Theres a lovely Latin phrase terra firma. It means solid earth. Its the basis for a metaphor we use a lot. We talk approvingly about someone who has his feet on the ground, and disparagingly about people who are not properly earthed. For us, the earth, the ground, is something dependable, something
fixed, something immutable.
And yet for years I lived in Cambridge three doors away from a man named Dan McKenzie who believed otherwise. Dan was a geophysicist who thought that, far from being fixed and immutable, the ground on which we stood was shifting. He was the leading scientist in a small group who formulated, in 1967, the theory of plate tectonics the view that the earths surface is comprised of a number of giant plates which are constantly in motion, colliding with or sliding along one another. When they push against one another, huge mountain ranges are created.
Thats how we got the Himalayas. And when plates scrape against one another, as for example along the San Andreas fault in California, we get earthquakes or tsunamis.
As it happened, Dan was right. His view of how the earth behaves is now accepted as the truth. So while our terra may be appear to be firma, actually its moving, with consequences which are sometimes terrible as we saw in the Asian tsunami of Boxing Day, 2004.
Theres a simple and obvious moral here and it is this: even when you think things are immutable, you may be wrong. Huge changes may be taking place under our feet, but only our grandchildren will see them clearly. Which is no consolation to us, because we will be dead and gone by that time.
What I want to do this evening is to apply this philosophy to thinking about our communications environment. My conjecture is that huge, tectonic shifts are under way in this environment; that these changes have momentous implications for our society and its industries; and that we currently lack the tools or the inclination to think coherently about the phenomenon.
What do I mean by momentous implications? Well, to illustrate it I want you to join me in a little thought experiment.
I want you to close your eyes and think back to 1993. The year is 1993. John Major is Prime Minister. The Tories are in government. Tony Blair still looks like Bambi. Bill Clinton has just become President of the United States. Nobodys
heard of Monica Lewinsky. Germany is still a prosperous country. Mercedes are still the most reliable cars around. Only grown-ups have mobile phones.
Nobody but nobody outside of academic and research labs has an email address. And a URL now that is something really exotic! Amazon is a river in South America. A googol is the technical term for an enormous number 1 followed by one hundred zeroes. eBay and iPod are typos. An instant message is something you send via a chap on a motorbike. RyanAir is a small Irish airline which flies to airports nobody has ever heard of. Oh, and there are quaint little shops on the High Street called travel agents.
Read the full paper at The Hindu.
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