Irving Wladawsky-Berger

What Will Digital Life Be Like in 2025?

The Pew Research Center is marking the 25th anniversary of the World Wide Web with a number of reports on the current state and potential future of our digital lives.  Last week I discussed the first such report, The Web at 25 in the US, which looked at the fast growth of the Internet and mobile usage and presented the findings of a national survey on their impact on everyday life.  “The internet has been a plus for society and an especially good thing for individual users,” was the survey’s overall verdict. 

But what about the future?  A second report, Digital Life in 2025, analyzed the responses of over 1,800 experts to an open-ended question:  “Good and/or bad, what do you expect to be the most significant overall impacts of our uses of the Internet on humanity between now and 2025?” 

“Experts predict the Internet will become like electricity - less visible, yet more deeply embedded in people’s lives for good and ill,” was the report’s overriding consensus.  But, beyond this general agreement, there were widely different views on the Internet’s impact on the economy and society.  The Pew study grouped its diverse responses into 15 different theses about the digital future, - with eight classified as hopeful, six as concerned, and the last one as neutral, sensible advice.  Let’s discuss a few of the theses.

How Has the Internet Worked Out So Far?

The Internet started out as a DARPA sponsored experimental project to develop a fault-tolerant computer network.  ARPANET was launched in 1969, and by the mid-1980s, it had evolved into NSFNET, a network widely used in the academic and research communities.  Then, with the advent of the World Wide Web, the Internet began its transformation from a network used primarily by research communities to the commercial platform it has become, now being used by billions around the world. 

The Web and the Internet have become so intertwined that most people use the terms interchangeably, even though the Web, like e-mail and other applications, is one of the major layers of the Internet.  The original concepts that led to the Web where first proposed in a 1989 paper by Tim Berners-Lee.  The Pew Research Center is commemorating the 25th anniversary of the Web with a number of reports on the current state and potential future of the Internet and digital life. 

The Web at 25 in the US looks back at the growth of the Internet over the past 25 years and presents the findings of a national survey on how Americans feel about the Internet’s impact on their lives.  The survey asked questions in four main categories: adoption, impact on everyday life, impact on social relationships, and overall verdict.  Let me briefly discuss the key findings in each category.

From Mass Production to Mass Individualism

A few weeks ago, NY Times columnist David Brooks posted an OpEd on The Evolution of Trust. The OpEd is focused on Airbnb, the online platform where people list and book  accommodations all over the world, which now has over 600,000 listings in more than 34,000 cities and 190 countries.  Brooks thought that people would never rent rooms in their homes to total strangers.  “But I was clearly wrong,” he writes.  “And Airbnb is only a piece of the peer-to-peer economy.  People are renting out their cars to people they don’t know, dropping off their pets with people they don’t know, renting power tools to people they don’t know.”

He attributes the growth of this peer-to-peer economy to 3 main trends.  First is middle-class stagnation.  Technology and globalizations have significantly reduced the employment opportunities and earning of middle-skill, middle-wage jobs.  Many have thus had to invent their jobs and sources of income, including renting out rooms, cars and other possessions, and offering child care, pet boarding and a variety of other services.

Second, quite a number of people find the less expensive, one-of-a-kind goods and services now being offered by unique individuals more appealing than the mass-produced goods and services offered by companies.  People with time to travel but little money prefer to stay in someone’s moderately priced spare room rather that in a more expensive standard hotel chain.

And, adds Brooks, “the big thing I underestimated was the transformation of social trust.  In primitive economies, people traded mostly with members of their village and community.  Trust was face to face. Then, in the mass economy we’ve been used to, people bought from large and stable corporate brands, whose behavior was made more reliable by government regulation.  But now there is a new trust calculus, powered by both social and economic forces.”

Disruptive Innovation Revisited

The recent New Yorker article, - The Disruption Machine: What the gospel of innovation gets wrong, - by Harvard history professor Jill Lepore, has led to a flurry of opinions on disruptive innovation.  The New Yorker described the article as “Rethinking the innovation craze.”  Others called it an “absolutely devastating takedown of disruptive innovation,” a concept that Lepore said is a “competitive strategy for an age seized by terror.”  It’s also a takedown of her fellow Harvard professor Clayton Christensen, - considered the father of disruptive innovation based on his 1997 bestseller The Innovator's Dilemma, and a number of subsequent books and article, - whom she accused of poor scholarship, misreading history, and myopia. 

As I wrote last week, disruptive innovation has been often misused, as happens with popular concepts which become trendy buzzword.  Many are truly tired of all the talk of disruption, even if they could not do without their smartphones and the Web.  Lepore’s article may well be part of a growing backlash against the relentless advances in technology.  It’s important to examine the impact of technologies on society, especially by those who can best write about the societal changes in their wake through the lens of history and human nature.  I was hoping that Lepore had written such an article, but in the end, her aggressive attacks on Christensen turned me off. 

John Hagel, - co-chair of Deloitte’s Center for the Edge, - had a similar reaction in his blog post The Disruption Debate - What’s Missing?   “I admit that I’m mystified by Jill Lepore’s article in the New Yorker attacking Clayton Christensen and his theory of disruptive innovation,” he wrote.  “Not only does it have a meanness that isn’t warranted, but it leaves the reader with an unanswered question: if Clay's theories are not helpful (and I still believe they are), how do we explain the cascading disruptions that are playing out in markets and industries around the world?” 

Hagel then proceeds to examine the growing forces of disruption, which he views “simply as the sudden demise of leaders or incumbents in particular markets or arenas. . . Disruptions turn the assets of incumbents into potentially life-threatening liabilities. . . “[D]isruption is occurring with increasing frequency in the business world.  Whether it is good or bad, it is happening and becoming increasingly widespread.”  ”

A Growing Backlash Against the Relentless Advances in Technology?

Otherwise serious concepts sometimes end up as overused buzzwords.  If the books and articles that introduced them become popular, the concepts can get stretched and applied way beyond their intended meaning.  The business world is particularly awash with such trendy buzzwords.  After a while, most of them quietly return to their academic roots or disappear altogether, and the public moves on to the next popular buzzword.  Examples abound, including core competencies, paradigm shift, and synergy. 

Few business concepts have been as long and widely used as disruptive innovation.  Disruptive innovation was coined around 20 years ago by Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen to describe “a process by which a product or service takes root initially in simple applications at the bottom of a market and then relentlessly moves up market, eventually displacing established competitors.”  His 1997 bestseller, The Innovator's Dilemma, further elaborated and popularized the concept.  Over the years, he has continued to author and co-author books and articles on the subject, including The Innovator’s Solution, The Innovator’s Prescription, and The Innovative University.

A few weeks ago, The New Yorker published The Disruption Machine: What the gospel of innovation gets wrong by Harvard historian Jill Lepore.  I looked forward to the article.  Given the relentless impact of technology-based innovation on just about all aspects of society, I like reading the views of different people on the subject, especially those outside my own worlds of technology and business.  I particularly like to read the opinion of scholars in the humanities, who might well be in the best position to describe these societal changes through the lens of history and human nature.

I was frankly taken aback by Professor Lepore’s article.  The article makes a number of good points, in particular, that the concept of disruption has been overused and misused in business.  But it then turns into what some have described as an “absolutely devastating takedown of disruptive innovation.” It does so, as noted in Businessweek, by accusing Christensen of poor scholarship, misreading history, and myopia.