Communications Overload

Sir Tim has a lot to answer for!

Back in the 1990s we in the IT community were obsessed with the assumed threat of ‘Y2K’, the idea that when the date turned from 23:59:59 on 31st December 1999 to 00:00:00 in the year 2000 all the computers on the planet would shut down and chaos would ensue.

It turned out to be an entirely false assumption because when the clock ticked on nothing happened. All the work done in the five or so years earlier found nothing which would cause the predicted event and only a few peripheral errors which were easily corrected were found.

I was part of the exercise and was paid a lot – a lot – of money for the work I did in supposedly preventing the predicted holocaust.

But meanwhile . . .

Something else was going on, in a way far more significant, which proved to make a major – very major – change in everyone’s life on this planet.

As the senior programme manager of mainframe systems software at ICL, the UK’s flagship computer company, I co-ordinated over 120 concurrent projects and one, with very low priority n the ‘project list’ was something called ‘internet’ and very few people in the organisation had a clue what this might be about.

The ‘internet’ then was a way of connecting a few large computers together using physical wiring or telephone systems so data could be passed from one to another. Very basic and quite ‘clunky’.

One of the first ‘internets’ was the Joint Academic Network, or ‘Janet’ which universities used to share information – or more accurately, data. The idea was also picked up by the US Navy who played a significant role in its development.

There wasn’t much, if any, public application of the concept, the main issue being the need for a physical or telephonic connection between machines.

Do you remember the days of ‘dial up internet’? Strange noises n the line and often the need for an extra line so you could make ordinary calls at the same time.

For business the way around it was to use a system called ISDN which could carry multiple signals on the phone line, interestingly this is being ‘retired’ at the end of 2025.

In these early days the ‘internet’ relied on specific connections between specific computers or groups of computers but then Sir Tim Berners-Lee came along with a ‘great idea’ to create a system where everyone in the world could connect with each other?

Thus was born the World Wide Web. (Remember the ‘www’ we needed at the beginning of each address?) But it still needed a phone line to connect and in most cases still does although this is now often through fibre-optic lines or satellite connection together with Wi-Fi’ to connect local computers together wirelessly.

Together with this the arrival of ‘Broadband’ connections able to carry much more data than a regular phone line and everything was in place for what happened next.

The world we live in today is massively different from 20 years ago when publicly available broadband connection to the web became commonplace. Everyone can communicate with everyone else – without even thinking about it, which sadly they often don’t!

We are undergoing a ‘communications revolution’ – oh, it’s not over yet with so-called ‘artificial intelligence’ distorting the picture even more than we humans have been able to do so far.

So what does this mean for personal freedom? The fear of the world being ‘turned off’ by Y2K has been replaced by a new concern – too much ‘information’ but what proportion of it is factual information and what is ‘mis’ or ‘’dis’ information? Where’s the line between fact and fiction? It’s hard to tell.

‘Freedom of speech’ is a long standing principle and has been cited as justification for people to be able to say whatever they want in the media on the web, but there was always a, perhaps unspoken, proviso about freedom of speech which was ‘so long as it doesn’t harm others’.

You and I just don’t know in many, perhaps the majority of cases, what ‘is’ and what ‘isn’t’. The web has turned into a ‘Tower of Babel’ and is like a flood of vegetation taking over unused space. You and I have to find a way of determining what to ‘keep’ and what to root out and this is by no means and easy task.

Right now, I don’t have a practical or constructive answer as to how we protect our personal freedom. What are your thoughts? Please let me know.

There’s more to all this than is written here. Your first step is to become a member of the Academy (there’s no fee if you’re in the first hundred to join) and explore, and develop your understanding of what your freedom is and how you can make it happen.  Join now using the button below

Thanks for your time and I’ll see you inside.

Ben Coker – The Freedom Coach