ABSTRACT
A decade ago the Canadian author William Gibson observed that
science fiction is often mistakenly credited with predicting the
future, simply because technological change seems to happen so
quickly. With the benefit of hindsight, he argues, observations of
emerging trends can only seem prescient if they are not interrogated
too deeply: “As I’ve said many times before the future is already
here, it’s just not very evenly distributed” [1]. What we perceive
as new technology is often a combination or application of current
but hitherto distributed knowledge or tools-for example, the
relatively rapid development of smartphones and tablet computers
can be attributed to many decades of prior development in
telecommunications, computing and even photography and satellite
navigation.What we have seen in the first decade of the 21st century
is a coming together of existing social and computing networks
to form new patterns of connections in the online world. These
principles of human social interaction, painstakingly unearthed in
the past by social scientists using small sample sizes and in-depth
field research, are now becoming available for empirical research in
an unprecedented way.
