25th Anniversary of the World Wide Web

Lord Giddens Excerpts

Thursday 16th January 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Giddens (Lab)]

My Lords, I join the queue in congratulating the noble Baroness, Lady Lane-Fox, on having initiated this debate, and say what a great addition she is to your Lordships’ House. That is my three minutes more or less gone.

I will be more extravagant than most other speakers so far and say that the internet has been the greatest transformative force in history bar none, because of the speed of its transformation; as has already been mentioned: it took 20 years. The invention of writing is perhaps the only parallel, but that took 5,000 years and was the prerogative only of elites. It is the greatest transformative force because of its scope, because it is the instrument of globalisation on a level never seen before; and because of its intensity—it enters all our lives. We see people going along the streets who cannot let go of their mobile phone. It has become an intrinsic part of who they are. There has never been anything like this before in history, so it is not surprising that it is rather difficult to come to terms with its longer-term impact.

I will make some brief comments on higher education and the advent of MOOCs. MOOCs are not a kind of medieval curse; the acronym stands for massive open online courses, which promise to be deeply transformative of universities. When I was running the LSE about 15 years ago, we all thought that the future of universities would be online. We had consortia with other universities in the United States, but that did not really work. The only experiment that worked a bit was with the University of Phoenix, which was more or less an online university.

MOOCs are transforming that situation. Now these courses are being adopted by the elite American universities: Harvard, MIT and Stanford. They promise to be both deeply shocking to traditional universities and also to add to their armoury. In this country we lag behind. The Open University is in the forefront, but the Americans—as before, perhaps—are well in the lead.

The advent of massive online courses will not see the end of the campus-based university, because such universities have other things to offer. We are not having this debate online, but in your Lordships’ Chamber. There is what sociologists call the “compulsion of proximity”—the need to be with other people—and the added value of having been to a campus-based university. However, massive online courses will probably transform universities as fundamentally as Amazon has transformed the book trade; that is the future they offer.

They also offer the opposite—the digital divide, which has been referred to by many people. Billions of people will be able to follow these courses online and interact with other people in real time, in seminar groups across the world. That will be possible for billions of people in Africa, for example. It will be like mobile phones; Africa will be able to jump a stage in the evolution of education.

I conclude by saying, “Don’t go all high-tech”, because back to the future will often be one of our political remedies. We used to think that the car was the instrument of the future, but now we are going back to bicycling and walking. That will be true of all areas. I wave my piece of paper, but that is not because I think I am just a remnant of a previous age; there will be many areas where simple, back to the future solutions will be just as important as technologically developed ones.