The big beach book that I read last year was Niall Ferguson’s The Square and the Tower. It was a book about networks. Who knew that the network effects of globalism would be illustrated in 2020 by a global pandemic!
But the other network effect has been to drive people around the world away from text and into video.
Ferguson says:
The rate of growth of the global network may be slowing, in terms of the number of new Internet users and smartphone owners added each year, but ti shows no sign of stopping. In other respects– for example, the transitions from text to image and video, and from keyboard to microphone interphace– it is speeding up. Literacy will ultimately cease to be a barrier to connectedness.
The Square and the Tower, Ch. 58, Network Outage, 401.
As I get ready for another Zoom call (should have bought stock in them) and have now filmed nine videos in the last two weeks, I can agree with Ferguson’s prediction.
We need to be thoughtful about how our lives will be changed by the Covid-19 virus, but also by its social consequences, networks all.
