The Future (70 page)
Authors: Al Gore
63
More than 5 billion of the 7 billion
International Telecommunications Union, “ICT Facts and Figures: The World in 2011.”
64
1.1 billion active smartphone users worldwide
Meeker and Wu, “2012 Internet Trends (Update).”
65
3.2 billion people have their own devices
“SIM Earth,”
Economist
, October 19, 2012,
http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2012/10/global-mobile-usage
.
66
low-end smartphones that will soon be nearly ubiquitous
Christina Bonnington, Wired Gadget Lab, “Global Smartphone Adoption Approaches 30 Percent,” November 28, 2011,
http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2011/11/smartphones-feature-phones/
; Juro Osawa and Paul Mozur, “The Battle for China’s Low-End Smartphone Market,”
Wall Street Journal
, June 22, 2012.
67
Internet access as a new “human right” in a United Nations report
David Kravets, “U.N. Report Declares Internet Access a Human Right,”
Wired
, June 3, 2011.
68
computer or tablet to every child in the world who does not have one
“Nicholas Negroponte and One Laptop Per Child,” Public Radio International, April 29, 2009,
http://www.pri.org/stories/business/social-entrepreneurs/one-laptop-per-child.html
.
69
subsidized the connection of every school and library to the Internet
Austan Goolsbee and Jonathan Guryan, “World Wide Wonder?,”
Education Next
6, no. 1 (Winter 2006).
70
immediately upon awakening—even before they get out of bed
Kevin J. O’Brien, “Top 1% of Mobile Users Consume Half of World’s Bandwidth, and Gap Is Growing,”
New York Times
, January 5, 2012.
71
simultaneously trying to operate their cars and trucks
Matt Richtel, “U.S. Safety Board Urges Cellphone Ban for Drivers,”
New York Times
, December 13, 2011.
72
before the distracted pilots finally disengaged from their computers
Micheline Maynard and Matthew L. Wald, “Off-Course Pilots Cite Computer Distraction,”
New York Times
, October 27, 2009.
73
“ ‘FaceTime Facelift’ effect”
Jason Gilbert, “FaceTime Facelift: The Plastic Surgery Procedure for iPhone Users Who Don’t Like How They Look on FaceTime,”
Huffington Post
, February 27, 2012.
74
“Internet of Everything.”
Dave Evans, “How the Internet of Everything Will Change the World … for the Better,” Cisco Blog, November 7, 2012,
http://blogs.cisco.com/news/how-the-internet-of-everything-will-change-the-worldfor-the-better-infographic/
.
75
voluminous new quantities of data
McKinsey Institute, “Big Data: The Next Frontier for Innovation, Competition, and Productivity,” May 2011,
http://www.mckinsey.com/Insights/MGI/Research/Technology_and_Innovation/Big_data_The_next_frontier_for_innovation
.
76
without being processed by computers for patterns and meaning
Al Gore, “The Digital Earth: Understanding Our Planet in the 21st Century,” speech at the California Science Center, January 31, 1998,
http://portal.opengeospatial.org/files/?artifact_id=6210&version=1&format=doc
.
77
actuators has been disposed of soon after it is collected
Michael Chui, Markus Löffler, and Roger Roberts, “The Internet of Things,”
McKinsey Quarterly
, 2010.
78
promote efficiency in industry and business
McKinsey Institute, “Big data.”
79
information collected during the seconds prior to and during
“In-Car Camera Records Accidents,” BBC News, October 14, 2005,
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/southern_counties/4341342.stm
.
80
airplanes and most security cameras in buildings
Kevin Bonsor, “How Black Boxes Work,” HowStuffWorks,
http://science.howstuffworks.com/transport/flight/modern/black-box3.htm
.
81
twice the amount of information presently generated
Tony Hoffman, “IBM Preps Hyper-Fast Computing System for World’s Largest Radiotelescope,”
PC Magazine
, April 2, 2012.
82
billions of messages posted each day on social networks
Chui, Löffler, and Roberts, “The Internet of Things”; McKinsey Institute, “Big Data.”
83
Twitter Earthquake Detector
Tim Lohman, “Twitter to Detect Earthquakes, Tsunamis,”
Computer World
, June 1, 2011.
84
the Global Pulse program Ban Ki-moon launched
Steve Lohr, “The Internet Gets Physical,”
New York Times
, December 17, 2011.
85
predict social unrest in countries and regions of particular interest
John Markoff, “Government Aims to Build a ‘Data Eye in the Sky,’ ”
New York Times
, October 10, 2011.
86
predict how well Hollywood—and Bollywood—movies will perform
Ibid.
87
dominant content on the Internet is printed words
Roger E. Bohn and James E. Short, “How Much Information? 2009 Report on American Consumers,” December 2009,
http://hmi.ucsd.edu/pdf/HMI_2009_ConsumerReport_Dec9_2009.pdf
.
88
massive crowds of election protesters in Moscow
Alissa de Carbonnel, “Social Media Makes Anti-Putin Protests ‘Snowball,’ ” Reuters, December 7, 2011.
89
spotlighting the excesses of elites
Thomas Friedman, “This Is Just the Start,”
New York Times
, March 1, 2011.
90
used by rebels in Misrata to guide their mortars
Tom Coghlan, “Google and a Notebook: The Weapons Helping to Beat Gaddafi in Libya,”
Times
(London), June 16, 2011.
91
across the border to collaborators in the diaspora living in Thailand
Mridul Chowdhury, Berkman Center for Internet & Society, “The Role of the Internet in Burma’s Saffron Revolution,” September 2008,
http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/sites/cyber.law.harvard.edu/files/Chowdhury_Role_of_the_Internet_in_Burmas_Saffron_Revolution.pdf_0.pdf
.
92
completely blacking out the Internet inside the country’s borders
Ibid.
93
Aung San Suu Kyi, from her long house arrest
Tim Johnson, “Aung San Suu Kyi Freed,”
Financial Times
, November 13, 2010.
94
destined to take control of the government
Dean Nelson, “Aung San Suu Kyi ‘Wins Landslide Landmark Election’ as Burma Rejoices,”
Telegraph
, April 1, 2012.
95
protest against the fraudulent presidential election
Bruce Etling, Robert Faris, and John Palfrey, “Political Change in the Digital Age: The Fragility and Promise of Online Organizing,”
SAIS Review
30, no. 2 (2010).
96
controlling Internet use by the protesters
Ibid.
97
the tragic death of Neda Agha-Soltan
Ibid.
98
protest movement were almost completely shut down
Ibid.
99
the government simply blacked it out
Ibid.
100
stifle any effective resistance to the dictatorship’s authority
Will Heaven, “Iran and Twitter: The Fatal Folly of the Online Revolutionaries,”
Telegraph
, December 29, 2009; Christopher Williams, “Iran Cracks Down on Web Dissident Technology,”
Telegraph
, March 18, 2011.
101
Iran and the retro-Stalinist dictatorship of Belarus
Larry Diamond, “Liberation Technology,”
Journal of Democracy
21, no. 3 (July 2010).
102
turn the Internet within China into a national intranet
Ibid.
103
was censored and made unavailable to the people of China
Josh Chin, “Netizens React: Premier’s Interview Censored,” China Real Time Report blog,
Wall Street Journal
, October 7, 2010.
104
open values of the world’s largest search engine, Google
Clive Thompson, “Google’s China Problem (and China’s Google Problem),”
New York Times Magazine
, April 23, 2006.
105
“in certain areas the genie
has
been put back in the bottle”
Tim Carmody, “Google Co-Founder: China, Apple, Facebook Threaten the ‘Open Web,’ ”
Wired
, April 16, 2012.
106
“It’s hopeless to try to control the Internet”
Ian Katz, “Web Freedom Faces Greatest Threat Ever, Warns Google’s Sergey Brin,”
Guardian
, April 15, 2012.
107
more than 500 million people, 40 percent of its total population
Matt Silverman, “China: The World’s Largest Online Population,” Mashable, April 10, 2012; Jon Russell, “Internet Usage in China Surges 11%,”
USA Today
, July 19, 2012.
108
to take to the Internet themselves in order to respond to public controversies
Lye Liang Fook and Yang Yi, EAI Background Brief No. 467, “The Chinese Leadership and the Internet,” July 27, 2009,
http://www.eai.nus.edu.sg/BB467.pdf
.
109
Dmitri Medvedev also felt the pressure to engage personally on the Internet
“Medvedev Believes Internet Best Guarantee Against Totalitarianism,” Itar-Tass News Agency, July 30, 2012,
http://www.itar-tass.com/en/c154/484098.html
.
110
four out of every ten Tunisians were connected to the Internet
Zahera Harb, “Arab Revolutions and the Social Media Effect,”
M/C Journal
[Media/Culture Journal] 14, no. 2 (2011).
111
with almost 20 percent of them on Facebook
Ibid.
112
80 percent of the Facebook users were under the age of thirty
Ibid.
113
as censoring political dissent on the Internet
Reporters without Borders, “Enemies of the Internet,” March 12, 2010,
http://en.rsf.org/IMG/pdf/Internet_enemies.pdf
.
114
It was the downloaded video that ignited the Arab Spring
John D. Sutter, “How Smartphones Make Us Superhuman,” CNN, September 10, 2012.
115
In Saudi Arabia, Twitter has facilitated public criticism
Robert F. Worth, “Twitter Gives Saudi Arabia a Revolution of Its Own,”
New York Times
, October 20, 2012.
116
feisty and relatively independent satellite television channel Al Jazeera
Jon Alterman, “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” Middle East Notes and Comment, Center for Strategic and International Studies, March 2011; Heidi Lane, “The Arab Spring’s Three Foundations,”
per Concordiam
, March 2012.
117
even in countries where they are technically illegal
Angelika Mendes, “Media in Arab Countries Lack Transparency, Diversity and Independence,” Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung, June 25, 2012,
http://www.kas.de/wf/en/33.31742/
; Lin Noueihed and Alex Warren,
The Battle for the Arab Spring: Revolution, Counter-Revolution and the Making of a New Era
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012), p. 50; Lane, “The Arab Spring’s Three Foundations.”
118
the Internet had spread throughout Egypt and the region
Harb, “Arab Revolutions and the Social Media Effect”; Alterman, “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.”
119
Al Jazeera and its many siblings were the more important factor
Alterman, “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.”
120
“All that trouble from this little matchbox?”
“Special Report: Al Jazeera’s News Revolution,” Reuters, February 17, 2011.
121
shut down access to the Internet in the way Myanmar and Iran had
Harb, “Arab Revolutions and the Social Media Effect.”
122
the public’s reaction was so strong that the fires of revolt grew even hotter
Ibid.
123
including Malcolm Gladwell
Malcolm Gladwell, “Small Change: Why the Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted,”
New Yorker
, October 4, 2010.
124
actually represented a tiny fraction of Egypt’s huge population
Noah Shachtman, “How Many People Are in Tahrir Square? Here’s How to Tell,” Wired Danger Room blog, February 1, 2011,
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/02/how-many-people-are-in-tahrir-square-heres-how-to-tell/
.
125
new political consensus around what kind of government
David D. Kirkpatrick, “Named Egypt’s Winner, Islamist Makes History,”
New York Times
, June 25, 2012.
126
from those advocated by most of the Internet-inspired reformers
Ibid.
127
when the Ottoman Empire banned the printing press
Fatmagul Demirel,
Encyclopedia of the Ottoman Empire
, edited by Gabor Agoston and Bruce Masters (New York: Facts on File, 2009), p. 130.
128
they had deprived themselves of the fruits of the Print Revolution
Ishtiaq Hussain, “The Tanzimat: Secular Reforms in the Ottoman Empire,” Faith Matters, February 5, 2011,
http://faith-matters.org/images/stories/fm-publications/the-tanzimat-final-web.pdf
.