Next Billion Seconds

Book: The Next Billion Seconds. Mark Pesce.

URL = http://thenextbillionseconds.com/

Introduction

Mark Pesce:

“What happens after we’re all connected?  When I asked that question, seven years ago, well over eighty percent of all Australians had their own mobile, and the bulk of the nation had signed up for broadband Internet access.  The answer led me on a journey through the future of media, education, politics, and now, economics. In July I started to set down the outcomes of my research in a book titled THE NEXT BILLION SECONDS.  A billion seconds is just a bit over 30 years – a generation, if you will – and it’s my belief the billion seconds from 1995 to 2026 will be as important in the history of human affairs as the birth of language, seventy thousand years ago.  Being connected means being something new. We, here in this room tonight – along with everyone else on the planet – are in the middle of this transition, halfway between what we were, and what we will become.  That’s always been true, but just now the transformation of our civilization has gone into overdrive, because all of the frictions which kept it chugging along at a lazy pace are evaporating. We’re moving into a superconducting phase of development, with no resistance holding us back.  Stripped of all baggage, we’re accelerating wildly, unpredictably, into a future which looks almost nothing like the recent past.

…

The hyperconnectivity created by the mobile dramatically improves an individual’s ability to earn a living.  To own a mobile in Bangladesh or Peru or Nigeria means you have a capability to earn more to keep you and your family alive.  This effect is completely obvious, so everyone in the developing world has been acquiring their own mobile handsets.  In the decade from 1999 to 2009, we went from half the world’s population never having made a phone call to half the planet owning their own mobile.  We’re now well past that point.  There are over six billion mobile subscriptions and almost five-and-a-half billion individuals using mobiles right this minute, and, if current growth patterns are maintained, in five years’ time everyone on Earth – over seven billion people – will have their own mobile.” (http://blog.futurestreetconsulting.com/2011/10/06/hypereconomics/)

Excerpts

Cases, Examples

• the Impact of Mobile Phones on Kerala Fishing Communities

“ ... forever at the mercy of the weather, insects and crop blights, suffered from ‘informational asymmetry’ in the marketplace: the buyers have always known more than the sellers, using that information to their advantage.  Hyperconnectivity has disrupted that informational arbitrage.”

• DrumNet and the impact of Mobiles on Kenyan Farmers

• Mobile Phones and the Karachi Barbers