The 4th Revolution

Subtitled 'how the infosphere is reshaping reality', this hugely well-informed and well-written book postulates that we are living through a fourth revolution after those of Copernicus, Darwin and Freud. The author introduces a number of new terms including 'onlife' for online life and characterising us as 'inforgs', informational organisms who do no longer distinguish so sharply between the online and off-line worlds. He explains the life cycle of information and how a key feature of technology is in-betweenness, with all these communication interfaces. There are interesting discussions of identity and self-understanding, also of privacy, intelligence and agency.

The political, environmental and ethic dimensions are also addressed and there is a wealth of interesting statistical information. The number of SMS messages was overtaken by chat apps in 2010 (19 billion as opposed to 17.6 billion daily), and we learn that it takes on average 224 tweets to start a relationship compared with 70 Facebook messages, 37 emails or 30 phone calls. The average American girl sends 80 texts a day while boys send only 30. Our ability to access information has certainly been democratised, which has had an effect on health consultations. Political processes have also been modified through the development of information societies and online democratic initiatives. Cyber wars are already in process, and pose an additional security threat. We also have to expand our concept of environment to include the infosphere and it is striking to read that data warehouses consumed 30bn W of electricity in 2012, which represents the output of 30 nuclear power stations. Their contribution to greenhouse gases will increase by 6% a year to 2020, overtaking the emissions of the airline industry in the process. The book is an ideal starting point for serious consideration of the many issues raised by the development of ICT.