Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
However, will the Internet work well when such a big disaster comes again in the
future?
TCP/IP was developed imagining a nuclear war threatening all human beings,
as a type of connection that would never be cut no matter what happened, and
unfortunately this time, the earthquake proved it working.
However, communication was character based and person-to-person based. After
everyone has started using the internet to deliver motion pictures, and after everything
around us got connected and started communicating with each other, the internet may
blow up. Visual communication and machine-to-machine communication needs a
new network architecture.
Now, a next generation network should be planned, taking into consideration the
enemies named earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear power stations.
On September 11 in 2001, I drove my car from Boston to NYC for an appointment
with a startup company early in the morning. At the entrance of Manhattan, I was
stopped by the police screaming something that I could not understand. The car radio
was also shouting but I could not understand. As soon as I watched CNN at a coffee
shop on my way back to Boston, I understood what's going on.
What I witnessed there was a clash of high technologies of the last century, jet
planes and skyscrapers. Aeronautical technology and high-rise architecture, things
designed to make people happy were used as weapons for terror and destruction.
I made telephone calls to my friends in Tokyo and Kyoto, all of who had watched
the real scenes of the second airplane hitting the building on TV. My friends in the
US didn't watch it because people in the east coast including me were commuting to
their offices and schools and the west coast were sleeping because of the 3 h time gap.
The “real time character” of the disaster was much stronger in Asia.
Twenty-five years ago, in Nintendo days, we dreamt of the advanced information
society where all the people could connect with each other and could watch everything
visually. Those days, the government of Japan advocated that world peace would
come true if all the people on the earth could understand each other.
Now it is achieved. We can watch everything on TV in real time via satellites and
optic fiber networks. But the dream has not become true. We got to know each other
better, which made our difference clearer, and which caused new friction.
In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the engine of the society was war and
competition, battles among nations and battles among companies. Nowadays digi-
talization causes new battles. Could this be the engine of this century? Modern wars
are connected through new media. World War Two was recorded on film, Vietnam
was watched on TV, Falkland was relayed with satellites, Gulf was simulated like a
TV game, and Iraq was the first war after the internet.
After September 11, the Internet community in the world tried to stop the war.
The antiwar movement quickly spread over on to the virtual space. However, it
was not successful. One and a half years later, the war started in Iraq. In the war,
the same digital technology was used as a weapon. GPS enabled pinpoint bombs
and wearable computers enabled soldiers to kill people more efficiently. What we
developed is used for both peace and war. The direction digital technology goes is
determined by its users. “Digital” reached that stage in the beginning of this century.
