The Virtual Revolution

Last night I finished watching the excellent BBC series The Virtual Revolution presented by Dr Aleks Krotoski. It served as a very useful reminder of how much our lives have been changed by technology in an incredibly short space of time. Dr Krotoski had access to a host of major individuals from Tim Berners-Lee (a modest visionary) to Bill Gates (love him or hate him, can’t fail to be impressed by him) to Al Gore (staggeringly dull). I was particularly impressed by Stephen Fry who articulated with incredible passion just how significant is this age that we are living through. There is no doubt in my mind that historians of the future will point to the early decades of the 21st century as encompassing a seismic shift in the way that mankind functions - better to be a part of it than to miss the major event of many of our lifetimes.

However the series wasn’t just about the vision thing.  It also revealed to me a lot of unseen truths about how the web now works commercially, things that perhaps I’d suspected but like most people failed to analyse fully. As one contributor put it: the commodity that is being traded online is not the information that enterprises like Google give you, it is the information that you give them. Now I’m a big fan of Google and I like the incredible range of services that it gives me ‘free’; but I can now see that I am giving huge amounts of data in return. I don’t mind this, it seems a fair deal. However it is definitely better to see the commercial web in those terms and to understand the deal, rather than simply to play with the toys unknowingly.

If you missed the series, find it on iPlayer - it will wake you up to what going online really means.