The ‘Jasmine Revolution’, spreading through the Arab world in the past month like a prairie fire, has highlighted the power that the internet has to create political change. Using social networking websites such as Facebook and Twitter to organise themselves and to gather support, protestors are putting pressure on autocratic regimes, leading already in the case of Egypt to the fall of President Mubarak. No doubt, more fundamental change is on its way.
http://www.caglecartoons.com/
Given how pervasive the power of the internet has become and how it affects all aspects of policy today, I thought I would use this blog to provide an update of some of the activities of the European Internet Foundation (EIF) over the past month. These extracts below provide a snapshot of a major technological revolution underway:
- Healthcare
The first meeting of note was one devoted to how technology will revolutionise healthcare. Craig Mundie, Chief Research and Strategy officer at Microsoft, was the keynote speaker at the EIF Dinner Debate on “The Impact of ICT on Health Services” on 1 February 2011. He reflected on the evolution of computing and technology and described how it is increasingly bringing a paradigmatic shift to several areas of societal importance, including health, ageing and other key challenges.
Issues discussed included how the next generation of technology will improve the delivery of health services. The so-called data driven model of healthcare can dramatically lower cost while at the same time improving the quality. The healthcare system needs to shift from a focus on ‘transactional’ care of patients when they are sick to real-time, lifetime health management. With an ever increasing human population, there is a real need for better health information exchange, a focus on prevention and wellbeing, and quality of life of patients as well as independent living for elderly people. Here, increasingly, there will be a fundamental question about the privacy of healthcare records which can now be overcome by having effective encryption of data for transmission purposes.
- Ambient Assisted Living
An ageing population is a fact for Europe. We are looking at a future where the number of people over 65 will double, and the number of people over 80 will triple. In the context of the recently launched European Commission Consultation on active and healthy ageing, the EIF debate on ‘Ambient-Assisted Living: Ageing in the 21st Century’ on 2 February focused on how new Information and Communication Technologies can be instrumental in enhancing the quality of life of the elderly.
The statistics speak for themselves. A tsunami of elderly people is on the horizon, and our current healthcare systems cannot handle this as they could in the past. The traditional care for the elderly will not be possible because of an outflow of care people who will reach old age themselves, and who will not be replaced by people at the same level. In essence, there will not be enough care takers to take care. The technology is no longer an issue, the necessary devices and tools exist today. The challenge however is to get these systems into the homes of people. The obstacles are that there are no large scale actors in this field yet.
- Media
In a keynote speech given to the EIF on 9th February, the BBC Director General focussed on how the internet is transforming the way we watch television and that things are not happening the way we predicted them 5 to 10 years ago. The essential prediction many people had in mind for classic linear TV was a model of substitution. Successive forms of traditional media would be superseded by the Internet, a prediction that turned out to be false. As strange as it may seem, in light of the enormous penetration of the web, conventional television viewing is going up. There has been a high amount of innovation in passive linear TV; think of HD, 3D, and Dolby Surround for example. Passive TV has been adapting and innovating with richer service, higher quality and a broader choice. It did not disappear at all, quite the contrary in fact.
At the same time, convergence is finally beginning to become a reality. Most of the TV sets sold today have Internet capability: TV is not immune to the internet revolution. It seems that things are moving at different speeds for different media, for example, by identifying some of the trends in the three main areas in TV broadcasting (information, entertainment and education). The BBC amongst others is trying to create a more TV like experience for internet TV. It is probable that the future of TV will be multiple screen and multiple devices e.g people may watch TV whilst gathering information on a second device.
The discussions above hosted by the EIF in the European Parliament provide interesting examples of the way in which the world is changing rapidly through the influence of information technology. Those who are best informed about how technologies can be utilised will be the winners in the modern world today.