How Old is the Network

How Old is the Network
by Brian O'Hanlon - November 2005

Everyone talks about the information economy as if it were something new. But the information economy had its roots back in 18th and 19th century France. Napoleon Bonaparte was instrumental in building the first telegraph system. Napoleon allowed the telegraph systems to broadcast National Lottery results simultaneously all over France. But Napoleon mainly used the network to organise his military campaigns. In the twenty-first century, warfare itself has moved onto the Internet. The planning and sophistication of global terrorist attacks leaves no doubt about that. But some people are still reluctant to take the wider implications of technology seriously.

The move towards industrialisation in the nineteenth century created a crisis of control. A question of how organise the work force, how to maximise efficiency, and how to create demand for produce. Accounting became very important in nineteenth century. Advertising also became important as a means to regulate demand amongst consumers. Combining the telegraph and the mechanical printing press, it was possible to reach a much wider audience. By the twentieth century, the cost of becoming a public speaker was enormous. What you see is the industrial manufacture and distribution of information products. We are talking about recording studios, the movie industry, massive broadcasting facilities and technological infrastructure. Capitalists saw a great opportunity to make money from the production of information.

The information environment of the twentieth century consisted of a professional speakers broadcasting to passive recipients. This environment created the image of an architect as a romantic author. The myth was created to sell more architectural publications. The image has been re-worked many times to suit the individual tastes of each generation. Architects in magazines are portrayed like rock stars or movie icons. A dozen names can dominate the debate. James Horan, was a previous head of Architecture in Dublin Institute of Technology. James often liked to remind his students how few architectural publications existed in his day. The architect, Kevin Roche was a student in UCD in the post war years, when there were only three books in the architectural library.

In the twenty-first century people have developed a new kind of relationship with information. Digital technology has drastically reduced the cost of fixation and transmission of information. Reduced it to the extent where individuals themselves tend to become ‘broadcasting facilities’. With computer aided design, it costs an initial amount of money to produce the first blueprint. But it costs nothing to make and re-distribute many more copies. The network of collaboration can stretch for miles into cyberspace. With an architectural project in the twenty-first century, data is constantly being transmitted over the Internet. The decision making process has become radically de-centralised. The network is intelligent at the edges, but dumb at the core. This second stage of the information economy is not like the industrial stage as seen in the 19th and 20th century. There aren’t any large printing presses or signal masts. There is no large corporation that owns a monopoly over the distribution channels.

The rules for architecture are compiled for a designer who carries around a bundle of drawings. The rules presume a slow and deliberate release of information. The central architect takes his or her time to come to a decision. A designer can supposedly exercise control over where their drawings go. The original negative being produced in-house by an architect is assumed to be copyright material. The longest trip it should ever make is around the corner to the blueprint shop. But in this day and age, the digital blueprint ends up being a patchwork of fragments worked on by different individuals. It is sewn back together to preserve this 'notion of singular authorship'.

What are the weaknesses in the concept of large scale distributed peer review on the Internet? One person who learned a lot about collaboration early on, was Frederick Brooks. Brooks worked as a software architect and project manager, during the completion of the IBM 360 computer operating system. It was a very ambitious project for its day, compared in its significance to the Manhattan project during WWII. The completion of that project established a framework for the success to follow, of the entire computing and software industry in the United States. Brooks put many of his thoughts into a book published in the 1960s called 'The Mythical Man Month'. He observed from his experience at IBM that adding more people to a project can sometimes make it go slower rather than faster. As you add more people to the project the communications overhead will rise exponentially. But the work done will rise only in a linear progression.

There is a modern fascination for design by consensus and collaboration. Which has been fueled by technologies like email and personal computers. But there are also many pitfalls to look out for. An architect is needed now more than ever. The architect should define the components of the project, that can be split up and still retain their own conceptual integrity. The architect should define clean interfaces for constrained collaboration. In the early 1980s, Tom Peters wrote his famous book, In Search of Excellence. I will finish with this quote by Tom Peters to illustrate my final point.

Most of the institutions that we spend time with are ensnared in massive reports that have been massaged by various staffs and sometimes, quite literally, hundreds of staffer. All the life is pressed out of the ideas; only an iota of personal accountability remains. Big companies seem to foster huge laboratory operations that produce papers and patents by the ton, but rarely new products. The companies are besieged by vast interlocking sets of committees and task forces that drive out creativity and block action. Work is governed by an absence of realism, spawned by staffs of people who haven't made or sold, tried, tasted or sometimes even seen the product, but instead, have learned about it from reading dry reports produced by other staffers.

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