At the close of Tom Hayes' "Jump Point: How Network Culture is Revolutionizing Business," the author enigmatically asks "Is the Jump Point the opening of a portal to a new Renaissance?" The answer? Apparently that comes after the Jump.
Hayes starts off, though, by sounding the alarm. He forecasts that the next Jump Point, or turning point in human experience, will happen when the web welcomes its third billionth user. Three billion is roughly the size of the global workforce. And that moment when the global workforce is online and everything we think we know about conducting business will be upended is racing towards us with an ETA of 2011.
According to Hayes, Jump Points have occurred throughout history whenever technology, economics, and culture converge to produce transformational change. It's not usually apparent in the moment, but in retrospect this moment looks like a sudden, non-linear growth surge in the adoption of a particular technology. He takes us through a fascinating leap across historical Jump Points: the creation of first organized cosmopolitan city-state Catal Huyuk, the manufacture of personal timepieces in Italy, the use of steam engine technology in the textile mills of Massachusetts. Hayes carefully differentiates these Jump Points from the invention of new technologies: the Jump Point is when the impact of the application of, integration of, or widespread adoption of a technology occurs, and it can come months, years, a century after the technological invention, or trigger.
Hayes doesn't project an evolutionary shift or a gradual transition from the world as we know it to the future post-Jump state, or The Next Curve, as he puts it. He sees the Jump Point as a clash, two states occurring simultaneously and in direct conflict with one another (past tense and the future tense). The impending change will be on a grand, worldwide scale, a revolution of business and society, a major disruption of the world as we know it, and sudden, dire global upheaval. He references a broad array of supporting sources, from Clay Christensen's Disruptive Innovation to Albert Einstein's Theory of Relativity, in building a case for his hypothesis. But, paradoxically, it may be sudden, dire global upheaval that we don't notice. You won't know it when you see it, he seems to say, you'll need to take a long look back to recognize that momentous inflection point. I had a bit of trouble holding onto these two thoughts at once: a desire to fasten my seatbelt for a Jump I may not see or feel.
After making every effort to scare the pants off the reader with the idea of three billion people - one billion who "may not be aware of what toilet paper is" - joining our trusted community, Hayes settles in to outline the Jump itself in Part Two. Or more accurately, the environment in which the the jump will occur. He takes a long, thorough look back at the technological advances and cultural environment leading up to our impending Jump Point: from the evolution of communities from D/ARPANET to MUDs and early MMORPGs, Usenets and BBSes (The Well), through today's games and communities across the world, from Everquest to Facebook and MySpace to Cyworld and Orkut, blogs and Twitter. I had a sense that I was flipping through a photo album cataloging my favorite long-forgotten childhood vacations, and it's this part of the narrative that I enjoyed reading the most, and yet found the most frustrating.
Frustrating, because I began to wonder what "sudden" means to Tom Hayes. At one point near the end of the book, he reminisces:
"Just as we woke up one day in the late 1990s to realize that the personal computer and the Internet had become inextricable parts of our daily lives, so too may we look around in 2020 and realize that we live in an entirely different world from the one we knew two decades before ... and not be able to put a finger on just when that metamorphosis occurred."
I don't share that experience. After all, as Hayes had pointed out, Catul Hayul wasn't built in a day. It took a century for the invention of the steam engine to trigger the industrial revolution. Many of our great-grandparents lived through the transition from horses and buggies to landing a spacecraft on the moon. In my lifetime, I've experienced a continuous stream of mind-blowing advancements that I always felt keenly aware of, and I don't recall waking up and thinking - at least in terms of technological advancement - how did I get here? Is the fact that our world is so very different from that of 25 years ago really a surprise? Who among us hasn't been awestruck by technological advancements and the impact of those changes on what seems like a daily basis? As a child I thought Pong and my shiny white Commodore 64 were going to change the world. They did.
I was skeptical of the clanging of the alarms at the start of the book, the warnings invoking Nostradamus and Mayan calendars to mark a great big X across 2011 on our calendars, and that scary third billion. But I get what Hayes is driving at about the part we each play in this revolution: it's not some brilliant programmer in the bowels of Microsoft who will push the button; it really is the small girl in remote India who logs on some sunny day in 2011 and turns the world on its head. A point when we have the option to plug into the world, or disconnect - on an equal basis across the world.
In REM's 1987 song It's the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine), after a rapid litany of objects and moments in time, the chorus is about as relentless and straightforward as is Hayes' hypothesis. Hayes's chorus is: the world as we know it will change--suddenly, disruptively--when the third billion person logs on to the Internet in 2011 from some corner of the world. Only, it may look and feel very much like it does right now.
From REM:
It's the end of the world as we know it.
It's the end of the world as we know it.
It's the end of the world as we know it ... and I feel fine.
In a way, Jump Point reads a bit like REM's song (and Bob Dylan's Subterranean Homesick Blues before that), with a rich aggregation of earworms and viral memes, from the Welcome Back Kotter theme and Alka Seltzer ads to Live Nation, Threadless, crowdsourcing, and ourselves as `nodes' within social networking systems. It's a fast-paced read with a lot of well-documented and supported facts and information: I can't get it out of my head, and I immediately wanted to share thoughts of time-bending, 22 hour workdays, signal to noise ratio, playing-hard-to-get marketing tactics, and whether or not I owe Warner Music Group $10K for singing Happy Birthday to my three year old last month upon finishing the book.
I first judged the book by its dust jacket and wasn't too far off. I saw former Apple evangelist Guy Kawasaki's endorsement on the back cover "This is the Tipping Point for geeks," liked the sci-fi implications of the title "Jump Point" and bought Hayes' book. In contrast with a stream of interesting but very different books about micro elements: microblogging via Twitter, aggregating small threads and interleaving them into tapestries of conversation about the minutia of the day to day, harnessing social networks, I wanted to read about something sweeping. The cover of this book promised the time-space continuum, global market revolution, and I was holding out for a little bit of the Singularity (it's in there!). Although the hype got out somewhat in front of what the book delivered and I didn't come away with an artist's sketch to help me identify that Jump Point when I see it, I think Hayes created an eye-opening assessment of today's `convergence culture,' placing it within a context of relevant history. I don't buy into every detail of his theory - the suddenness of the disruption occurring on a particular day in 2011, for instance, a few terms he coins that I can't see holding water ("bemes" and "Bubble Generation") but he does provide some really intersting analyses of and explanations for today's global marketplace and the changing community dynamics that affect it that seem spot on.
But even more than his answers, I really enjoyed the questions. There's a long-standing debate about whether the time commonly recognized as the Renaissance actually had any significant discontinuity from the earlier period of time. And some historians question if the term itself has a meaningful place in delineating a real point in history. With that in mind, Hayes' final question "Is the Jump Point the opening of a portal to a new Renaissance?" is pretty apt and opens up a whole lot of fascinating questions. How would a Renaissance differ from what we experience now? Could these past 20 years be our extended Jump Point? Is our Jump Point really coming in 2011 or did the end of the world as we know it occur back in 1982 when Pong and personal computers started showing up in our living rooms?
Or are multiple Jump Points coming at us - fast and furious, and do we just adapt so well we don't feel the disruption? My three year old has cochlear implants that allow her to hear - right now, when I plug an iPhone directly into her behind-the-ear processor transmitting to a receiver deep in her head that bounces that cell phone signal to her auditory nerve, are we triggering some future Jump Point in which we're all `wired' with cybernetic implants? Or is that borg-like human connection via our digital world exactly what Tom Hayes is talking about circa 2011?
