On the structure of computing revolutions, part 2
I was a little surprised to read that "P2P networks are yet another manifestation of the shift of information systems' control to individuals" in an article by Tom Kirkham and colleagues in the September/October 2013 issue of IEEE Security & Privacy (p. 14). Everywhere else, I read that information is moving to the cloud. Cloud enthusiasts might even point out (rightfully) that the series of examples of peer-to-peer social networks that follow the statement are rarely heard of outside technical circles, and do not appear to pose the slightest threat to Facebook or Google.
I suppose that Kirkham and colleagues are trying to leverage the enthusiasm for the "disintermediation" and "user-generated content" that made a buzz around 2000-2005, and live on as "social media" now. Cloud computing and disintermediation aren't necessarily incompatible: individuals can and do create their own content and store it in cloud-based services like web hosts, virtual worlds, Facebook and Twitter. (The particular proposal made by Kirkham et al., though, is very un-cloud-like.) I'll come back to this later.
The same issue of Security & Privacy has Gary T. Marx writing about the line between citizens assisting with law enforcement and citizens pursuing vigilantism (pp. 56-61). Despite the recent prominence of citizen journalism and success in apprehending suspects after the bombing of the Boston marathon, Marx observes that cooperation between law enforcement and the public is hardly new: governments have been encouraging citizens to report crimes for decades, and, in the more distant past, routinely employed citizens as auxiliary law enforcers.
All this had me groaning: is anything ever new? A moment's thought assured me that surely something is, since plenty of technology exists now that didn't exist a hundred years ago. My reaction to the claims of both Kirkham et al. and their opposites in the cloud computing camp is really a reaction to sweeping claims that computing is centralising, or de-centralising, or intermediating, or disintermediating, or converging, or diverging, or whatever. At any one time, surely some things might be de-centralising (like creation of web pages) while others are centralising (like hosting of the same web pages), depending on the most efficient and effective way of using the available technologies. To claim that there is any overall trend seems pretty bold, to say the least.
Whatever technology is doing, however, we remain human and we continue to struggle with rights vs responsibilities, privacy vs accountability, individuality vs community, and a hundred other tensions that likely existed before anyone ever rubbed two sticks together, let alone built a computer. Technology may change the means by which tensions like these are expressed and resolved, but it hasn't made us a whole new species with whole new needs and desires. Facebook may have appeared only ten years ago, for example, but it's hardly the first time anyone had a social network.
I've previously observed that commentators can generate a lot of nonsense by mistaking a change in one aspect of computing for a computing revolution. I should perhaps extend that observation to include mistaking a change in technology for a change in humanity.
