Those of you who have either read “The Shift Age” or have heard me speak about the Shift Age, know that the accelerating global electronic connectedness is one of the three forces that has, is and will continue to reshape our world.  There are now 4 billion cell phone subscribers in the world.  Facebook has more that 200 million users.  Twitter is approaching 20 million users and all these numbers are increasing every day.

There is no longer any time, distance or place in human communication. That both transforms reality and creates new realities and opportunities.  It is as though human communication is completely fluid and like water, can flow anywhere without boundaries, channels or hierarchies.  Humans can interact with other humans in ways never before experienced in history.  Our connectedness is a force in and of itself.

What has occurred these past few weeks in Iran will be regarded as one of the events in the geopolitical world that is both a confirmation of this new force and a signpost to our future global orientation.

Even a month ago, it would have seemed hard for most people to imagine that Twitter tweets would be used as news sources about a major event in the New York Times, ...]]> [Note:  This is a column reprinted from the current "Shift Age Newsletter" as it is very timely and has already received a lot of positive comment.  If you are not yet a subscriber of the newsletter, please go here and click on FREE subscription]

Those of you who have either read “The Shift Age” or have heard me speak about the Shift Age, know that the accelerating global electronic connectedness is one of the three forces that has, is and will continue to reshape our world.  There are now 4 billion cell phone subscribers in the world.  Facebook has more that 200 million users.  Twitter is approaching 20 million users and all these numbers are increasing every day.

There is no longer any time, distance or place in human communication. That both transforms reality and creates new realities and opportunities.  It is as though human communication is completely fluid and like water, can flow anywhere without boundaries, channels or hierarchies.  Humans can interact with other humans in ways never before experienced in history.  Our connectedness is a force in and of itself.

What has occurred these past few weeks in Iran will be regarded as one of the events in the geopolitical world that is both a confirmation of this new force and a signpost to our future global orientation.

Even a month ago, it would have seemed hard for most people to imagine that Twitter tweets would be used as news sources about a major event in the New York Times, The Globe and Mail and on CNN and other news channels.  This has now happened with the Iranian crisis.  The autocratic theocrats of Iran sent journalists packing – and beat them if they didn’t, jammed broadcast signals, and tried to shut down web sites.  They were largely successful in these efforts.  However, due to twitter, facebook, cell phone videos and email the world has been kept informed of the brutality that is going on in Iran.  Here the water metaphor is perfect as it always finds the cracks, the holes in the dyke, the weak spot in the levee, the porous part of the structure and flows through it.

I have several followers from Iran on Twitter.  I did my part by tweeting that the world was in fact watching, that their messages were getting out and that their struggles were known and supported. It was interesting how often such tweets, both mine and others, were RT (retweeted).  This is another new unique experience, people feeling participatory in a struggle half a world away through personal communications.

It is clear what lies ahead for Iran.  Autocratic governmental power and centralized authority kept in place through brutality, misinformation, xenophobia and false prophets will ultimately collapse.  This is particularly true when the educated, the young and the affluent are the ones in the streets being beaten.  As long as the current leaders are in power in Iran there will be an exodus of the best and brightest out of the country – if they are allowed to leave.  These leaders are so insular and consumed with maintaining their power that they do not realize the new reality of global electronic connectedness on a personal level.

If internal political upheaval does not bring these leaders down, the tidal waves of personal communications due to this electronic and immediate connectedness will.  The nation state structure cannot defend against it anymore.

The image is one that anyone over the age of 35 can remember as it flashed around the world and represented the individual facing down superior force in a literal stand for freedom.  It was this image that gave the communist Chinese government its first taste of international outrage as it was slowly moving toward a more open, capitalistic society. It was a government and a country unused to global scrutiny. While the crack down on protestors continued, it was done quietly and out of camera range of foreigners and journalists.  A single image had flashed around the world and had left an indelible mark on human consciousness.

One of the dynamics that led this single man to stand in front of the tanks was the impact of technology.  When the government moved to end the demonstrations, it blocked all know communications channels, isolating the demonstrators. International TV and radio was jammed so the demonstrators had no idea whether there was support for them around the world. One thing the government missed was the new communications technology called the fax machine.  Evidently in offices near Tiananmen Square and in universities ...]]> It was 20 years ago this week that the demonstrations in Tiananmen Square turned violent.  After days of open demonstrations, the Chinese government had had enough and sent in the army.  This led to one of the most iconic visual images of protest in recent decades: a single man standing right in front of four tanks, daring them to run him over.

The image is one that anyone over the age of 35 can remember as it flashed around the world and represented the individual facing down superior force in a literal stand for freedom.  It was this image that gave the communist Chinese government its first taste of international outrage as it was slowly moving toward a more open, capitalistic society. It was a government and a country unused to global scrutiny. While the crack down on protestors continued, it was done quietly and out of camera range of foreigners and journalists.  A single image had flashed around the world and had left an indelible mark on human consciousness.

One of the dynamics that led this single man to stand in front of the tanks was the impact of technology.  When the government moved to end the demonstrations, it blocked all know communications channels, isolating the demonstrators. International TV and radio was jammed so the demonstrators had no idea whether there was support for them around the world. One thing the government missed was the new communications technology called the fax machine.  Evidently in offices near Tiananmen Square and in universities there were fax machines.  They were used by demonstrators to get the word out to the world.  Much more importantly, the world responded, sending faxes by the hundreds, letting the demonstrators know that the whole world was watching.  This is what gave the demonstrators strength.  This is what emboldened the young man to stand in front of the tanks.

Fax technology was just a few years old in 1989.  The fax machine first entered the office in the mid 1980s and didn’t make it into the home until the 1990s.  It was this brand new technology of sending documents through phone lines that fueled the demonstrations. There were only a few million cell phones in the world in 1989, and certainly none available for the demonstrators at Tiananmen Square. So it was the fax machine, using land lines that kept hope alive in Beijing.

What is striking is how much transformation in communications technology humanity has experienced in the 20 years since 1989.  In 1995 there were 89 million cell phone subscribers in the world, in 2005 there were 2 billion, and today there are 4 billion!  In 1995, the year the first commercial browser came to market, there were some 45 million people using the Internet.  By 2005 that number had crossed 1 billion and there are close to 2 billion today.  Cable and satellite TV was still in early stage growth in 1989, today they are global in reach.  In 1989, the few laptops in the world were large, bulky and heavy and there weren’t very many of them.

Humanity is more globally connected than it has ever been.  Terrorist attacks are caught on cell phone cameras and telecast to the world. Network news anchors speak live via videophone to correspondents anywhere in the world.  Internet services such as Skype allow us all to cheaply communicate globally via video.  Bandwidth expansion and data compression are such that  a month’s worth of videos from YouTube equals what coursed through the Internet the entire year of 2000.  We are constantly connected.

Communications technology may now provide us with more information than can possibly be absorbed and digested.  The electronic feed trough of information is always on, and this can feel overwhelming.  We move from the delight in access and availability to the desire to totally unplug.  The good news for freedom and openness is that, with each technological step forward, barriers fall, dictators’ control lessens, ignorance decreases and people can take ever more informed actions.

The fax technology of 1989 provided the demonstrators with the knowledge that the whole world was watching, allowing one man to take an informed action that single handedly stopped a phalanx of tanks.  That was 20 years ago this week.  How far we have travelled since then..

There are several interesting aspects to these numbers. Of course, since China is the most populous country in the world with more than 1.3 billion people, it will ultimately have more of most any category of people, based on size alone. It is interesting that there seems to be an age divide in China. Not only are 70% of the country’s internet users under the age of 30, 90% of the new users in the last six months were high school students. This reflects the fact that the booming economy in China is led and fueled by those under the age of 40 as many of the older generations are still anchored in the past.

It is possible that, if current growth rates continue, China could have twice as many Internet users as the U.S. within two years. It is when that happens that Internet usage in China will bring about significant change. The 253 million Internet ...]]> It was just reported that, as expected, there are now more Internet users in China than in the U.S. As of last month there were 253 million Internet users in China as compared to 220 million in the U.S. What is striking is that in just the last year, the number of new users in China was 90 million, or a growth rate of more than 50%. That annual increase in users is more that the total number of users in most countries in the world.

There are several interesting aspects to these numbers. Of course, since China is the most populous country in the world with more than 1.3 billion people, it will ultimately have more of most any category of people, based on size alone. It is interesting that there seems to be an age divide in China. Not only are 70% of the country’s internet users under the age of 30, 90% of the new users in the last six months were high school students. This reflects the fact that the booming economy in China is led and fueled by those under the age of 40 as many of the older generations are still anchored in the past.

It is possible that, if current growth rates continue, China could have twice as many Internet users as the U.S. within two years. It is when that happens that Internet usage in China will bring about significant change. The 253 million Internet users in China, represents only 19% of the country’s population, while the 220 million in the U.S. represents 70% of the population.

The reason I suggest that significant change will come to China in two years is that the percentage of the population using the Internet will be between 30-40%. It is when a new media reaches that level of penetration to the population that it changes the culture and creates a new media environment. In the U.S. it wasn’t until the early 1950s when Television reached 50% of households that “the golden age of television” began. Similarly it wasn’t until the first quarter of 2007 that 50% of U.S. households had broadband or high speed internet access. This changed the culture. It was no coincidence that 2007 was the year of YouTube. High speed internet access basically means video.

In addition, while the Chinese government still censors many web sites and blocks access to others entirely, it will become harder to do when a couple of hundred million more users come on-line. Not only will there be more users, but the users will be shaping the culture. As we have seen elsewhere in the world, once a communications technology reaches a critical mass it is hard to contain or control. Even today, the Chinese have a tendency to text rather than actually speak on the phone, a phenomenon unheard of just a few short years ago. The distances of the country and the cultural walls are collapsing.

So, China now has more users of the Internet than any other country in the world. As this growth continues it will bring about huge change that will alter the culture of the country. Welcome to the accelerating global electronic connectedness that is reshaping humanity.

The other thing I remember were those times, while riding in the family car, of listening to the testing of the national alert system via the AM radio airwaves: “This has been a test of the emergency broadcast system”.  What examples of communicating to the populace; sirens that pierced the air of every population center in America and the then ubiquitous AM radio band.  The air raid siren being the industrial age amplification of the town crier and the AM radio being the most widely distributed form of electronic media at that time.

All this came back to me a couple of weeks ago when I read that the FCC had approved a plan for an emergency alert system that would send text messages to cell phones. This system is expected to be in place by 2010. Now that 75% or the population have cell phones and we carry them every ...]]> Growing up as part of the baby boom generation, a distinct memory is the air raid siren tests.  Every Tuesday, if I recall correctly, at 10a there was the test of the air raid siren blaring across the entire city of Chicago.  This was to prepare us for the possibility of a nuclear attack from the Soviet Union (so we could crawl under our desks as instructed by our teachers).  Since it happened each week at the same time we knew it was a test.  If it had happened on any other day, I might not be writing this column today.

The other thing I remember were those times, while riding in the family car, of listening to the testing of the national alert system via the AM radio airwaves: “This has been a test of the emergency broadcast system”.  What examples of communicating to the populace; sirens that pierced the air of every population center in America and the then ubiquitous AM radio band.  The air raid siren being the industrial age amplification of the town crier and the AM radio being the most widely distributed form of electronic media at that time.

All this came back to me a couple of weeks ago when I read that the FCC had approved a plan for an emergency alert system that would send text messages to cell phones. This system is expected to be in place by 2010. Now that 75% or the population have cell phones and we carry them every where we go, what better way to inform us of a natural disaster or a terrorist attack?    The good news is that these text messages should be able to be geographically directed so if there is a tornado in Oklahoma on a specific path, those in the way can be sent text messages.  The only hope here is that with more than 1.5 billion text messages being sent daily in the U.S., this text message would not get lost in the clutter.

This evolution of warning system fits the times.  A nuclear attack would have been national in scope in the 1950s and 1960s, so a mass media national warning system made sense.  A terrorist attack or natural disaster will not be national in scope. 

So, the 50 year media history of the emergency alert system:  Air raid sirens and AM radio to text messaging. 

When you stop and think about it, this is nothing less than amazing. This means that more than half of all human beings alive today have cell phones. That includes all children, all the elderly, all the people living in poverty around the world, all the people living in underdeveloped countries and all those living in remote areas of the world where there is no cell phone use. Of course there are a number of people in the U.S. and elsewhere that have more than one cell phone, but that is a very small percentage of total users.

In 2006, when doing research on my forthcoming book and for speeches I deliver, the latest projections at that time suggested that this 50% threshold would not be crossed until 2010 at the earliest. This time compression of projected growth of electronic connectedness has become a familiar experience to me. In addition to cell phone subscriber projections there has been an almost constant upward estimation of Internet users and terabytes of content coursing through the Internet. Research conducted ...]]> I have written several columns about cell phones in the past. Each one was due to milestones of growth. The speed of growth in the use of cell phones continues to be astounding. It was announced last week by the International Telecommunication Union that the number of total global cell phone subscribers will exceed the number of non-subscribers for the first time in 2008.

When you stop and think about it, this is nothing less than amazing. This means that more than half of all human beings alive today have cell phones. That includes all children, all the elderly, all the people living in poverty around the world, all the people living in underdeveloped countries and all those living in remote areas of the world where there is no cell phone use. Of course there are a number of people in the U.S. and elsewhere that have more than one cell phone, but that is a very small percentage of total users.

In 2006, when doing research on my forthcoming book and for speeches I deliver, the latest projections at that time suggested that this 50% threshold would not be crossed until 2010 at the earliest. This time compression of projected growth of electronic connectedness has become a familiar experience to me. In addition to cell phone subscriber projections there has been an almost constant upward estimation of Internet users and terabytes of content coursing through the Internet. Research conducted on these growth projections has to be regularly revisited.

We get overwhelmed with this type of rapid growth so that we think that the hard to conceive speed of growth we are living through is as fast as it can get. We then take that rate and project it into the future. Two years later we find that we have underestimated how fast accelerated growth is. We always think that it has to slow down, but it never does. We are racing toward an ever more connected and immediate world.

I believe that this dynamic is moving us to a singularity in connectivity. We are literally erasing time and distance from human communication. If one had the appropriate calling plan from a cellular carrier and one had the phone numbers of the 3 billion people who have cell phones one could immediately connect with that many people at any time, wherever they are. That potential, that growing possibility is unlike anything that has ever existed in human history. In the short time since 1985, humanity has gone from place based phone connectivity for hundreds of millions to mobile connectivity for billions.

Cell phone technology, unlike most other technologies, is a leap frog technology. What that means is that it allows people and countries to leap over some of the historical infrastructure process of development experienced by the countries in the developed world that moved from agricultural, to industrial, to information age and now to shift age societies. Telephone growth was based upon the laying of cable and the stringing of wires; a geographical, wired growth. While the U.S., Europe and Japan went through this sequence of growth, developing countries such as India and China did not. In those two countries, a lot of the industrial to information age development was leap frogged.

Sure, the growth of the Internet has made the laying of cable imperative around the world, but now with the growth of broadband wireless, even that is being leap frogged. When you combine that development with the present and soon to be accelerated growth of Internet access via smart phones the future can be clearly seen. Ever more powerful hand held devices that start to resemble computers combined with ever growing wireless bandwidth creates something that has only been present in science fiction. Humanity has portable, fits in the pocket computing power that also allows us to be all connected.

We all get caught up in the convenience, speed, always available aspect of this development as we talk, type and view content. However, as Marshall McLuhan said, “The medium is the message”. What he meant was that the fact that tens of millions of people were watching television at one time was a more important reality than whatever it was they were watching. This is now true with cell phones and wireless devices. The fact that 3 billion people are now connected with always on connectivity is a fact that is more significant that what they are communicating. It changes the environment in which we live. It is a new environment.

Cell phones are transformative. The cell phone is the global technology. It is one of the key forces that have brought us to the global stage of human evolution. We have created cell phones and they are now one of the forces creating our new world.