Land of imaginations: July 22, 1996 issue of New Thinking

July 22, 1996 New Thinking:
Land of imaginations

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July 22, 1996

Land of imaginations

By Gerry McGovern

Summer sun didn’t come often when I was growing up in rural Ireland. When good days arrived, we were out in the fields from morning to dusk, making the hay. If our fields were ready then the neighbors were down.

Looking out onto the field you didn’t say: ‘Janey, the forks are hard at it today.’

The Internet is no more a network of computers than our hayfield was a network of forks.

The Internet is a network of people.

To discover what the Internet is and may become, it is useful to look back at pre-industrial society.

I was born into a largely pre-industrial community. We were poor, having little machinery and often working the fields with forks.

Agriculture is not like that anymore. The small farms and big families disappeared as the big tractors arrived.

The Industrial Age made people more dependant on the machine and less dependant on each other. The digital age makes people even more dependant on machines and more dependant on each other.

In Western society, machines increasingly made us physically redundant. They dominated agriculture, driving the farmers into the city. Automation now dominates mass production.

We must journey again. Some will leave the city for the country. (Not to make hay!) But the real journey is into the imagination, as brain replaces brawn, as working for a decent living means thinking hard.

Our new frontier is The Land Of Imaginations. This frontier is not about the marrying of computers and telecommunications, but a marriage between many minds.

What sort of children do many minds make?

The medium of the Industrial Age was the machine. The tractor left farmers working on their own. The factory left people working on their own, surrounded by others working on their own.

The world became an army. Lines of command drove down through management, government, education, society. Laws and rules were made like precise mechanical engines.

The message was to become a cog.

You knew your place. How can we know our place today, when the place itself is only in the making? No, it is not a time to know your place, but to make it.

Great multimedia is made by the synergy and energy of people who are great at sound, images, text and programming. We see very little great multimedia today, firstly, because the technology is still evolving, but secondly, because multimedia is often made by jacks of all trades and masters of one.

The Internet is what it is because so many people helped make it. Prosperity for the Internet, for multimedia, for business, for people, is in exploring and exploiting this co-operative model and seeing what sort of new things can be made with it.

We need to rethink ownership, rethink what a product or service can be, rethink the individual. Because in the digital age new products will be made by many companies and many individual developers working together. (Many minds make light work.)

They will dig in the fertile soil of The Land Of Imaginations, where the Medium is the Communication.

The future is not about opening mines. The future is about opening minds.

Gerry McGovern

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The future is not about opening mines. The future is about opening minds.