Ditally unstable: January 12, 1998 issue of New Thinking

January 12, 1998 New Thinking:
Digitally unstable

Website content management

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January 12, 1998

Digitally unstable

By Gerry McGovern

Last week, Amazon.com, one of the Internet’s best-known businesses, disappeared for 11 hours. In the same period, a hacker caused an outage at the UNICEF website. Also, ‘smurfing,’ an approach whereby a hacker overloads a server was seen to be on the rise.

Now don’t be getting scared. Other reports show that the Internet is getting more reliable and that most email is getting to its destination quickly. However, what we cannot escape is the fact that we are entering a digital world where things will never be quite as stable as in the physical world.

The essence of something digital is that it is fluid and malleable. Digital things have very little physical existence. A computer program might be a central nervous system for an airport but it in itself has very little substance compared to all the concrete and planes.

Physical things have a wide variety of forms and substance. We can go from water, which is very fluid, to a diamond, which is very hard. However, physical things exist around us. They house us. We sit on them. We sleep in them. We ride in them. We handle them.

The digital world is a much more untouchable place. Our website may be central to our business. It may grow to thousands of pages, with complex programming and databases, but it will always fit into a computer screen, always take up the same basic physical space on the desk.

The digital world is an endless place. We can copy and paste a new space at will. With the same basic tools we can create an endless variety of forms. We can shape, mould, manipulate; things digital are so flexible.

In the physical world if we want to punish someone severely we send them to goal, thus locking them in, so that they cannot get out to the world. In the digital world the reverse occurs. If you want to punish someone, you lock them out so that they cannot get in. You close down their site so that they cannot get at it.

I think a day will come for all of us when we are locked out of the digital world for some reason. We may only be locked out for a few minutes, a few hours, or perhaps a few days. I would say that for most of us it will be a frightening experience. Because suddenly we will realize how dependent we have become on the digital world.

It’s not too bad today when things are not ‘perfect’ and when we all expect the Internet to be rough at the edges. The danger lies down the road. After a period of working extremely well, many of us will have integrated the Internet into our business and social lives. Some sudden breakdown or unusual virus may then wreak havoc.

We are going forward this way and that is fairly inevitable. However, we need to be aware that the physical world gave us a solidity that it is probably not possible for the digital world to match.

We are on the digital river, moving fast forward. In our future everything is possible. Everything is unstable.

Gerry McGovern

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We are on the digital river, moving fast forward. In our future everything is possible. Everything is unstable.