Preface
Understanding Digital Society

CONIUGI DILECTISSIMAE

During my childhood, only the local bar, the baker, the grocer, the mayor, the doctor, the notary and the veterinarian of the village had a telephone installed in their homes, mainly to deal with the necessities of their trade. Only a dozen telephone sets existed in our small town in the French countryside. The telephone was rare, expensive, reserved for supposedly important uses, which only a very small minority of users were privileged to have. Less than 20 years later, Fernand Raynaud’s memorable sketch, which marks the memory of our generation and even the next one that follows, stigmatized this incredible under-equipment in France: in 1966, while everyone knew Number 22 at Asnières1, our family home still had no automatic telephone, neither did the neighbors, nor did the village cafe. It was not until the government promoted telephone catch-up as an essential and urgent national priority through a huge advertising campaign that the former subscribers of the manual network were finally provided with automatic equipment, which was only established from 1974 onwards in our rural community2!

Thirteen years on, another telephone revolution took off in France, albeit several years later than in countries such as Sweden: wired telephone equipment having become the norm, a first cellular telephone license, prepared by the team I was coordinating at the French Ministry of Post and Telecommunications, was awarded to a private operator, SFR, at the end of 1987; the first customer of this commercial company was only served in the first quarter of 1989. At the same time, the Post and Telecommunications Administration began the transformation that would split the Post Office and telecoms. After several intermediate stages, France Télécom SA was created thanks to a law in July 1996. In the meantime, the GSM digital cellular service had been put into service by France Télécom in July 1992; it was the first link in a long series of digital communications that gradually equipped the planet and made the telephone what it is today, everywhere in the world: a digital smartphone3, a multifunctional device that has sold billions worldwide in a just few years!

What a transformation of objects, techniques and modes of interpersonal communication in barely 20 years! But the story does not stop there. At the beginning of the period that is today glorified by history as the one where everything is (supposed to be) possible4, the students that we were had two traditional instruments for calculations, in addition to our own aptitude for mental arithmetic: a table of logarithms and a slide rule which, just to clarify, is only a personal calculator based on logarithms! These two calculation assistants, which are totally forgotten today, refer not to actual figures, but to analog calculation5: add two lengths of a ruler, on a logarithmic scale, for multiplication; or subtract, on the contrary, two lengths of the same ruler to do a division.

Analog calculation has proved its worth for a long time. For the practitioner, it entailed two important consequences: the obligation to remain wary, in any calculation, of the orders of magnitude, and at the same time, to train the calculator, whether he was an engineer, biologist or architect, to remain aware of the error implied by any measurement. In this case, inevitable approximations upon reading the ruler scale. None of my children knew, during the course of their studies, how to use a slide rule; from high school onwards, they were all allowed to have an electronic pocket calculator; for them, the digital age began with their entry into sixth grade! As for current students in high schools and colleges, my grandchildren’s generation, they now take their classroom notes on a tablet, on a smartphone or a laptop. Nobody pays any attention to analog calculation any more: the object, the industries that manufactured them, the logarithm tables printed in the minds of thousands of past high school students have been wiped from existence. In the 1980s, one stroke of a pen drawn by technical progress dissolved the small precise mechanics that manufactured our slide rules. This disappearance heralded, with our lack of taking any serious precautions, the digital disruption that we will find in almost all the chapters of this series, as a consequence of the disruptions that are now largely felt in the economy, trade, education, health and transport.

After my studies at the Ecole Centrale, I discovered modern digital calculation when I became a Fullbright scholar at the American university where I was able to program, for the first time, those IBM computers that none of our great schools had yet installed, to make their students discover this new instrument that would, in a few years, flood into companies, transform business management, industrial research, physics, chemistry and biology in less than half a generation. For us, it was a matter of simulating, by digital calculation alone, the physico-chemical phenomena preparing industrial production. When I returned to the Parisian Faculty of Science laboratory, we had to use resources that were occasionally available in Orsay to be able to do calculations that were important at the time, because Parisian universities were generally badly equipped, a bit like the retorts and lab benches used by Pasteur or even Lavoisier!

Over the next 10 years, I then witnessed the birth and growth of a generation of management programmers who trained and oversaw the administrative and commercial management of public services (urban planning, land use planning and social services) and businesses: insurance, banks, pension funds, industries, transport and cities. They were my traveling companions and fellow students, and made the strength of the service, research and IT consulting companies (IT Services) who, for more than a quarter of a century, have branded European computing and software engineering. These businesses, which were competitive and rapidly growing, quickly opened up to the international market, maintaining a competitive advantage for a long time. They converged from the mid-1970s with the transmission of remote computing to produce, around 1980, the famous report to the President of the French Republic, christened with the forged name “Télématique” that permanently marked the coupling between telecommunications and information technology: telematics (Nora-Minc Report, 1978). Let us make no mistake, this was the first tangible manifestation of what would then be called “digital convergence”, the scope of which we have been constantly expanding since the Internet began to emerge around 1995.

Let us sum up our observations: during a lifetime like mine, a multi-centenary calculation method, the analog calculation, has fallen into oblivion. Only the digital calculator is now used. This changeover, in the time span of just two generations, has two consequences that deserve to be considered:

• – a profound change of perspective on measurement and the instruments we use to measure;
• – the symbolic overestimation of numbers in our understanding of the world and nature.

By becoming purely digital, our tools now detail each measurement by aligning numbers that are not necessarily significant for our practical needs (temperature, pressure, distance, volume, speed, percentage, etc.): do we really need to know body temperature to two decimal places to diagnose a fever? Is a measurement of land surface per hundredth of a square meter necessary for a real estate agent? Does displaying the result of one-tenth of a percent on a political popularity survey mean anything when you know the level of statistical error associated with the percentages calculated from a survey of 1,600 interviews (approximately +/- 2.5%6)? The race for display accuracy implicated by the digitization of our tools, to evaluate physical quantities as well as social behaviors is an illusion: accuracy becomes a decoy, a smoke screen that conceals the reality of things, because measurement is only an approximation, an order of magnitude that we seek to evaluate.

We have been going astray for half a century, particularly for those in human sciences. The preliminary thoughts that opened Raymond Aron’s 1956–57 lessons titled “La lutte de classes”7 rightly pointed out, with regard to sociological studies: “You can [by survey] determine the proportion of individuals in the community who belong to various classes” (p. 86); and, a little further on: “There will always be a certain difficulty in delimiting (these) groups... the particular of social groups is to be equivocal, to have poorly defined boundaries”. So, what is the point of precision, if it is not an illusion? What is important, as I mentioned earlier about the profession of construction engineer, is not to have a precise number, but to identify the order of magnitude of the phenomenon that we observe and describe. I, therefore, insist that with its digital display, this tool is lulling us with illusions, making us believe in a misleading precision to the detriment of what really matters: the appreciation of magnitudes, both in the world of material objects and in the world of living beings with economic and social functions!

Analog calculation required calibration of the measuring tool, in direct relation to empirical knowledge; digital calculation favors a completely different convention that is detached from the sensitive apprehension of our five senses, which are all...