In 1996, The Economist predicted that the year would be “one of those pivotal years on which the whole world’s future would turn”.
The New South Africa was only two years old–1996 was the year the Republic adopted its constitution. Osama bin Laden first published the fatwa, or declaration of war, in Al Quds Al Arabi, a London-based newspaper, in August, 1996. Y2K had not yet happened.
The reasons for The Economist’s forecasts were political ones: American and Russian elections, a pending decision on whether the member countries of the EU would become a political entity and the imminent death of the Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping (he died in February of the following year).
They didn’t see 9/11 coming. No amount of electioneering could have espoused such extremes of political feeling. Russia and China were overshadowed as world powers by the Stars and Stripes and England effectively excluded itself from the EU by keeping the pound and siding with George W on the issue of the war against terrorism.
Ten years on, it’s the changes in technology that have insured that the common man keeps his nose out of politics. World opinion, for the most part, is dictated by digital media and censored by selective networking.
By 1996 the word "Internet" was common public currency, but it referred almost entirely to the World Wide Web – 1991 was the debut of the Web as a publicly available service on the Internet. The era of the dotcoms was spawned in the ‘90’s by the commercial possibilities it presented as it became obvious to most publicly-traded companies that a public web presence was no longer optional.
By 2001 the bubble had burst, along with the deliberate demolition of the Twin Towers, but the seemingly insane projections on which the 1990’s business models were based – broadband, advertising, and e-commerce– continued to gain impetus. Today, broadband is commonplace, everyone shops online, life without wires is becoming the rule rather than the exception in connectivity. Widespread technology adoption, slated as a silly bubble-era notion, has played out the words of the Electric Light Orchestra’s 1980’s song 21st Century Man: “You can do ’most anything”. The song prophesied that we would be able to “Fly across the city, Rise above the land”.
A mere 20 years later there are virtual communities, cellphones with any number of mutations, free telephone calls over the internet and a host of devices to harness all the possibilities presented by the new boom in connectivity. There is sufficient eye candy out there to keep us from seeing what is really happening in the world.
The last person standing is likely to be a computer.
According to Chris Anderson of Wired magazine, Silicon Valley is “roaring back to life”. He describes the renaissance as a boom rather than a bubble, not only because the technology that was lacking in the 1990’s is a reality today, but because company start-up costs are a fraction of what they were five years ago thanks to the investments made in technological research in the ‘90’s. Today an industrial strength server is cheaper than a PC, a courtesy afforded us by the companies that went bust securing fibre-optic networks that make today’s broadband so ridiculously cheap – at least to the first world.
Will the current boom be more sustainable than the froth and frosting of the 1990’s?
Anderson sees the current growth as more organic and less artificial, because the investments are real and the fickle venture capitalists who pulled out when the going got tough will be excluded from throwing virtual money at hot air.
If all goes well, and we are not plunged into chaos by another 9/11, 2006 will be remembered by the IT community as the year of quiet revolution. © Debbie smit – The Sunday Independent
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