Sir Christopher Wren designed buildings which established the character of the new London that was rebuilt after the Great Fire of 1666. Among the most magnificent of those buildings is St. Paul's Cathedral. Wren is buried there.
His tomb is covered by a simply inscribed slab of black marble. Nearby his son placed a memorial inscription in Latin. The English translation reads: " … if you seek a monument, look about you."
Wren's buildings are everywhere. They are so much a part of the world of London that you almost overlook their influence.
Some years ago the media was full of studies and projections about what the impact of digital communications and technologies would be on the world. You don’t see those studies anymore. It’s been probably a year or more since the last time I saw an estimate of how many people are on the Internet.
What’s happened is that the Net and other digital communications technologies have become part of our lives--like Wren’s buildings have become part of London. If you seek the impact of the Digital Age, look about you.
Joanna is the daughter of the Most Beautiful Woman in the World, and a freshman in college. She’s at a school that’s close to home, but not local. A couple of days after she arrived at college, Joanna’s wisdom teeth began to act up.
She was in pain. She called her mom and her dad and they worked out a plan to deal with the problem. Joanna’s local dentist had a contact with a dentist in the area where she’s going to school, and so she headed over to that dentist. He prescribed some pain medication.
Joanna, quite sensibly, decided that it wouldn’t be a good idea to take the pain medication until she was back at her dorm, so she started driving – still in pain. Pretty soon, she realized that she didn’t know exactly where she was or how to get back to the school that she’d only recently started attending.
Joanna was in unfamiliar territory. She wasn’t even sure if she was headed in the right direction. But she had a wireless phone, and that was enough. She called her mom.
While we had her on the phone, calling off landmarks, I went on the Internet and brought up maps of the area. She called out the road names she passed and we figured out where she was. We determined which direction she was going in. Then we got her turned around and headed in the right direction.
Years ago none of that would have been possible. While there certainly have been wireless phones for a long time, they wouldn’t, commonly, be something that college students routinely carried with them.
Now, that phone was a lifeline that helped Joanna get back quickly to her dorm where she could take the pain medication she needed. Wireless phones and the Net are so much a part of our lives that we didn’t think much about how to use them in a situation none of us had ever encountered before.
Shortly after that incident, we had a cell phone plus Internet incident with the Most Beautiful Woman in the World’s other daughter, Lindsay. Lindsay was on her way to pick up her friend at the Raleigh-Durham Airport, which is several hours’ drive from Wilmington, where we live.
When she’d been on the road for over an hour she realized that she’d left the piece of paper with her friend’s flight number at home. But she had a wireless phone and that was enough. She called her mom.
This time the challenge was to figure out what flight her friend would be arriving on. We knew some of the information. We were able to search for flights into the Raleigh-Durham Airport by time, airline, and flight number. In a few minutes we knew which flight it was and when it was due in. Lindsay had plenty of time to get there.
Wireless phones have transformed travel and business for most of us. Think about how many of us drive from place to place, talking on the phone, carrying out business that used to have to wait until we got to the office.
When I’m on the road, even far from home, I use my wireless phone instead of my hotel phone. It’s cheaper. A couple of years ago I was driving across South Dakota to a speaking engagement when I got a call on my cell phone from a contractor who was working at the house back in Wilmington. He needed me to look at his work. It took a while for him to understand that I was a thousand miles or so away.
The Digital Age has transformed the way we go about handling the information needs around our travel. We use services like Sidestep and online travel agents to find flights at good prices. We can book online. There’s more.
It used to be that when I went on the road, I needed to pull all my information together and put it into an itinerary. I’d type it all up and make several copies. There was one for me. There was one for the office, and there was one for the refrigerator at home.
Today that’s not necessary. All I need to do is find my itinerary and have it sent via e-mail to just about anyone that I want. I also download it to my Palm Pilot.
I’m also using the Net to get maps, weather reports, and information about what kinds of businesses are close to the hotel where I’ll be staying. All of that’s a natural part of life now. It’s a result of the Digital Age.
I got geta lot more than travel information from the net. It's changed my whole business.
Back when I started my business I knew that I needed to gather lots of information on a regular basis so that I could provide my clients with good recommendations and programs. Fortunately, I was living at the time near the University of California at Berkeley. That campus is home to a fine Social Science and Business Library.
Every month I devoted two days to library research. The first thing I’d do would be to go around and check the tables of contents for all of the business periodicals that the library subscribed to. There were about 260 of them, if I recall correctly. I’d scan them all for interesting information. .
Next I’d find articles that had come out in the last month that I wanted to either read or have in a file. I’d spend time at the copier while the light went back and forth under the plate, copying my articles.
Two days. Today I do a more thorough job of keeping up and it takes me just about fifteen minutes a day. I get notice of recently published journal articles sent to me via e-mail. I check the news online and receive alerts from some publications.
My first morning routine during the week is to check the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and the Christian Science Monitor to see if there’s anything there of interest. The Times also sends me news alerts on topics of interest to me, and I check the articles that they recommend. Once a week I check out the online versions of Business Week, The Economist, and Industry Week for any articles that I might want to keep in file.
I’m not alone in my love for online news. Ninety percent of executives, in a recent survey, said that going online was their primary source of news. Online news has also become more important for all Americans since September 11, 2001. We seem to have discovered that going online can give us flexibility and depth that we simply can’t get any other way.
Think about your own life. What do you do differently now because the Digital Age makes it possible? How much is your wireless phone or email a part of your life? Whatever it is, it’s just the beginning.
We’ve just entered the second fifty years of the Digital Age which I date from the installation of UNIVAC, the first computer designed for commercial use. The first UNIVAC ("Universal Automatic Computer") was sold to the U.S. Census Bureau in 1951.
The second fifty years of a Techno-Social revolution is a time of great growth and development. That’s one way of saying that we haven’t seen anything yet. In the years ahead we’ll shape new technologies and business models that will transform our business and personal lives even more than the Digital Age has transformed them already.
We need to be careful here. In the years ahead we will be making choices about how we'll use our technology. Those choices will affect our institutions, laws and patterns of life. There is a danger that we will just let these happen, without much planning or notice.
Christopher Wren's monument is in the buildings he left us. It was not Wren, but another great Englishman, speaking in London, who pointed out that "first we shape our buildings, and then our buildings shape us." His name was Winston Churchill.
If we want a great monument we should adapt those words to our own time and situation. Our monument for future generations will be the results of the choices we make in the next few years. First we shape our technologies, and then our technologies shape our lives.
This feature appeared on 7 October 2002
