Review of Don Tapscott, 'The Digital Economy, Anniversary Edition'

Don Tapscott, The Digital Economy, Anniversary Edition: Rethinking Promise andPeril in the Age of Networked Intelligence, New Foreword by Eric Schmidt, New York: McGraw Hill, 2015 [Pub Date: October 27, 2014]

I first read The Digital Economy in 1997, two years following its initial publication and after I had completed Don Tapscott’s next book, Growing Up Digital.  At the time, I was teaching in and directing a postgraduate Media Studies programme that ambitiously sought to combine the study and practice of more traditional media, particularly narrative film, documentary, and television, with new media theory, digital production and even design principles.  It was a heady pre-Millennial moment of experimenting with increasingly widespread digital technologies and of musing on the potentially world-changing possibilities they seemed to represent.  

Fittingly, The Digital Economy ranged widely from practical issues of managing and implementing technologies to more far-reaching questions about where they might enable individuals, businesses and society to go.  In an early chapter, Tapscott distinguishes between business process reengineering and business transformation – and how taking that latter, more ambitious step required an openness to change.  While an important distinction in terms of business, of course, the clear implication concerned a more general willingness to accept and participate in larger-scale transformation, of individual, economy, and society.  The book then went on to offer probing yet accessible discussions of the import of analog versus digital, the arrival of smart products, the need for overhauling talent management and learning, the ascendant roles of IT and CIOs in organizations, and many more topics in order to portray an emerging future. 

One of Tapscott’s gifts has been the consistent ability to examine such topics in detail while also conveying but not overstating their greater significance.  As a prolific and consistently insightful analyst and commentator on the digital transformation, his work falls, for me, into four overlapping areas of interest: (1) the “net generation” to which he’s devoted several books starting with Growing Up Digital; (2) mass collaboration, openness and sharing, probably most familiar from his 2006 bestseller, Wikinomics (co-written with Anthony D. Williams), and its recent sequel; (3) the more explicitly business-focused books, beginning his earliest publications on office automation and clearly elaborated in the 2003 The Naked Corporation; and his integrative writings on the digital society and economy, of which The Digital Economy is still the most penetrating.  Whatever the specific object of discussion or analysis, though, the wider contexts and deeper humanity of technological, business and social change remain an unmistakable priority for him.   

Re-read today, that balance and breadth still set apart The Digital Economy.  Contemporary analyses of all things digital, particularly in business and management writing, tend to lack his sensitivity to broader human or social contexts – at least contexts expressed with balance and without hyperbole.  In the original chapter on leadership, Tapscott opens with a quote from Internet pioneer Vint Cerf about the Internet being “like the wilderness of the Wild West,” both inevitably awaiting the imposition of systems and civilization but always retaining “some interesting wilderness areas to visit.”  That metaphor was ubiquitous in the late 1990s.  Yet the opening section of the chapter, in which he discusses how difficult are paradigm shifts and journeys into the ”wilderness” of the unknown for “leaders of the old,” remains as valid as ever a commentary on human nature and the challenges of profound change.

To Tapscott’s credit, little of the new material is self-congratulatory.  The Preface to the Anniversary Edition offers a valuable summation of the book’s major ideas and the extent to which they have come to pass – or not.  Throughout, the new commentaries preceding each chapter provide valuable extensions and illustrations from the last twenty years of the nascent ideas proposed in the original text.  The updates on the “The Internetworked Business” chapter, for example, draw on insights (specifically, the seven business models) from Wikipedia in order to frame the importance of developing and implementing a coherent strategy for advancing the social economy, workplace, and marketing.

Tapscott also rebuts critics who claim he has been a digital Polyanna by downplaying or ignoring the “dark side” of the transformed economy.  Especially compared with some of his mid-1990s contemporaries, the tone and treatment of possible digital futures in these pages is balanced.  Recalling many of the visions of the time, both utopian and dystopian and often charged with Millennial hope or uncertainty, The Digital Economy was less a futurist tract than an exploration of social and economic possibilities grounded in actual (or emerging) technologies and human practices.  That the author foresaw accurately so much of what has developed in the years since the book first appeared is testament to his sensitivity to the ways businesses, societies and especially people engage new technologies and change more broadly.

The original text does contain some obviously glaring misses.  A few are small and forgettable, as with the insistent use of the “Internetwork” and, especially, “I-Way” (for “Information Highway”) as the digital basis and engine of future progress.  Others, notably the significant treatment accorded to privacy issues late in the book, require fuller annotation in the new edition.  Citing “Big Brother” and (corporate) “little brothers” as threats, the conclusion in 1995 was to take greater care with the information we give away.  Two decades later, as Tapscott acknowledges in his new comments, individuals are thoroughly connected by social media, Big Data, surveillance and geospatial systems, and many other institutional networks and technologies, shifting the onus much more to institutions and owners of data to manage data and their privacy appropriately. 

The next and final chapter of The Digital Economy addresses the “new responsibilities” of business.  Here, the author writes most directly about “societal transformation” and how the many technologies and transformations he has catalogued can help re-cast the role of corporations in society and even the future of democracy.  Then, closing his retrospective comments, Tapscott writes that “this Anniversary edition is not intended to be a history text.”  Strictly speaking, he is right.  Yet when framed by the new material, the original text can still serve a very similar and valuable purpose, namely, to give an illuminating longer view of two decades of changes, small and large, wrought by the digital economy and experienced by each of us – and still to envision a future marked by immense promise and some peril. 

Andrew Lih, _The Wikipedia Revolution: How a Bunch of Nobodies Created the World’s Greatest Encyclopedia_ (Hyperion, 2009)

Opening this account of the history and current reach of the World Wide Web’s phenomenally successful encyclopedia is a foreword by Wikipedia’s founder, Jimmy Wales. In it, Wales speaks briefly of some of the values guiding the project: individuals doing good, trusting each other, and using old-fashioned standards of clear writing and reliable references. His most important observation, though, building on these other values and view of beneficent human nature, is that Wikipedia grew as a kind of social software that both fostered and relied upon community.

That basic if imprecise idea guides much of the following account of the early years of technological developments that allowed Wikipedia to emerge. From Linux and Nupedia to WikiWikiWeb and Hypercard, the evolution and linkage of various innovations through the 1990s makes for a fascinating read. The individuals responsible at each step in the process, including Wales but also Ward Cunningham, the father of Wikis, and Larry Sanger, the original Nupedian, and others are also nicely drawn. Throughout, the imperative to create formative connections both between and for a networked community remains consistent.

In the middle of the book is a 50pp chapter that draws together various central issues but also covers a series of incidents and events, policies, and internal practices. It exemplifies the book’s strength and weakness. On the one hand, it delineates clearly the development and coordination of various technologies into a fully viable site for widespread public participation, production and usage. On the other, the recurrent attempts to make sense of these developments in broader social and cultural terms are frustratingly lacking. That sense-making is not necessarily required in an historical account, of course, but the recurrent suggestion here of metaphors and models to interpret the cultural significance of Wikipedia only highlights the failure.

Subsequent chapters are event-driven, showing how Wikipedia continues to be shaped, across languages, in face of different competitors and a changing web and mediascape, and finally how the project is managing growth. The book concludes with questions about the scaling of the project and the persistence of its originary values of community. Will increasing numbers of participants continue to do good and trust each other? Will the result, the “Wiki-ness” of Wikipedia endure? And crucially, how should the stewards of the foundation, like Wale, respond to the shift from being like a village where everyone knows each other to “more of a faceless impersonal metropolis” that is “driving the adoption of hard, cold, binding policies” (176).

As this challenge for the future suggests, the book dwells on the idea that we have come to describe as the wisdom, collaboration and dynamics of crowds. Yet detailing the Wikipedia case hardly settles the matter: did crowds create Wikipedia or did Wikipedia create the relevant crowds? More intriguing, the book seems to question the relationship between the individuals who developed Wikipedia and the crowds so regularly invoked by them as responsible for its growth. Are crowds possible, that is, without individuals orchestrating their collaboration?

Lih makes clear that the answer, at least in terms of the history of “the world’s greatest encyclopedia,” is no: remarkable, innovative leaders were as indispensable as the crowds themselves. In his Foreword, Wales underscores the socializing power wrought by technology and the World Wide Web. But he doesn’t pursue it, possibly because a fuller explanation would involve him directly in ways that run somewhat counter to better publicized tenets of community and collaboration. Perhaps the ultimate lesson here of Wikipedia’s creation and continuing growth is that an essential aspect of celebrating the creation and ongoing growth of global community of contributors remains the recognition of key leaders able to envision the scope and direction of that collaboration.

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The Wikipedia Revolution also foregrounds another question. Going forward, how will we write – or, more to the point, research – histories of the digital age? The matter of research materials is a major concern: what will be the digital archives of sites and other projects that change and transform themselves so quickly? Again, one answer to this returns us to the issue of individual rather than collective voices. Invaluable to Lih and to us, for example, is Larry Sanger’s 16,000+ word account of the “Early History of Nupedia and Wikipedia” from 2005, available at Slashdot.com. At least for the near future, when such individuals remain alive and available to provide their recollections, they will remain vital resources. Beyond that, particularly as access to and preservation of digital projects fades, the matter becomes murkier.