levels where digital scholarship is relevant:

• Governmental, national agency, research councils
• Discipline
• Institutional
• Individual

Taking these four levels and the four aspects of resilience gives us a ‘digital scholarship resilience matrix’ as shown below. Completing this is an exercise you might like to attempt for your own discipline and institution, and a relevant research council or agency. For each box enter the degree to which that example meets resilience factor, for example if you work in a very traditional discipline, such as law, you may decide that it is very resistant to change.

	National agency	Discipline	Institution	Individual
Latitude
Resistance
Precariousness
Panarchy

How you complete each entry will vary considerably depending on discipline (medical research for instance is arguably less precarious than historical research) geographical location (venture capital funding for technology research will be easier to come by in San Francisco), institution (Cambridge University is likely to be more resistant to change than a modern one) and recent events (universities in Ireland and Greece for example will be subject to the panarchic influence of recent years).

Building on Holling’s work resilience is now often defined as “the capacity of a system to absorb disturbance and reorganise while undergoing change, so as to retain essentially the same function, structure, identity and feedbacks” (eg Hopkins 2009).

It is this focus on retaining function and identity that is relevant to scholarship I would argue. To return to the point above, this does not equate to resistance. Indeed, a high resistance, is not necessarily a benefit to an ecosystem, as Holling observed some insect populations fluctuate wildly depending on environmental factors, but overall they are resilient.

In terms of scholarship resilience is about utilising technology to change practices where this is desirable, but to retain the underlying function and identity which the existing practices represent. It is a mistake to think of the practices themselves as being core scholarship, rather that they are the methods through which we realise them, and these methods can change. Peer review for example, is a method of ensuring quality, objectivity and reliability. But it may not be the only way of realising this, or at least its current incarnation may be subject to change. A resilience perspective would seek to ensure these core functions were protected, and not just resist at the level of the method.

 

The scholar, their content & the cloud

  by  LeeLeFever 

After the wikileaks controversy which highlighted the dangers of placing political discourse in the cloud, we have had the news of Delicious apparently being abandoned by Yahoo. Not a good week for cloud computing. As John Naughton puts it "For years people have extolled cloud computing as the way of the future. The lesson of the last week is simple: be careful what you wish for."

Does this signal the death knell for cloud computing? Should academics abandon it altogether (before most of them have even made the shift)?

I think it's a more measured response than that. I would suggest a number of responses:

i) Use the cloud for what it's best at. If you want to share content, have it easily embedded, be part of a wider community of participants, then the cloud is the best way to go. I could put my presentations in my own database, but Slideshare offers a better option and more people will find them there. If it's eyeballs and ease of use you want, then the commercial cloud is a sensible option.

ii) Store locally, share globally. Of course, putting content online doesn't mean you surrender it altogether. One should assume that you will lose these services at some point, so a local store is your backup.

iii) Find alternatives - the point of the cloud is that there are numerous services that perform the same function. Many people are shifting their bookmarks to Diigo for instance. 

iv) Develop academic solutions - I say this with some reticence since, as with learning objects, academic projects don't have a good track record in keeping things simple. But there are services we may find useful to share between universities, such as storing research data in a specialised cloud. Paul Miller has a good post on this, as does Andy Powell. I certainly think that a universal cloud service to academia represents one way we may go, but make it good like JANET, not like [insert your own choice of difficult to use, overly complex higher education web project here]

v) Accept that they are temporary.You've had seven years of delicious use, a service you wouldn't have had if you'd waited for an institutionally hosted version to materialise. Accept it was useful for that period, and move on.

vi) Develop service level agreements - this model accepts that some cloud based solutions are viable and the institution either pays for these or guarantees a number of users in return for a service level agreement. Of course, this doesn't mean the companies can't go under or the services be removed, but it does provide a level of reassurance. It also limits the experimentation and innovation at an individual level we see with the wider ecology of free tools.

I would argue that an appropriate response is not to retrench to solely internally hosted systems, either for students or scholars for two reasons: the loss of the network effect and the positive pull effect that commercial systems have had on interface and innovation. We can lose these but need to decide if that's a price worth paying.

More brains! The perpetuation of the zombie scholar

With Jim Groom I'm writing a chapter for the Zombies in the Academy book. It's at an early draft stage, but thought I would share it in this wiki.

My argument is that the context we have set up in education for all aspects of scholarship is like a contagion that works against innovation. This was an idea I explored in my researchers and new technology post and which forms a theme of my upcoming book (but with no zombies). There is an analogy here with the manner in which zombies turn all-comers into one of their own, which is exemplified by this clip from Dan O'Bannon's Return of the Living Dead:

 

The scholarly discipline is in ever more need of fresh brains to feed itself.

But I propose that, unlike zombification, there may be an antidote: the adoption of the fast, cheap and out of control technologies espoused by Brian Lamb.

Anyway, take a look at the paper and if you feel like contributing let me know.

If nobody speaks of remarkable things

For my digital scholarship book I wanted to take a random working day and record my working pattern and my use of technology. Yesterday was that day, and so here is my account:

Before breakfast, while getting my daughter ready for school and feeding the dog, I do my morning communications check, including email, my blog and Twitter. Via the latter I see that Scott Leslie has posted a response to my blog piece on reductionism. Scott is someone I have known online for a few years, but finally met this year. We have been debating this topic in some detail over the weekend on twitter. We have differing views but the discourse has proven, I think, to be mutually beneficial in developing our own thinking. I also see that Google have donated $100k to Bletchley Park in order to try and keep Alan Turing's papers in public ownership. I respond to a couple of comments from the previous night when I had tweeter that I was seeing the film The Social Network.

After my wife and daughter leave, I go to my office to work. As I am writing today my intention is to not engage too much in online chat, so I don't have email or twitter open in my tabs in Google Chrome.

Before I start work on my chapter I post a comment on Scott's blog post, and send a tweet seeking confirmation about the Bletchley Park news (it having only appeared on Twitter thus far). I also bookmark a blogpost on the crowd sourcing of educational tools by NMC, which came to my attention because it is tagged ''digital scholarship' and I have a Google Alert set up for this term so I get daily emails for results.

I then start writing - I have amassed around 30 articles, blog posts and reports for my chapter on academic publishing. These have been found largely through search, following references and names in some papers, links that have been passed to my by my network and my own references that I have collected using Tumblr. All of the articles are open access, although I spend a frustrating half an hour trying to locate one reference which seems to have disappeared.

After writing for most of the morning I take a break, and during this mentally compose a blog post, which some of the book authoring has led me to. The post, around 500 words argues that scholars have failed to take ownership of their own practices, particularly with regards to technology. This will form a theme in my book, so I decide to test it out by blogging it. I quickly find a creative commons image to use in my post, and it only takes 15 minutes to write as I have much of the material to hand. I post it, announce this on twitter and then return to my chapter. Later I want to follow up a particular argument around costs so search for references and find four good articles. 

In my afternoon tea break I compose my a photo for Flickr. I am not a very gifted photographer but I am currently undertaking the informal 'photo a day' project, and am on day 170. Having taken my photo, uploaded it to Flickr and tweaked it with the free online Picnik tool, I take a look at some of the recent uploads from my contacts.

I also check Twitter and see that two people have retweeted the link to my blog post. I check my blog and see that it has had around 170 hits today, which is about normal. In my email there is a message confirming that i am speaking at Cardiff Business school on Friday. This talk has arisen due to a contact I made at the regular social media meetings that were organized in Cardiff.

For my final push at writing for the day I write up the notes of a talk given by Mark Patterson of PLoS, which I attended in Cambridge the previous week. I check some of my notes and find references for this at the PLoS site.

Later that evening I take my daughter to her horse riding lesson. I take my iPad so I can finish reading Anya Kamenetz's DIY U which I have as a Kindle book. I also make some notes for this post.

What does this digital scholarship snapshot tell us? Firstly, it's quite traditional. This is partly because I am writing a book, but it is also representative. I didn't spend the day overlaying different data formats or creating a musical mashup, or anything exciting like that, I spent it writing. Related to this the technology used is fairly simple - there are no specialist tools in use here. There is a mixture between the professional and personal in their use. Even on a relatively unconnected day when I am engaged in the solo pursuit of writing I still maintain social connections with a global network of peers. A significant point is that there is a vast amount of high quality information available to me without leaving my house. I like the way that different elements of work fit in the elements of my day and that there is a wide range of granularity of outputs, from writing a book to individual tweets. Lastly, these are small, subtle changes and yet the way they intermesh to create the fabric of a working day is, I feel, quite remarkable. We've just become so habituated to them that we fail to appreciate this.

If anyone else would like to share an account of a normal working day, I'd love to read it. It is in this detail that the real changes are revealed. 

A failure of ownership

In writing my digital scholarship book several themes keep recurring. One that I hadn't really set out to explore, but find depressingly persuasive is that of a failure of ownership by scholars over their own practice. This is particularly related to their use of technology to help refine their ways of working. Inevitably this has meant we have outsourced functions to for-profit companies. There may not be anything intrinsically wrong with this, I'm happy for a company to run the catering facilities for instance. But for complex activities that go to the heart of scholarship, once we outsourced them we became reliant on them, and effectively lost control. Here are three examples of this in action:

1. VLEs - the central role of elearning was underestimated by many and so we looked for simple solutions. The commercial VLEs offered this, but our return was an attempt by Blackboard to patent the very idea of elearning, and of increasingly costly contracts. Because the VLE became so embedded in institutional systems it became almost impossible to overthrow once it was in place.
2. Tenure, assessment and publications - as I've mentioned in an earlier post, the complexity of measuring excellence in different fields was outsourced to the peer-review process. This placed publishers in a central position in academia, since they controlled the routes to career progression. Related to this was the manner in which scholars bowed to governmental pressures for assessment exercises which sought to quantify the quality of research. This reinforced the publishers' position since their journals were linked directly to institutional funding.
3. Publication - many professional societies and university presses handed over their publications to for-profit publishing firms, effectively outsourcing the process, the proceeds of which they would then have to buy back. As Edwards and Shulenberger suggest the relationship with publishers operated successfully when it was seen as a fair exchange, a ‘gift economy’, but, they claim “beginning in the late 1960s and early '70s, this gift exchange began to break down. A few commercial publishers recognized that research generated at public expense and given freely for publication by the authors represented a commercially exploitable commodity.” In Clarke's analysis of publishing costs he reports that an ejournal article published by a for-profit costs around $3400 whereas one published by a non-profit professional society costs around $730. The difference is largely because of the expensive software the commercial publisher has developed to maintain their competitive advantage and "their much greater investment in branding, customer relationship management and content protection." None of these seem to me to be related to scholarship.

George Siemens has argued that we should take ownership of the open education debate before it is too late, and given the above history, I would say he is right. The message I take away from the above is that we allowed this to happen because we failed to engage with the required technology. Large scale open source projects could have (and in cases such as OJS and Moodle have been successful) solved many of these problems and the overall cost to universities would have been much less than being at the mercy of commercial companies for whom scholarship is not their primary interest. The type of resistance we saw, for example, to the very concept of elearning, often on the grounds of commercialisation of education, did not prevent it, and in many ways played directly into their hands. Far better is to take the attitude of inventing your own future.

I'm not against commercial partnerships in education, for instance many of the free services I like to promote seem to me better for being not developed in education (eg Flickr), but we should be aware of what it is we are handing over. As we face the question of 'what do we do about web 2.0/cloud computing/social media?' then a full understanding of what it can do is essential, and simply handing over the problem to someone else will not serve us well.

Tenure, publishing and Tony

As Tony Hirst has blogged, his recent promotion case was unsuccessful. I'm obviously disappointed by this, for his sake, and because it was our first attempt at pushing through a digital scholarship case.

We don't know why it was unsuccessful yet (detailed feedback will follow I suspect), but today I was reading an excellent report from the Center for Higher Education Studies at Berkeley titled "Assessing the Future Landscape of Scholarly Communication: An Exploration of Faculty Valuesand Needs in Seven Disciplines". There are several points it raises which I think reflect on Tony's experience and others like him. Here are some key quotes with my interpretation of each of them:

"the peerreviewed journal article is the primary mode of scholarly dissemination in the sciences and the quantitative social sciences, while the more interpretive, historical, and qualitative disciplines rely heavily on the university press monograph with a varying mix of journal articles, critical editions, and other publications. These traditions, which rely heavily on various forms of peer review, may override the perceived “opportunities” afforded by new technologies, including those falling into the Web 2.0 category."

So, even if we acknowledge there are benefits to using new technologies, the cultural traditions may prevent us taking advantage of them. This was a theme I explored in my earlier presentation on researchers and new technologies and which I go into detail in for my forthcoming book.

"In most fields, however, a stellar publication record in prestigious peer-reviewed outlets usually counts significantly more in advancement decisions. At some institutions, scholarly contributions such as data curation or multimedia websites are considered to be forms of “service” or “teaching” in a scholar’s academic portfolio, or they may receive credit when presented in a peer-reviewed publication that “discusses” the resource or data set."

Even when other outputs are recognised, the peer-reviewed journal trumps them all to the extent that they may placed in an ill-fitting separate category.

"The degree to which peer review, despite its perceived shortcomings, is considered to be an important filter of academic quality, cannot be overstated."

This stuff is deeply entrenched.

"enthusiasm for the development and adoption of technology should not be conflated with the hard reality of tenure and promotion requirements (including the needs and goals of final archival publication) in highly competitive and complex professional environments. Experiments in new genres of scholarship and dissemination are occurring in every field, but they are taking place within the context of relatively conservative value and reward systems that have the practice of peer review at their core."

This reinforces the point I made in my research talk - the environment we have created works in direct opposition to innovation and adoption of new technologies. This is a dangerous situation.

If we take Tony as an example the way he works raises some interesting questions about what we mean by research. He typically explores new technologies and data visualisation in particular. A random sampling of recent posts include:

• An analysis of twitter connections between UK politicians
• A representation of online communities who use the same hashtag
• An interrogation of the Mendeley software to show users by institution
• Sharing his own promotion case
• A presentation on ‘data driven journalism’

Each of these is intended to promote discussion, and has suggestion for implications, for example in how higher education can make effective use of data. None of the posts arise from a specific research project, and each of them is fairly small in terms of time and resource. The use of a blog though (instead of publications) allows Tony to engage in this ongoing experimentation, as it has an outlet, and it simultaneously encourages it also since discussions will arise on the blog (or in other places such as Twitter). Taken as a whole then, the blog itself represents the research process, and in this context it is difficult to say that it is not demonstrating the REF definition of research: ‘a process of investigation leading to new insights effectively shared.’

A paper on scholarship has recently been approved by the OU Senate and there is undoubtedly a desire to engage with and recognise new forms of scholarly activity. But what the report demonstrates is that cultural practices are almost inextricably bound up with publishing. And when you unpick what publishing means it leads you to some difficult considerations. This is Bellow's Law in action. When a case like Tony's comes across it simply doesn't fit well with the existing framework. This is, I guess, one of the perils with being a pioneer. Not that this is much consolation.

Bellow's Law

 

In my talk for George last week, I proposed 'Bellow's Law', which I thought I'd share here. 

In that Great American Novel, The Adventures of Augie March, Saul Bellow famously observes that ‘there is no fineness or accuracy of suppression; if you hold down one thing, you hold down the adjoining'. When we look at the impact of new technologies, the reverse would seem to be true also:

there is no targeting of liberation; if you release one thing, you also release the adjoining. 

It is this knock-on effect that creates the era of uncertainty we are in now. This can be seen as the law of unintended consequences, but I think the element of neighbourhood it adds is useful. We are seeing the liberation (that is obviously a term with positive connotations, but let’s go with it for now) of a number of activities that are facilitated by the digital, social network. These include the removal of filters, freedom to publish and broadcast, the ability to share easily, establishing peer networks without the need for travel, creating communities of interest around diverse subjects, etc. It is why attempts by many industries to control what is liberated ultimately fail. You can't simply say we will liberate the music track from the whole album or from its physical format and expect record companies to stay the same. If you liberate one then others will follow.

In digital scholarship an example might be seen with publishing - once we have removed the filter to publish through blogs and other outlets then the neighbouring practices cannot remain unaffected: academic journals as the main source of knowledge sharing; the tenure process and what it recognises; research and dissemination; the granularity of research outputs and activity; course content. All of these begin to change because the pressure on one element in an interconnected system has been removed. It's not entirely unpredictable, but it may be one element in the sort of emergent behaviours Scott is interested in.

If you want to know what practices will be influenced by new technologies, then a good place to start is to consider what elements have been liberated by them, and then map the neighbouring practices, sure enough you'll see an activation across these soon. 

And we don't have enough laws named after great novelists. 

The lack of uptake of new technology by researchers

Yesterday I gave a presentation for George and Stephen's open course PLENK. You can see the recording of the session here. The slidedeck is below:

Research, technology & networks

View more presentations from Martin Weller.

I have been writing a chapter on research and how researchers are (or rather aren't) using new technologies for my digital scholarship book. Several good surveys and reviews have been published recently looking at this, and the overall picture is a rather depressing one (see some references in my Mendeley list). While there are islands of innovation, generally researchers are making little use of new technologies and are very cautious and conservative in their adoption.

I talked about why this might be so and suggested the following reasons:

• The stranglehold of publishing - tenure and reward are still linked to publishing in academic journals, so spending time on other forms of communication is not directly encouraged. This is reinforced through research quality assessment exercises which are closely allied to publishing, such as the REF.
• Wasting new blood - related to the above, in other sectors new recruits are seen as the people who bring in new ideas. Yet in education because tenure is linked so closely to traditional outputs, new researchers are positively discouraged from spending time on other endeavours. So the very people who might engage in transforming practice are discouraged from doing so. This leaves it to tenured academics to engage in innovation, but these have mostly been successful through more traditional means so their history tells them to carry on this way. The pool of potential adopters then is decreased by the research context we have in place. I suggested this was quite a harmful environment to create.
• Antithetical to research ethos - I also put forward the suggestion that in science in particular, research is about predicting outcomes, and much of web 2.0 (or whatever you want to call it) is about unpredictability - you don't know what will happen with your outputs, or through a network.
• Research is the core practice - despite how much academics might say they value teaching, or public engagement, it is still research that is most highly valued. This means it is the area people are least willing to risk their reputation in and want to control most tightly.

I then suggested some themes that I thought were emerging, but that is for another post.

Of course one might argue it doesn't matter. Researchers will adopt new technologies if they are effective, and there is an underlying assumption in my talk that adoption is a good thing, which isn't necessarily true. This may well be the case, but there are three responses to this which at least bear consideration:

• The impact of the negative context - if research adoption of new technologies (and associated practices eg open publishing) is being impaired by the financial/reward structure we have in place, then we need to address whether that structure is doing research a disservice in the long term
• Powerful tools - I know through personal experience that even when people have been dismissive, or cautious of a particular tool, when it is demonstrated in the right context, or they appreciate its possibilities, then they will find uses for it in their academic work that I had never anticipated. This isn't true for everyone or for all uses, but it is worth chipping away at misconceptions and demonstrating potential.
• The role of the researcher - as higher education seeks to demonstrate its value to society, it strikes me that it is potentially dangerous not to be leading on the use and development of new tools, and particularly on what they mean for knowledge construction and sharing, rather than leaving it to others.

Understanding the attention economy

My iPad (which decided to stop connecting for a couple of weeks, but has now returned from its sabbatical) has made me appreciate anew the importance of good design and using media to grab people's attention. This was brought home first by the Flipboard app, which takes your Twitter & facebook feeds along with other feeds to convert social media into your own glossy magazine.

 

The result is that it provides me with another 'in' to the stream. This isn't the only way I interact with these sources but it's a pleasant interface and pulls me into looking at links and articles I might otherwise miss.

Bloglines is a similar app (which I found via John Connell), here I add in my favourite blogs to create a nice bookshelf. Again it probably isn't the best way to handle hundreds of feeds, but it provides a nice window on some of them, meaning again I might read things I would otherwise skip.

 

What both of these apps demonstrate is that by adding a nice layer of UI, the way you interact with these sources can be subtly altered. For a start it seems to elevate them somewhat - these are now nice articles to be read with a coffee and a bagel.

But more significantly it highlights the importance of grabbing people's attention. This usually means by adding in some media - a post with a nice image is more likely to make me open it from bloglines (Jim Groom's Bavatuesdays wins here). Or it could be an intriguing title. There are also variables such as posting at an optimal time (weekends are rarely useful, and afternoons in the UK will get some American traffic too).

These may seem like trivial, superficial aspects for academics to be concerned with, and certainly trying too hard to get attention has the opposite effect. But in an information saturated context we can't assume good quality will always be found. As we send our little thoughts into the digital world we need to at least give them every chance to survive. I wonder if understanding the online attention economy will be a digital literacy?

Living in pregnant widow times

<Image http://www.flickr.com/photos/janrito/118498874/ black widow by Janrito Karamazov>

For the title of his latest novel, Martin Amis borrows from this Alexander Herzen quote

“The death of contemporary forms of social order ought to gladden rather than trouble the soul. Yet what is frightening is that the departing world leaves behind it not an heir, but a pregnant widow. Between the death of the one and the birth of the other, much water will flow by, a long night of chaos and desolation will pass.”

Amis is writing about the sexual revolution, but I think the same can be applied to the digital revolution. This is what causes so much angst in the popular press, and amongst society in general. We can see what is passing, but what is forming is still unclear. Clay Shirky, talking about newspapers puts it thus:

"So who covers all that news if some significant fraction of the currently employed newspaper people lose their jobs?

I don't know. Nobody knows. We're collectively living through 1500, when it's easier to see what's broken than what will replace it. The internet turns 40 this fall. Access by the general public is less than half that age. Web use, as a normal part of life for a majority of the developed world, is less than half that age. We just got here. Even the revolutionaries can't predict what will happen."

We can think about some general directions of travel, we can make some guesses, and most of all, we can experiment. My interest is what the changes mean for scholarly practice, how will academics perform research, what will education look like twenty years from now, how can we best be engaged in public debates? We have a very well established set of methods for all of these currently, but it is unlikely that any of them will remain untouched by the impact of digital, social networks. And as with other industries, trying to find ways to preserve them as they are, or with a digital veneer, won't be sufficient when other find innovative ways to achieve the same ends using the new tools. If you accept the argument that we are living in such a period of change, then what academic wouldn't be interested in observing this change in any field, let alone that of their own practice.

As Amis puts it in his novel, "it was a revolution. And we all know what happens in a revolution. You see what goes, you what stays, you see what comes."

What goes, what stays and what comes - each of element of this trio is significant. Often we concentrate on 'what comes', but it's just as interesting to consider what stays. This reveals what is important to us (will journalism stay? Will universities stay?), or at least what is so ingrained culturally or commercially as to be immovable. The QWERTY keyboard has stayed thus far in the digital age, despite being an analogue solution, not through any sense of value, but because it was too entrenched to overthrow. 

What goes is equally revealing, because it demonstrates that practices and values we may have seen as unassailable are suddenly vulnerable because the assumptions they are based upon are no longer valid. The scarcity, rivalrous nature and distribution model of many goods and content is one such example. When they became abundant, non-rivalrous and freely distributed whole industries began to look weak. The 'what goes' element may also reveal to us what was important and not so important after all.

We generally assume that after a peaceful social revolution the resulting practice is an improvement for the majority of people, otherwise it wouldn't occur. Unless the revolution is imposed upon the people, then the general direction will be towards a utilitarian improvement. But this doesn't mean the post-revolutionary world will be better for everyone. There are those whose profession and identity will be strongly allied to the existing practices. There will be practices and values that are lost that we find we did in fact hold dear, but which were too closely attached to the older methods to survive. In short, there will be winner and losers. A revolution may be bloodless, but is rarely painless for all.

Which is why we see scare stories about games damaging kids health, or social networks ruining the nature of friendship, or piracy killing artistic endeavour, or the fabric of society being damaged irrevocably by the addiction to computers. We are learning what role these new tools play in our lives, and there will inevitably be mistakes, misapplication, over-use and correction. For example, many people reported something resembling an addiction to social networks when they first started on them, but these have since settled into a more controlled, regular place in our lives.

We are living in pregnant widow times, and we can see what is going, but we don't yet know what is staying and what is coming. And that's kinda fun isn't it?