The Internet -- talking up a third revolution

By Larry Elliott

LONDON: The first industrial revolution 200 years ago marking the shift from an agrarian to an urban society was accompanied by a profound cultural shift. The time of Watt and Stephenson was also the age of Blake and Beethoven.

No question, this was a revolution in the way we lived. Moving people off the land into cities was a seismic shock, and artists responded by trying to make sense of the new world order.

Something similar occurred 100 years later. The second industrial revolution at the turn of the century was the triumph of the machine. Electricity turned night into day, while mechanization sounded the death knell for craft-based industries and increased the potential for slaughter. Mass industrialization, political turbulence and war again produced its cultural response: modernism. The novels of Joyce and Proust were as different from those of Hardy and George Eliot as the poems of Blake had been from those of Pope. In art it was the time of cubism and surrealism; in architecture there was a shift from homes built around the hearth to machines for living in.

Today, it is said repeatedly, that we are living through a third industrial revolution. Barely a day goes by without a politician or a corporate executive solemnly saying that "the internet changes everything". Our lives, we are told, are being turned upside down by the new "knowledge-based technologies".

American economist Lester Thurow puts it this way: "Microelectronics, computers, telecommunications, designer materials, robotics, and biotechnology are transforming all facets of life -- what we do and how we do it. Biotechnology is changing the characteristics of life itself. Genetic diseases do not have to be accepted. New plants and animals with different characteristics are being built."

Thurow may be right. It would be daft to pretend that the internet has changed nothing. One reason, for example, that airlines are having a more difficult time is that corporations no longer feel as great a need to send executives on grueling and expensive long haul flights for meetings when they can communicate easily from their offices.

If the first two industrial revolutions are anything to go by, the third industrial revolution should also be accompanied by its own cultural renaissance. But this doesn't seem to be happening. There are a number of possible explanations. The first is that there is no innate reason why economic transformations should have a cultural echo. History does not always repeat itself.

The second is that we are in danger of overstating the technological change that is under way and are misusing the word revolution. It could be that what we are seeing is not an economic revolution, but a refinement of existing techniques. From this standpoint, the internet, a hybrid of two forms developed in the machine age, has had an impact, but not the same impact as electricity.

Consider the contrast. Before the advent of steam power, most people lived and died in the villages where they had been born. They lived by the sun and by the seasons, usually only one or two steps above a subsistence existence and often not even that. Other than for the rich, or for the military during wars, travel was limited. The first industrial revolution changed the way people lived, not only by increasing mobility but also by providing an economic surplus.

The second industrial revolution created a new way of living and of dying. Telephones, steel, the aeroplane, cars, the cinema, the machine gun transformed the landscapes of Western nations. Without the car cities would have no suburbs.

A third explanation is that a cultural revolution is going on, but it has yet to be recognized. There are those who argue that the internet will be the medium for a new artistic flowering in the 21st century, just as cinema and TV were in the 20th. The children of the consumer age may be having trouble adjusting to a world in which creativity is channeled in unfamiliar ways.

An alternative thesis is that we need to look outside Western Europe and North America for cultural renewal, because creativity is flourishing in those parts of the world which are going through the sort of wrenching changes endured by the developed world 100 or 200 years ago. Novels about post-apartheid South Africa have more to say about the human condition than novels about post-Thatcher Hampstead.

Finally, it may be that there is no cultural revolution yet, but that there will be. Again, this is a theory worth considering, since it is clear that the full impact of the first two industrial revolutions were only felt over time. The first cars were on the streets of the United States by the turn of the century, but the nation did not have a car-based culture until the 1950s, when the suburbs and highway system were built.

Deciding which of these explanations -- if any -- is the most plausible is a matter of conjecture. This is not a question of right and wrong, but of opinion. My hunch is that, so far, the claims of a third industrial revolution have been overdone. People say that the internet is changing everything, but in reality our lives have changed very little. Some of us send emails and some of us buy books from Amazon, but most of us still work in an office, shop or factory and spend our leisure time in the pub, at the cinema or in front of the TV. At least half the people in the world have never made a phone call, let alone logged on.

Moreover, the first two industrial revolutions caused not just deep-seated anxiety but grinding misery. An entire way of looking at the world was challenged at the end of the 18th century when people were uprooted from the land; people were no longer sure of their place in the universe. Likewise, the end of the 19th century saw the growth of political autonomy through the spread of democracy but the loss of economic autonomy through systematic mechanization.

Today, artists in the West no longer fulfill the function of a Blake or a Lawrence, who gave early warnings of how mass industrialization and unfettered materialism would lead to a hardening of the soul. Instead of providing a moral compass or trying to make sense of the world, they hold a mirror up to our narcissism, barren acquisitiveness and spiritual poverty.

Or so it seems. During the first and second industrial revolutions, people were removed from their homes, lived and worked in filthy conditions, died in the trenches. In the so- called third industrial revolution we suffer none of those horrors. And that makes a difference. Some will say what we are living through is unprecedented. To which my reply is: show me your Ulysses, show me your Songs of Innocence. Then I'll take you seriously.

-- Guardian News Service