N.B.  My notes from the Digital Transformations event, they might not make too much sense; I’ve padded bits out here and there. It might be worth looking at the tweets from the day which are in a handy document here.

Next up at Digital Transformations was John Naughton, I couldn’t really hear most of John’s talk, there wasn’t a microphone, and I was sat at the back. So most of my notes come from jotting down stuff of his slides.

• John quotes Castells with the belief that we are “entering, full speed, the Internet Galaxy, in the midst of informed bewilderment. What is informed bewilderment? An assumption that we have good idea of what stuff is about & make mistake that others do to.
• ‘We are living in the biggest period of transformation since the invention of the printing press’ – nobody knows where it’s all going just as Germans didn’t know where Gutenberg’s invention would take us”
• John suggested that the majority of society has “Sheer bloody ignorance about what is going on” when it comes to digital things, particularly the internet. Suggesting that some people think the web is the internet and others who think Facebook is the entirety of the web. I took umbridge at this, are ‘other’ people really as ignorant as all that? I know we shouldn’t make assumptions about what people know. But is ignorance the right term? is it not up to us to educate? Is it ok to accept that ignorance exists? Should we try to combat it?
• Certain generations were shaped by broadcast tv and now moving to different medium – Internet. How should we deal with this? Has abundance overwritten scarcity in terms of ‘content’, prevails in economies of attention?
•  Convergence and complexity
• Convergence delusion.
• What is our emerging media ecosystem
• Complexity and viable system theory
• Does the Internet have a surprise generation machine is at its heart? Are unpredictability and abundance permanent features? How do you design for this? we’ve always had surprises, it’s just digital code copies more effectively
• Biodiversity: More biodiversity equals more system productivity. Overall, not specific to certain areas.”
•  permissionless innovation
• Intelligent filtration. Do we need instructions for checking quality? Can people no longer produce measured criticism?
• People have always complained about information overload and society has created tools to deal with it. This will continue.