Friday, July 08, 2005

Cardiff 1905-2005 : From the Industrial Revolution to the Digital Revolution
















This posting follows yesterday's event:

The Communications Agenda for Wales workshop session, at the Welsh Consumer Council conference Making it Happen: Consumer Policy in Wales, Cardiff City Hall, 7 July 2005. See here for my background materials for the conference session.

In my introduction as Chair I engaged in a historical reflection upon our location in Cardiff City Hall. As this year is the 100th anniversary of Cardiff as a City 1905-2005, I'll indulge a little further in this theme:

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Cardiff 1905-2005 : From the Industrial Revolution to the Digital Revolution

The locus of Cardiff City Hall provides a useful vantage point for historical reflection, as this year is the 100th Anniversary of Cardiff as a City.

1 Cardiff 1905: The Industrial Revolution

Cardiff City Hall: the visible emblem of the wealth and power of Cardiff and the South Wales coalfield
  • architectural signifier of the triumph of the public municipal sphere
  • Civic boosterism: "Coal Metropolis Cardiff", "The Welsh Metropolis", "The Chicago of Wales"
  • City status 1905 : New Town Hall (Villa Cardiff) opened in 1903(?), thence used as Cardiff City Hall
  • the UK's first planned civic centre, Cardiff's civic architectural vision finds a root in the 1893 Chicago Exposition
2 Cardiff 2005: The Digital Revolution?

Signs of the Digital Revolution?

Welsh Assembly Government policy: ICT is a key component of economic development and regeneration strategy:

  • ICT strategy framework, "Broadband Wales": programme vision for the transition of Wales from an industrial to a knowledge economy
  • Increased availability and improved take-up of broadband is expected to generate a step-change that will help to underpin the successful transition (of Wales) from an industrial to a modern, knowledge economy. (- Broadband Wales Unit, Welsh Assembly Government)
Telecoms- this week's big news:
  • BT and Welsh Assembly leaders announce that Cardiff will be the UK pilot for BT's 21CN- to deliver next generation network and services:
  • Rhodri Morgan, the First Minister of the Welsh Assembly Government, said: “It’s incredibly exciting for us that Wales has been selected to provide the test bed for BT’s new 21st Century Network. The Welsh economy is thriving and growing. This investment by BT clearly signifies that Cardiff and central South Wales is one of Europe’s most dynamic and progressive regions. The end result will transform our personal and business lives, and help attract high tech industry and services to Wales.”

3 Network Economy

C19 network economy:
  • coal
  • the world of railways and coal
  • railway networks colonizing the globe, imperial trade (See Lenin's Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism)
C20 network economy:
  • IP- Internet Protocol
  • the world of digital networks
  • "the weightless economy"
The essential continuity across the industrial and the digital eras is the persistence of the network economy. A world in which infrastructure and the economics of networks structure the spheres of the possible, our daily lives enmeshed in a global network of trade and communications, within which each individual node contributes to and benefits from the power of the network.

4 The theme of invisibility (1): from bits to bites

Invisibility- the transformation from an industrial to a digital landscape?

Industrial Revolution:
  • a monumental landscape of power
  • coalfield/docks/civic centre
Digital Revolution:
  • an invisible landscape?
  • fibre, wireless (spectrum)
Invisibility- the shift from moving bits to moving bites (Negroponte).

Raymond Williams spoke of the Long Revolution in tracing the dynamics of progressive change from the industrial revolution to the post-'45 social democratic settlement. The invisible revolution emerges as a characterisation of the permanent revolution of technology and our current phase of modernity.

5 American Wales: From the Industrial Frontier to the New Electronic Frontier

The spectacular urban-industrial landscape of iron works, coal mines, railways, docks, and civic architecture was all-encompassing in its transformations- a scale and rapidity of growth such that Cardiff was dubbed "The Chicago of Wales".

It has been said that there is more fibre underground in Cardiff Bay than there is in the City of London and that Cardiff Bay is second only to San Francisco- a new urban mythology, a new genre of digital boosterism?

At its official launch in November 2002 Cardiff community network Arwain deployed a 802.11 licence-exempt broadband wireless connection 7 km across water from Flat Holm to Cardiff Bay - a conscious following in the footsteps of Marconi's world's first wireless transmission across water from Flat Holm.

Because of the link with US pioneer Dave Hughes of Colorado, Cardiff's pioneering community wireless networking activities drew more attention from American commentators than closer to home. With no-licence wireless an exemplar of the revolution at the edge of the network, grassroots innovation in Wales was suddenly a vital node on the global map.

Former CTO for BT Peter Cochrane debated the American-Welsh wireless future in the East Coast based Cook Report on Internet. Californian sociologist-seer of the digital revolution Howard Rehingold's Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution (2002) included a chapter sub-heading "Tonga, Mongolia, the Rez and Wales: The New Electronic Frontiers":
While Hendricks was unwiring North American Indian reservations, Hughes paid a visit to the land of "nine generations of rebellious Welsh Minister forebears" (...) An activist from Wales came to Old Colorado City to videotape Hughes proclaiming his vision for the future of Welsh telecommunications. The video is online- a remarkable combination of tour, demo, how-to, and polemic. In the activists video, Hughes emphasizes the same benefit to local small businesses he pushes in rural Colorado: Wireless broadband isn't just bringing more things to consume and buy but offers a channel to create, sell, and promote their local point of view to the rest of the world. (...)
The view from the year 2005? We are still in frontier territory, with a sketchy and yet increasingly confused map :
  • In the year 2005 the Wireless Vision for Wales of the year 2000 still persists - of user-producer and community empowerment, of Wales as a producer of value and not just a consumer of other people's products and services.
  • Yet over time the signal-to-noise ratio has diluted, as we experience a resurgent telco-centric promise for the delivery of the future.
Rheingold's words of 2002 will ring in our ears yet:
While the United States and other nations tie up the development of their communication systems because of the investment by telephone companies in 3G licences, watch places like Wales to see the future media sphere emerge first. Or visit Okinawa, which some policy analysts in Japan are pushing to become a "radio haven" for the development and deployment of advanced wireless technologies.
- as we either navigate a migratory path forward (- effective deployment of wireless technologies, with particular reference to licence-exempt rights of access to the radio spectrum), or else we wander in the dis-connected wilderness.

6 The theme of invisibility (2): Radio spectrum, The Invisible Wealth of Nations

Three key structural areas have been asserted for the Broadband agenda for Wales (from an infrastructure and access perpsective):
  • the remote and rural agenda
  • backhaul, backhaul, backhaul!
  • a strategic role for wireless as a first mile/ last mile broadband solution
Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations laid the foundation for classical political economy. Adam Smith spoke of the "invisible hand" that regulates the individual's pursuit of self-interest- that is the market mechanism that works for the greater common good, the Wealth of Nations.

The radio spectrum presents the new frontier of the digital revolution- what we may call the "Invisible Wealth of Nations" (- cf Levin's "invisible resource").

Current spectrum management policy has enshrined a neo-liberal economic model- "the invisible hand" (the market mechanism)- for the "invisible resource"(radio spectrum).

"I gave a presentation to the Assembly the other week", said the Ofcom Wales Director at our conference session, "and was asked 'but what is spectrum'?- and so I show this slide" [- showing a powerpoint slide of Ofcom's standard diagrammatic representation of the electromagnetic spectrum- the mindset of managing spectrum according to bands].

Now contemplate Einstein's famous "No Cat" analogy for describing radio:
  • "You see, wire telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat. You pull his tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles. Do you understand this? And radio operates exactly the same way: you send signals here, they receive them there. The only difference is that there is no cat."
So how do we make the invisible resource visible ? how do we make the invisible hand visible? - How do we achieve an understanding that the radio spectrum is a strategic national resource, and that the public interest has to be engaged? That it not be left to the vaunted "market mechanism" alone?

We are left chasing Maxwell's Rainbow ( see George Gilder's Telecosm)

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~


References

The Cook Report on Internet

Howard Rheingold


George Gilder, Telecosm: The World After Bandwidth Abundance (2000)


  • "The supreme abundance of the telecosm is the electromagnetic spectrum..."

  • "The discovery of electromagnetism, and its taming in a mathematical system, was the paramount achievement of the nineteenth century and the first step into the telecosm. The man who did it was the great Scottish physicist James Clark Mawell. In his honour, we will call the spectrum Maxwell's rainbow. Today most of world business in one way or another is pursuing the pot of gold at the end of it" (Chapter 1, Maxwells' Rainbow).

No comments: