The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google

Citation

Hannabuss, S. (2009), "The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google", Library Review, Vol. 58 No. 2, pp. 136-137. https://doi.org/10.1108/00242530910936989

This is a firework of a book and, like many in its field at present, both an insight into current concerns and trends, and a collage of current comment – it is a highly intertextual area, everyone citing everyone else. Nicholas Carr's earlier book asked whether information technology (IT) mattered, and there and in articles in sources like Wired he has continued to raise stimulating questions about IT and the internet and related themes. In The Big Switch he argues that traditional structures and assumptions (computing is based on infrastructures and investment, telephony and data‐handling and journalism are moving along side‐by‐side, copyright and content control and privacy are not at stake, and much more) are obsolescent if not obsolete. He also suggests that even the PC‐centric world we are used to living in is being rapidly superseded by converged utility service provision with new business models and immersive access.

These are themes that have been widely discussed in recent decades by many commentators, in computer and the internet, in electronic communications and search engine and digital rights management, in libraries and information services and in relevant areas of sociology (privacy and surveillance, technology and progress, consumption and social change and the like). Carr's starting point, unexpectedly and tellingly, is that online products and services are being converged and absorbed and customized and developed in ways like electricity in the years between about 1870 and 1930: they are becoming integrated “givens” in society (think of what Habermas warned about such givens being invisible and therefore insidious). As utilities, they become a “cloud” of computer services accessed over the internet rather than locally hosted, changing everything – hence the phrase the big switch. I am glad at least that jejune terms like the information society are now fading into history, and that the emphasis is being placed where it should be in this wide field – on convergence, communications and globalization, and on the political and economic implications of this changes.

What are these utilities that, like electricity (and presumably water and air too – this is where Carr's analogy, or even metaphor, breaks down – not something to ignore if you buy into his argument), have become so internalized into modern online living as to be an accepted way we live and think and act? Second Life, the online game, is one, and YouTube, the social networking site, is another. The blogosphere and video/audio streaming and file‐servers for music are others. PlentyOfFish is an online dating service. Businesses can access and download mathematical models for financial and strategic management. Unbundling and deregulation cut across everything here (a backdrop frame of reference Carr assumes and readers, above all in and for US telecommunications, really should know a bit more than a little about to make sense of some of the opinions here), as companies like Google and Amazon go from strength to strength. Providing software online has become a key part of the competitive advantage of such players, and others like Salesforce.com.

At the same time, there are ambivalences about all this – greater access (ignoring digital divide and cross‐cultural problems for the moment) comes at the price of greater homogeneity, wider access to information also enables cyber‐terrorists to access intelligence, botnets can identify thousands of hapless recipients of spam or junk email, search engines can intrude on personal privacy to an unprecedented extent, and regulation of internet activity is like telling the sea to go back. Carr rather sits on the fence with these familiar apocalyptic themes, helping to make the book the firework it is – bright and striking but probably, ultimately, not long‐lasting.

This double‐edged quality comes through, too, in what Carr says about technological determinism, that well‐known Faustian pact (p. 196) associated with progress, the destiny of the human condition and compromises we make about wealth and power. Consumerism has aggravated such sentiments as well as, probably, emanating from them. He leaves us up in the air too about four other things – whether indeed the wealthier get wealthier with online changes, whether the dark side of these changes will prevail or not, whether proprietary copyright is a thing of the past and whether regulation has any future. His final comment is Delphic: “As the older generations die, they take with them their knowledge of what was lost when the new technology arrived, and only the sense of what was gained remains. It's in this way that progress covers its tracks, perpetually refreshing the illusion that where we are is where we were meant to be” (p. 233).

As a survey and summary of a lot of issues in the field, The Big Switch is a lively read. It is a good gateway to other books worth reading if you have not already done so (some are mentioned at the end of this review). Yet there is an “I told you so!” tone about the book that makes it more of an expanded article than a book of permanent reference value. That said, at the price and being on what it is, it will sell well both to public and academic libraries and in bookstores. Read it at one sitting and quarrel with it for the rest of the month.