digital computers. Born of war, computers were initially conceived as super-powerful calculators to guide missiles. However, it soon became apparent that they could help us with all sorts of tasks that could be represented symbolically—even those that didn’t specifically deal with numbers.
Over the last five decades of the 20th century, computers became ever smaller, cheaper, and more powerful, and were eventually connected into a vast network that amplified their usefulness and power in previously unimagined ways. This computer network—the internet—has become central to our lives. We depend on it for all sorts of tasks, from keeping in touch with our loved ones to shopping to working to finding a mate. Some of us even wear internet-connected computers on our bodies, where they track our activities and occasionally prompt us to exercise.
Consider what happens when you chat with a friend using an app such as Apple Messages in one of these internet-connected devices. You and your friend are communicating in real time, even though your bodies may be physically very far from each other. While you’re chatting, neither of you are focused on your physical surroundings. Instead, your minds are operating within a context that’s defined by the chat app; the two of you are represented in the space as little images within circles, your words conveyed by speech bubbles, much like cartoon characters.
The chat application becomes your shared environment, its boundaries defined by the app’s user interface much as the boundaries of a physical room are defined by its walls and ceiling. You and your friend are sharing this environment, even though you’re not physically in the same place. This environment is made almost entirely of information; you can’t eat or sleep or exercise there. (But you can find out where you’re going to eat, how deeply you’ve slept, and how much you’ve exercised.) Hence, while you’re chatting, the two of you are inhabiting a shared information environment.
Physical environments are not all the same. A conversation held in a confessional in a church has a very different character than one held in a beauty shop or coffee house. The same is true of information environments; a conversation that happens in Apple Messages (where you’re afforded some degree of privacy) will have a different character than one held over Twitter, which is more public. Information environments create contexts that influence our behavior and actions.
The writer and designer Edwin Schlossberg said, “The skill of writing is to create a context in which other people can think.”6 I think the skill of designing—especially designing software—is creating contexts in which other people can work, learn, play, organize, bank, shop, gossip, and find great gelato. We’re in the process of moving many of these activities, which we have heretofore realized in physical environments, online. The impacts of this transition on important aspects of our lives—how we shop, work, learn, and more—are worth considering. Let’s look at some now.
Shopping in Information
Consider the phenomenon that is being called “The Great Retail Apocalypse of 2017”: a massive closure of physical retail shops in the U.S. Over 4,000 locations were affected, with some retailers such as Payless Shoe Source, Sports Authority, RadioShack, The Limited, and Wet Seal declaring bankruptcy. Major players, such as JCPenney, Sears, and Macy’s have closed over 100 stores each, with the latter eliminating 10,000 jobs as a result. According to an article in The Atlantic,7 the simplest explanation is the rise of online retailing, particularly through Amazon.com, whose sales in the North American market quintupled from $16 billion in 2010 to $80 billion in 2016. Shopping has always been grounded in information. The buyer who has less information about prices than the seller is at a disadvantage. Information environments such as Amazon do a better job than physical shops as settings for the sort of information arbitrage that happens in a commercial transaction. When you shop for something in Amazon, you are a much better informed—and therefore, more powerful—purchaser than if you shop in a physical store. The economies of scale that come from serving a larger customer base lead to lower prices. Since the system is freed from the constraints imposed by physical stores, it can offer much more diverse inventory. And because the environment is made of information, it can reconfigure itself dynamically to make the relevant parts of this inventory more easily available to each individual customer. The combination of these factors is difficult for physical retail stores to compete with.
Working in Information
Much of our work, too, is increasingly happening in information environments. Many white-collar jobs require that people spend significant amounts of their time focused on their computers and phones, interacting with each other through information environments such as Slack, Outlook, and Salesforce.com. Today, many of us work with collaborators in different parts of the world, some of whom we don’t get to interact with in physical space at all. Our interactions with these people are completely mediated through screens and (less frequently) speakerphones. The way we organize our shared information environments has (at least) as big an impact in our ability to collaborate as the way we organize our physical offices.
Learning in Information
Education is also moving to information environments. At a time when the cost of traditional higher education is rising,8 MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) and online learning providers such as Coursera, Udemy, and Khan Academy offer a lower-cost alternative. Major universities such as Stanford, Harvard, and MIT already offer such courses. But it’s not just higher education that is undergoing this transformation. My grade-school daughters cheerfully talk about taking assessment tests in their Chromebooks at school. And much corporate training happens in learning management systems that allow employees to learn at their own pace and their managers to track their progress.
Socializing in Information
Increasingly, we socialize and get a sense for what’s going on by interacting in information environments. Social networks such as Facebook (which as of December 2017 had 2.17 billion active monthly users), WhatsApp, Snapchat, and Twitter are where many of us catch up with our friends today. Whereas Oldenburg’s third places reinforce a sense of local community by being grounded in a particular place, digital social networks are unfettered by such constraints.9 The opinions we’re exposed to in these systems are not those of our neighbors, but those of the people whom algorithms have determined will keep us engaged. The effects on democracy of having citizens inform their world views in such environments is a topic of ongoing study. That said, I can confidently say that engaging with each other in a context where over a quarter of the world’s population is present is bound to have some effect on our ability to act collectively.
Placemaking with Information
New applications of digital technology have frequently been framed as either tools or publishing media. This is understandable, since other new technologies have often taken the form of tools, and most previous information technologies have been in service to publishing information. However, thinking about these technologies as tools or publications limits our understanding of what they do for us (and to us). They’re much more than that.
Consider one of the greatest artifacts to have emerged from the internet: Wikipedia. On one level, Wikipedia is a product: a publication. As suggested by its name, it’s modeled on traditional paper-based encyclopedias such as the Encyclopedia Britannica. However, Wikipedia differs from those old books in two main ways. First, it’s much larger than any previous encyclopedia. As of July 2017, the English version of Wikipedia had 5,435,446 articles and is growing at a rate of over 20,000 per month. To illustrate in physical terms, in 2015 the American artist Michael Mandiberg printed out the English version of Wikipedia. It took up 7,473 volumes, each 700 pages long.10 The second way in which Wikipedia differs from previous encyclopedias is related to how it got so big: Wikipedia is a “living” document that is collectively