The Digital Era 3

Conclusion

Les longs ouvrages me font peur

Loin d’en épuiser la matière

On n’en doit prendre que la fleur !

(Long books scare me

Far from exhausting the matter

One must take its essence alone,)

Jean de La Fontaine,

Fables, Book VI, 1671, p. 24

As an inspirer and coordinator of the preceding works, I have endeavored to ensure their diversity and variety. As I conclude this series of essays on the digital era, I hope I will be forgiven for stepping out of the reserve that is required of an architect, and allowing some personal impressions to emerge. Since I began this project, more than 6 years have passed, a short period of time for history, but interminable if one thinks that tomorrow will be different from today and that everything depends on it, because a few years have sometimes been enough to reverse destiny: in modern France, only 4 years separated the revolutionary Convention from the Consulate, which prepared the First Empire; conversely, other essential changes of the 19th century were spread over three generations. Let us be wary: change is not always rapid; it can be profound without being immediate.

I am interested in the digital technology just as we were interested in coal around 1800 and in oil in 1900: it is part of our reality! However, I fear commonplaces and wish to remain faithful to the experimental method, on which the observation and analysis of the real world have been based for thousands of years. As far as knowledge and learning are concerned, evidence ...