The Fourth Revolution: How the
Infosphere is Reshaping Human Reality by Luciano Floridi is a philosophical
book on the impacts of looks at how our digital information and communication
technologies (ICTs) are affecting our sense of self, how we relate to each
other, how we shape and interact with our world, and how our activity online
shapes our lives offline. Floridi believes we are in the midst of a fourth
revolution where our high self-conception of ourselves is transformed into
something more modest. Copernicus taught the world that we are not the center
of the universe, Darwin taught us that we are not God’s special creatures,
Freud taught us that we are not masters of our own mind, and Floridi claims
that we are not masters of information. He states “what is real is informational and what is
informational is real.” Everything in reality is information and we are
inforgs, a term he coins meaning information organisms, and shows us that we
are not masters of it through many of his overarching themes.
Floridi starts his book identifying
the three ages of human development that are directly related to ICTs in
society. In prehistory, there are no ICTs. He states that the invention and
development of ICTs made all the difference between who we were, who we are,
and who we could be and become. It is only when systems to record, accumulate
and transmit information for future consumption became available that lessons
learnt by past generations began to evolve exponentially, and so humanity
entered into history. In history, there are ICTs to record and transmit
information, but societies depend mainly on technologies concerning primary
resources and energy. In hyperhistorical societies, ICTs and their data-processing capabilities are not
just important but essential conditions for the maintenance and any further
development of societal welfare, personal well-being, and overall flourishing. This
idea relates closely to the concept of time-space distantiation, discussed in a
chapter of a book by Jan Van Dijk on Social Structure. Time-Space distantiation
is the idea “that human and social time and space dimensions tend to widen in
the course of history” (Van Dijk, 157). This process looks at how societies
stretch information and communication under constraints of time and space.
Traditional societies were based on direct interaction between people living
close together so their information was constrained to only those it could
reach by word of mouth and could be preserved for as long as that information
would be passed along to the next person. Modern society stretches much further
across time and space. The increasing reach of communication and transportation
of our societies information globally break barriers of space, while information
stored in these new technologies to be passed on to future generations break
barriers of time. Van Dijk’s ideas directly support Floridi’s claim that
society enters a new era of development once ICTs are available to record and
preserve data for future generations.
Floridi spends some time discussing the
shift into being ICT-dependent requiring unprecedented levels of processing
power and huge quantities of data and its affects on memory and connectivity.
The book includes a graph of Moore’s Law, which is the number of transitors on
integrated circuits doubles approximately every two years, that shows the speed
at which ICTs are growing in order to store and process the exponentially
increasing ocean of data being created. This increased computational power is
also available at a decreased cost. Floridi includes a graph that shows the
cost of an ICT with the same power as the IPad 2 would be in that decade. In
2010, the IPad 2 costs $100, while in the fifties, that power would cost $100
trillion. He also talks about Metcalfe’s
Law and includes a figure that shows us that the value of a network is
proportional to the square of the number of connected nodes of the system. The
more nodes there are, the more useful it is to be connected and expensive to be
unconnected. These ideas are supported by a chapter in Michael Spence’s book on
Information Technology and the Integration of the Global Economy. Floridi’s
claims of increased computational power being available at a decreased cost is
supported by Spence where he discusses Moore’s Law and how ICTs are becoming smaller
and more portable as they become faster and more powerful. Metcalfe’s Law is
supported by Spence as well where he discusses a tipping point that at a
certain number of users, the value of the network exceeds the cost for
potential users and continues to multiply rapidly.
A portion
of Floridi’s book is dedicated to understanding informational privacy after the
fourth revolution. He states that as we begin to reinterpret our
self-understanding in this fourth revolution, privacy required an equally radical
interpretation. Each person should be constituted by his or her information
such that a breach of one’s informational privacy is a form of advancing
towards understanding one’s personal identity. Floridi also explains that your
information expresses a sense of constitutive belonging, not of external
ownership, a sense in which your body, your feelings, and your information are
part of you and not your legal possessions. Floridi’s claims over privacy are undermined
by in a chapter of a book by David Lyon on Surveillance, Power, and Everyday
life. Lyon believes that privacy gives individuals, groups, or institutions the
right to control, edit, manage and delete information about themselves and to
decide when, how and to what extent that information is communicated to others.
Under Lyon’s claims, information is the personal property of the individual and
not a sense of constitutive belonging.
Overall, I
sincerely enjoyed reading Floridi’s The Fourth Revolution. Floridi did a great
job expressing his ideas and concepts in a way that could be understood by a
more general audience. I agreed with
many of his ideas and was enlightened by even more. His perception of privacy
in our ICT-dependent society is something I haven’t considered, but makes sense
moving forward as our devices continue to grow in speed and connectivity. I
also liked how he started his book illustrating the magnitude of ICT-dependence
we’re currently at and at the rate it is going, and then spends the rest of the
book explaining it’s implications on society. His evidence contains many
endnotes and references that clearly shows the amount of research and thought
he put into all of his ideas, causing me to be more convinced of his arguments.
I would recommend this book as a fun and interesting read to anyone interested
in the direction our hyperhistorical society is moving in and it’s effects.
Michael Spence, “Information technology and
the integration of the global economy,” in The Next Convergence: The Future of
Economic Growth in a Multispeed World (2011).
David Lyon, “Surveillance, power, and
everyday life,” in R. Mansell et al. eds., The Oxford Handbook of Information and
Communication Technologies (2007).
Jan A.G.M. van Dijk,"Social structure"
in The Network Society
(2006)
