Untangling

Ambling back towards Waterloo, through the frozen streets of a wintry London, I noticed (via the Twitterverse) that old Guardian chum Aleks Krotoski was lecturing at the London School of Economics (LSE) on Tuesday night. What happy chance! Informed by serendipity, I executed a smartish turn into Portugal Street and then into the LSE East Building. I was a few minutes early, so I caught an impenetrable end session of a lecture about calculus (game theory calculus, if I wasn't mistaken) and then settled down to a terrific talk from Alex. She was talking about her new book -- based on some Guardian and Observer columns -- on "Untangling the Web".

Alex kicked off by saying that there is a culture of fear about the Internet because people (and especially, in my opinion, politicians) don't really understand it. I thought this was an interesting observation to make during the week where world governments are squabbling about the control of the Internet at some UN beanfeast in Dubai! I'm sure she's right, by the way. Everything seems a little scary: Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, Google and Apple are all scary to someone, which crystallised set of thoughts for me and I think I will write something about that in the future. Her central point, at least to me, is that insofar as we understand how power will work in the virtual world (which is not very much at the moment) it is something to do with the role of the inter-mediate in technologies and those technologies have context. Right now, it's essentially a Northern Californian context.

Aleks talked about the Google search algorithms as an example of how technology isn't neutral in shaping our views of the world, but it occurred to me that there is an even more fundamental angle on this which links to the Dubai wrangling. When it came to question time I asked her about this and she said that she was neither optimistic nor pessimistic about the direction that we might take. I think I might be mildly pessimistic, in that I think it likely that the Internet will fracture into a number of different blocs in the future, but that may be an age related disorder!

Aleks asked (these aren't her exact words, this is a paraphrase) if we are stuck in a quicksand of me, me, me narcissistic exhibitionism. I certainly am.

In the future, everyone will be famous for fifteen megabytes