The digital age has brought the world together under one roof more than any other phenomenon in history. Whether this is good or bad is another debate altogether, but the inescapable reality is, there is no other way to move forward than to accept its inevitability and learn its ways. It has in many ways redefined democracy in spirit as well as in practice. Never before has the world come to belong to one “imagined community” as they are now. When Benedict Anderson wrote his landmark book defining a nation as an “imagined community”, bound together by shared interests, and shared aspirations, a bondage most visible in subscriptions to newspapers and news channels that represented these interests, the internet was still in its infancy.
He talked only about how newspapers represented this abstract “imagined community” which transcends immediate circles of friends, relatives and acquaintances of at the most a few hundred people. The telephone contact lists of people in the 1980s and 1990s for instance seldom went beyond 200-300. Today with the advent of social media like Facebook, Whatsapp, Twitter etc, an individual’s “friends” or “followers” can run into thousands, and even several millions.The world under one roof has also meant the world as one market, and again nowhere has this been truer than in internet-based businesses. Facebook, Google, Amazon, Alibaba, Flipkart etc, to name just a few examples.
The Google story is a particularly interesting case for many reasons. David A. Vise, who chronicled the rise of the Google phenomenon in his book “The Google Story” gives us a glimpse of this internet search company’s short but spectacular history. Vise traces the success trajectory of the two extra bright Stanford University Ph.D scholars, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, whose thesis on the calibration of websites by tracking the number of links each site is associated with became the foundation of this multi-billion dollar company that gave an explosive start to the 21st Century.
Their achievement in the field of information revolution is compared even to those of Johan Gutenberg 500 years ago when he invented the movable fonts printing machine. Google was founded toward the end of 1998, and its two founders were billionaires in less than 10 years before they were 30. The word “Google” has also become a verb in the English language and in 100s of other languages of the world. Incidentally the name “Google” is, Vise’s book reveals, is a misspelling of the term “googol”, which stands for a very big number –10 followed by 100 zeros. That the two thought of this number is understandable, for while calibrating websites they were dealing with billions after billions of data. But by the time they realised it was a misspelling, it was too late, for the misspelled name “Google” had caught the world’s imagination.
The Google story has one other prominent hero other than the two friends – Stanford University. And it is this aspect of the story that this commentary is interested in. This is so with a view to suggesting to our own academia of an approach that has resulted in ground breaking innovations that spawned phenomenally successful leaders of the new age industries. The Google story exemplifies this more than any other. Imagine a doctoral thesis, and an internet search engine programmed on its basis as part of the same doctoral course, resulting in what may yet be the most phenomenal enterprise of the new century.
The moot point is, it was no accident that this happened in Stanford University, for the university actually has a programme that encourages this. Its Office of Technology Licensing even goes to the extent of not claiming propriety to ground breaking on-campus works by students and professors. Obviously, it sees no contradiction between academics and financial rewards and has served as the incubator for some of the most successful technological enterprises on earth, including Hewlett-Packard, SUN Microsystems (SUN actually stands for Stanford University Network), Amazon.com etc. It departs a little from the purist approach that the primary duty of the academia is to train the next generation professors and researchers alone. What it also does besides this is to give emphasis on linking its knowledge bank with the world outside to the benefit of both. The question is, shouldn’t it be worthwhile for our own institutions of higher learnings to give this approach a thought?
There is a big lesson, or we may even call it caution for every other field of human enterprise in this contention. This includes the printing press, and the All Manipur Printing Technologists Association too must take not of this. As the well-known adage goes, time and tide waits for no man. If those behind the printing world is not quick enough to constantly adapt and accommodate the ever changing and transforming new technologies, especially the digital technology, let nobody doubt it that those unwilling or hesitant will miss the bus and they may never be able to catch up again. The world has seen this happen over and over again. In the face of a revolutionary churning of new ideas, those unwilling or not ready to adapt to the brave new worlds the churnings bring, have always ended up phased out.
We have seen this played out in the printing world in Manipur too, in particular the world of print journalism. Even as recently as recent as 30 years ago when Offset printing technology made its entrance in the state, we have seen the immense range of new opportunities this new technology offered to those willing to accommodate it and take the fullest advantages of the offered opportunities. We have also seen the tragic falls of other legacy brands because they either delayed in accepting the new reality or else refused to let go of the old.
The challenge before the print world in the face of the digital age is huge. Not only so changes come as quantum leaps but they often demand discarding the old path and to walk on a new one. Moreover, the digital revolution is still an ongoing process, and there are no definite ceilings yet to define its limit. What today is thought to be a stable pinnacle is most likely to be overtaken and overturned by a new digital paradigm tomorrow. All this notwithstanding, the only way to survive and thrive in this brave new digital world is to keep pace with whatever are the latest paradigmatic changes. Just as the latest mobile phone model one year is outdone in features and applications by newer models the next year, the shelf life of every other technology in the digital world is short. We have no other choice than to be ready to meet this challenge. Let us remind ourselves that to not do so is akin to resigning to a fate of perishing unceremoniously.
Editor, Imphal Review of Arts and Politics and author
