Lady Bug, Lady Bug!

Internet Traffic - from Wired

Here in the US we take our phones, texting and internet for granted - ubiquitous like clean water.

However, nothing should serve as a more stark reminder of where things really stand that the treatment of these services in Egypt during the current uprising.  As you can see to the right the internet traffic in Egypt fell to almost nothing on January 28th.  As of today, according to wired.com, the last provider went off line.  As to whether or not service continues to any extent within Egypt itself at this point is unknown.

The dissemination of information in the western world has been something that, though we take it for granted today, has not always been the case.  Prior to the invention of the printing press word-of-mouth was about all that was available.  You didn't know about what went on in the next village unless you or someone else went there to find out.  If the king didn't want you to know he merely stationed guards along the road to prevent travel or posted proclamations telling you what was going on in the village square.

However, once the printing press was invented it became harder and harder for the ruling elite to limit and control what people knew or heard about.  The notion of free speech as a right of citizens first took root as law when Sweden became the first country to outlaw censorship in 1766.

That's not to say that many subsequent regimes like the USSR or modern day Iran still did not use censorship to control its populace.

Here in the US, though, we take, as I said, all of this for granted.  However Egypt should be a lesson for all of us.  Imagine a significant disruption in internet services, for example.  Many businesses could not function or even operate (think of Amazon in a world where the internet was "down" for a few months).  What would they do?  What would you do?

Similarly with phones - no texting or calling.  Again, what would you do?  In the past we had nursery rhymes to remind us of our responsibilities:

Ladybug!  Ladybug!
Fly away home.
Your house is on fire.
Your children alone.

Without present day high speed communication personal presence was the only means to ensure that you had control of things.  As a young parent in my house there was no texting or phoning the kids or babysitter to see if things were alright if you were away...

Egypt is also a lesson in what the government can do with a ubiquitous technology that, though everyone takes for granted, is really controllable at only a relatively small number of choke points.  Have you forgotten China transferring a significant portion of all US internet traffic through its web routers a few months back?

Do we thing that the US government does not have exactly the same ability?

In the hey day of print as the common means for communication the fact that virtually every small town had a printing press made it much more difficult for centralized control to "take down" the most common means of communication within society.  Certainly censorship might be able to operate at a high level, but there was always room from small operators at the very bottom to "get the word out".

This is true not only as a vehicle for government censorship but also in the case of natural disaster.

On the other hand, we must also realize that our reliance on these new technologies is all of our own doing.  Do we really need so desperately talk to our friends that we have to text while we are driving?  Certainly traveling in the days before cellphones involved maybe one call a day to your spouse in another state - that's all you could really afford and everyone accepted that when you were physically absent you couldn't talk as much.

Today, those giant payphone banks in the basement of places like McCormick Place in Chicago now stand empty during trade shows.

I think that as we have accepted the modern high speed communications that are offered us by cell phones and the internet we have also ceded our own right to communication during a crisis, whether natural or man made.  I think that Egypt should serve as a stark reminder of what can happen when we cede control of our destiny to technologies that we don't really control or have a good understanding of...

Your house is on fire.
Your children alone.