From atoms to bits

The final keynote speech at ALT-C 2011 was given by Professor John Naughton, who read directly from his notes with his head down, and used no visual media to support his at times somewhat mumbling and occasionally difficult to hear presentation. The message however, was quite compelling. The key theme in his 'the elusive technological future' speech, was that the future has already overtaken the music, advertising and publishing worlds, because they were completely unprepared for what was coming. He summoned up the words of author William Gibson, who famously said 'the future is already here - it's just not evenly distributed' to drive his argument.

In a taciturn style, Naughton cited Napster and other music sharing sites as disruptive innovations that changed our world and the way we do business. He harnessed the 'atoms and bits' argument (first offered by Nic Negroponte in his book Being Digital) as an illustration of the rapid progress of web based delivery of content, direct from the originator to the consumer. He gave evidence that the digital future has supplanted the analogue quickly, remorselessly and unexpectedly. For Naughton, Craigslist had caused a dramatic and irreversible downturn in newspaper advertising revenue, and Wikipedia was hammering the nails into the proverbial coffin of the encyclopedia industry. Whilst this was perhaps a little sweeping and dramatic, Naughton's message still resonated with his audience. The almost unspoken question was whether the digital future would soon overtake the world of education. Are teachers and lecturers prepared for the brave new world of the digital? Are we still wasting time and energy shipping atoms when we should be dealing in bits?


From atoms to bits by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.