Hyperconnectivity

Economical, Social and Environmental Challenges

Dominique Carré, Geneviève Vidal

• Publisher: Wiley-ISTE
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781786300874
• eBook ISBN:
  9781119557012
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Informatica
• Subtopic: Tecnologia dell'informazione

The use of digital information and communication technologies would be the traces of a social acceptability of the exploitation of all data, in the context of negotiations of uses. This is the reason why the users present themselves actors and contributors of the hyperconnectivity.

We would thus witness a new form of dissemination, inviting user experience and social innovations. It is thus the victory of subordination by negotiated renunciation; A new form of serving, no longer that of the 1980s, with the counters and other services, which have become uncontrolled services - excepted when the users are overcome by restrictive ergonomics, revealing too much the subordination device - which joins the prescription apparently without an injunction.

The lure is at its height when users and broadcasters come together to produce the services and goods, composing the business model, until the very existence of the companies, in particular the pure players. Crowdsourcing becomes legitimate: consumers create the content, deliver the data, the basis of the service sold (in a painless way because free access most of the time, indirect financing), the providers make available and administer the service, networks , Interfaces (representing considerable costs), also reputation to attract the attention of other consumers or contributors.

In these conditions, the environmental stakes are considerable, so we propose another way of considering them, not as they are dealt with - material and pollution - but according to the prism of the relational practices analyzed in this volume.

1
The Technological Offer and Globalized Services

Considering the anteriority of the offer and the fact that without a technological offer there is no usage, it is important to clarify how a technological offer accompanied by a range of different services has gradually been designed and globally established in a very short time. Alongside this consideration of the anteriority of the offer, it must be acknowledged that devices deployed by some users are increasingly present, and the offer does not necessarily mean usage, sometimes it even feeds on social innovations, such as free software or common digital dynamics. It is not about retracing the development of IT which, despite what some literature may say, did not develop without interruption, linearly and without failures. The development of IT since World War II has not been a bed of roses¹.

It is useful, by referring to volume 1 of this series “Computing and Connected Society”, to reconsider some features which have brought about the evolution of an important phase of social computerization which: the implementation of the network of Internet networks. Both the founding technical specifications and the discursive productions it brought can be identified in order to understand the development of the offer and its spread over a longer timescale. Similarly, it is important to mention the values which still exist today, such as freedom of expression, sharing and free and universal access, which have somewhat faded or are mixed with more contemporary values. They can be found in the orientations and usage within the guidelines proposed not by simple operators, but by genuine communication giants operating on a global level.

1.1. Importance of the open communication protocol

It is estimated that four time periods have passed since computing began. Each period was influenced by a type of dominant technology, but not only, without having prevented the evolution of other technologies or having substituted some of them, leading each time to new opportunities that are integrated in a social and economic logic and in the strategies of the main actors. Four periods can be identified. The first one was dedicated to hardware; the second, to software; the third, to the network; and the fourth, the current one, to data. This can be illustrated using two examples. It can be said that the Internet would never have been this important in connecting if access equipment such as smartphones did not exist. There is no doubt that miniaturization, the integration of many features on the same hardware, the autonomy provided by batteries, not to mention the decline in prices and the personal ownership of connection devices (which are no longer the property of a family) have strongly contributed to a daily, recurring, mobile Internet usage². It is the same for apps³ (app stores) which, from a smartphone and without a Web browser, allow direct access to a wide range of content, most of the time for free, on every continent.

As everyone knows, the Internet was born in the United States in 1969 when the ARPA (Advanced Research Project Agency) decided to link its main research centers to share resources, exchange data, and to maintain a communication system in the event of an attack on American territory. The establishment of this network was the result of a study carried out in the early 1960s by the US Air Force which concluded that there was a need to move away from centralized IT architecture, considered too fragile, to design a decentralized meshed network architecture able to remain functional even in the event of partial destruction of the network by enemy forces. With the American army abandoning this network at the beginning of the 1980s, it was given to the National Science Foundation (NSF) and made available to European research centers to promote the establishment of cooperative links between research communities. It was only at the beginning of the 1990s that the Internet was gradually opened to companies and private individuals.

Three technical innovations were to greatly promote its deployment, particularly to the general public:

1. 1) The development of the Web (World Wide Web) that enabled publishing and consulting documents through the Internet via a Web browser.
2. 2) The creation of a multimedia system with a client–server architecture.
3. 3) The implementation of high bandwidth networks facilitating high speed.

In 1995, the Director of Research at INRIA, Christian Huitema, stated:

“None of us would have imagined being concerned with sales or invoices. The network was certainly expensive, but not more than other equipment, supercomputers or particle accelerators, that the community made available to the researchers for free. It was only to be used ‘at best’ to advance science.” (Huitema, 1995, p. 8)

As for Patrice Flichy, he indicated in 2001 that:

“For nearly 20 years, the Internet has developed outside the market economy. Free access and cooperation were at the heart of this Internet user culture and market trading was even banned. But, little by little, a new commercial and economic discourse emerged on the network systems.” (Flichy, 2001, p. 223)

Thus, after being deployed for the military⁴, then among the higher education and research community, the Internet was opened to businesses and gradually since the mid-1990s to the public so that they could search and gather information (via the WWW: World Wide Web, which is based on a system of hyperlinks), access software frequently free of charge (freeware or shareware), exchange files, and especially – and this is what will be particularly interesting here – connect and communicate (electronic mail, mailing lists, digital social networks, etc.) whether it is on a professional, commercial, administrative or even personal level, while freeing us from the constraints of distance and time. Meanwhile, since 2010, the Internet of Things has been spreading, whether in the domestic, professional or leisure spheres. The things, identified and connected, rely on the users’ data and location, via various interfaces from which they can communicate. Therefore, mobile Internet uses allow you to think about environments, incorporating networks, applications, goods and services in daily life from which all types of actors, human and non-human, communicate and produce data.

The Internet of Things, also called Web 3.0, is developing in parallel to the Data Web and the Semantic Web, and relies on the interoperability of networks and diverse connecting machines, thus promoting the monitoring of all types of activities. This relies on the basis of the Internet, that is, the dual communication protocol TCP-IP. Its undeniable originality comes from the fact that it is an open protocol which is not dependent on a computer company. This is a common language which allows each station or platform to communicate with all the others. Accessing this global network requires hardware (computer, laptop, digital tablet, smartphone, etc.) and a broadband connection. New actors, the ISPs – Internet Service Providers – provide the Internet connection. Specialized companies or traditional telecommunication operators are able to offer this service which is often accompanied by additional services.

Experts, preachers and gurus of all kinds say that Internet diffusion relied on the following assumption: the global network was going to eliminate intermediaries by encouraging direct connection between individuals, an individual and an organization, or a seller and a buyer, etc. Over 30 years later, it is obvious that nothing of the sort has happened. Instead, more often new actors, who are called infomediaries, control mediations and are more and more powerful especially as the technical systems provide many opportunities to be achieved in a personalized way, with a maximum number of people in the least amount of time, regardless of the geographic range.

This situation contributes to a process of globalization of trades and services which differs from the more traditional internationalization process. The devices tend to align at a global level to offer messaging services, search engines, digital social networks, e-commerce, connection, video sharing, etc. even if usage differences exist or persist depending on the cultural spheres.

Obviously, the aim is to think of a global governance⁵, not only on a technical level, so that the TCP-IP can evolve and respond to a global demand of IP addresses, but also in terms of political and geopolitical issues between countries and pressure groups to co-regulate the Internet. Is this path going against the initial design of a network of networks, for “personal freedom”, which has contributed to its social ownership, as Patrice Flichy (2001, p. 223) indicated, or according to Fred Turner⁶? Above all, it is about promoting the dominance of information and communication flows with the evolution of the protocol TCP-IP. The Electronic Privacy Information Center points to a “threat to confidentiality and anonymity”⁷. Monitoring is largely at play on digital networks, but it would now intervene at the very infrastructure level of the Internet, yet without preventing social, legal and scientific innovation maintaining on-line performance as an open and emancipating network.

1.2. Mediation and industrialization of connection

We no longer only interact with tools, objects, scattered techniques or even machines, but with an interlacing of technical configurations interconnected with each other, running 24 hours a day, all year round and often made available by the servers of companies specialized in storage, (data mining), electronic mail hosting services, application hosting (software becoming an online service), blogs, websites and digital platforms hosted most of the time in what are called Data Centers.

Companies leading this market offer cloud computing services to their SaaS customers (Software as a Service); in this configuration, the software is installed on remote servers rather than on the user’s machine or to IaaS customers (Information as a Service). Experts believe that the market is worth approximately $150 billion and still growing fast.

It should be noted that the main operator is a subsidiary of Amazon, Amazon Web Service (AWS) which holds 33% of market shares globally (source: Synergy Search)⁸. This activity is much more profitable than its e-commerce activity. In 2016, the cloud represented a little less than 9% of Amazon’s total turnover, but 75% of its consolidated result, or $3.1 billion (source: Amaz...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Introduction
• 1 The Technological Offer and Globalized Services
• 2 The Hyperconnected Economy
• 3 Social Appropriation and Digital Culture
• 4 Renunciation and Negotiations
• 5 Environmental Issues
• Conclusion
• References
• Index
• End User License Agreement