The Sydney Morning Herald
In The Big Switch: Rewiring The World, From Edison to Google, Nicholas Carr argues that we're on the verge of "the death of the IT department". Computing will change from its current DIY state to a "utility" model where most information processing and storage is done in "the cloud" - that is, the internet. In this excerpt from his new book, Carr argues that this transformation will have far-reaching effects in corporations, media and society.
The transformation in the supply of computing promises to have especially sweeping consequences. Software programs already control or mediate not only industry and commerce but entertainment, journalism, education, even politics and national defence. The shock waves produced by a shift in computing technology will thus be intense and far-reaching.
We can already see the early effects all around us - in the shift of control over media from institutions to individuals, in people's growing sense of affiliation with "virtual communities" rather than physical ones, in debates over the security of personal information and the value of privacy, in the export of the jobs of knowledge workers, even in the growing concentration of wealth in a small slice of the population.
All these trends either spring from or are propelled by the rise of internet-based computing. As information utilities grow in size and sophistication, the change to business and society - and to ourselves - will only broaden.
And their pace will only accelerate.
Many of the characteristics that define American society came into being only in the aftermath of electrification.
The rise of the middle class, the expansion of publication education, the flowering of mass culture, the movement of the population towards the suburbs, the shift from an industrial to a service economy - none of these would have happened without the cheap current generated by utilities.
Today, we think of these developments as permanent features of our society. But that's an illusion.
They're the by-products of a particular set of economic trade-offs that reflected, in large measures, the technologies of the time.
We may soon come to discover that what we assume to be the enduring foundations of our society are, in fact, only temporary structures.
As the capacity of the "World Wide Computer" expands, it will continue to displace private systems as the preferred platform for computing. Businesses will gain new flexibility in assembling computing services to perform custom information-processing jobs.
Able to easily program the "World Wide Computer" in their own ways, they'll no longer be constrained by the limits of their own data centres or the dictates of a few big IT vendors.
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