Page 108 - Carbon Capitalism and Communication Confronting Climate Crisis

CHAPTER 8

The Next Internet

Vincent Mosco

Following from his 2014 book, To the Cloud: Big Data in a Turbulent
World, Vincent Mosco sees the internet of things, cloud computing and
big data analytics as the three pillars of the Next Internet. The Next
Internet will be more highly centralised, commercial and controlled than
the version we are used to. Mosco posits that it has great potential for social
good, but also poses significant social problems.
It would be presumptuous to map out the precise composition of the
next stage in the digital world, but it is reasonable to conclude that the
Internet, as we have known it for almost three decades, is changing and
that the Next Internet may do more to disrupt the world than its older
sibling. The Next Internet is far from fully formed and still bears some of
the characteristics of the original one born in 1989. But it is growing
rapidly and is already challenging its founders’ vision of a democratic,
decentralized and pluralistic digital world. The Next Internet brings
together three interconnected systems: cloud computing, big data analytics
and the Internet of Things. It promises centralized data storage and ser-
vices in vast digital factories that process massive streams of information
gathered by networked sensors stored in every possible consumer, indus-
trial and office device, as well as in living bodies. But the Next Internet is

V. Mosco (&)
Queen’s University, Kingston, Canada
e-mail: moscov@mac.com

© The Author(s) 2017 95
B. Brevini and G. Murdock (eds.), Carbon Capitalism and Communication,
Palgrave Studies in Media and Environmental Communication,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-57876-7_8