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China Tech Just imagine... | Just imagine... |
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| China tech | |
| Friday, 25 August 2006 | |
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The Internet is everywhere. We use it to get information, to communicate and to buy or sell things. It has reduced the distance between China and England to the press of a key. Perhaps for the first time in human history we can actually talk to each other in a way that genuinely allows countries and cultures to come closer to each other. This is an exciting time. This is when all the technology and geeky stuff becomes relevant to real people. People do their grocery shopping from home. People search for information. People communicate with each other though email, instant messaging and weblogs. It has become normal to buy a book on-line or do grocery shopping on-line. It's normal to email people instead of writing or calling. The Internet has lost its novelty. Some said that the dot.com boom (and crash) happened between 1999 and 2001. I think they're wrong. There was a lot of investment in the Internet during that period but it was still a really immature technology with a limited reach into the lives of real people. The boom for the Internet is actually now. This is the beginning of the tipping point when the Internet becomes integral in the lives of people. The first five years of the Internet were all about the USA. Between 1995 to 2000 American capital was invested in services primarily targeted to American consumers. However, in the last six years things have changed. While American multinationals still dominate the Internet from a commercial perspective the users are changing. It's not longer a situation of the USA plus the world. The world is now the primary market. Europe and China have important roles in the evolving Internet. The twenty five nations of the EU constitute almost 500 million people with increasing degrees of access to communication technology. China has a phenomenal 1.3 billion people living inside its borders. The future of the Internet is actually largely up to what we do next. It's our photos and emails and weblogs that are beginning to dominate the digital sphere. China is leading the digital revolution right now. It lacks the resources or the infrastructure of Europe or the US but it more than makes up for it with the single most important resource of all: people. With more than 100 million people using the Internet today – and with a total population of 1.3 billion people – China is the single most promising market for digital infrastructure. Europe is also key to the future of the Internet. The EU countries constitute almost 500 million people spread across twenty five countries. For all its economic woes the EU has an enormous economy and spends a great deal of money and manpower on the creation of what is called digital infrastructure. It's really worth paying attention to this stuff. Over the next ten to fifteen years we're going to see some fundamental shifts in the way people communicate. In some places these shifts will be bigger than others. For different reasons I think both the EU and China will be virtually turned upside-down. In the EU things will change because we have a unique communication problem. There are 25 countries coexisting economically and (increasingly) politically but we have a plethora of different languages being used to share information. Something needs to change so that we can work more effectively. Computers and the Internet are likely to play a key role in this. Translation technology will be one part of this and standardisation on a couple of 'official' languages will be another. We haven't quite worked out how we will get half a billion people talking instantly to each other but it's something we've got to do. In China things will change because coherent infrastructure is being deployed across a massive landmass with a mind-boggling population. 1.3 billion people are about to be thrown into the digital age. For some of these people this will involve a leap directly from agricultural subsistence to global communication. Absolutely no one has worked out how this will work. We just know it's going to happen. The Internet is the enabler. It's this amazing ethereal tool that allows us to conceptualise of a world where the distance between Beijing and London is – for all practical purposes – zero. We measure the time it takes to send an email in milliseconds. Instant messaging is instant. For both the EU and China it's the single tool that we are pinning our communicative hopes on. From another perspective we're about to take the training wheels off the Internet. A lot of the stuff that has been happening with this technology has been testing boundaries and working out where it's actually useful. When we finally work out how to apply the Internet to the effective communicative empowerment of the EU and Chinese citizens we'll be reinventing the technology. It'll have to change to accommodate us and in doing so we'll contribute to its evolution. If you're reading this and beginning to feel confused please don't worry. Everyone is confused. We're doing something completely new. This is quite literally a new frontier. It's worth examining because it'll have a pivotal role in building the world your children will live in. Ten years ago how many people used email? How many companies had a website? Just imagine where we'll be in another ten years. |
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