Of the three words in your book’s title, “Intelligent Wireless Web” the word “intelligent” really strikes me as adding a new and much deeper meaning to the wireless Web discussion. I was particularly intrigued by your exploration of the concept of Web intelligence, how the Web learns, where Web intelligence lies, and the push to formulate a Web IQ. Does your interest in this subject stem more from the challenges posed by the intelligence questions or the wireless ones?
Alesso: Intelligence is central to our thesis for the ‘Next Generation Web,’ which Dr. Smith and I foreshadow in our new book, “The Intelligent Wireless Web.” Our expectation is that intelligent programming will offer increasingly valuable Web transactions, while wireless connectivity will ‘stretch’ our computer access to keep us connected in a nearly continuous fashion. The result could be improving our efficiency and productivity as this process becomes more uniformly adopted.
Let me explain a little about what we mean by intelligent programming. Intelligence usually refers to the ability to reason, solve problems and learn new things. And notwithstanding the difficulty of defining intelligence, even among experts, it is worth recognizing that terms such as “artificial intelligence”, “intelligent agents”, “smart machines” refer to the performance of functions that mimic those associated with human intelligence. So, as we begin to add more intelligent agents, smart applications and Artificial Intelligence (AI) programs to Web sites, we will have to explore some uncharted territory and face some probing and provocative questions, such as:
- How smart are Web applications today?
- What is Web intelligence?
- How does the Web learn?
- Where does Web intelligence reside?
In our book, we discuss how to introduce intelligence to enlighten the optical pathways that inhabit the Web. But for now, let consider that the Web consists primarily as a huge number of data nodes (containing texts, pictures, movies, sounds). The data nodes are connected through hyperlinks to form `hyper-networks’ that collectively can represent complex ideas and concepts above the level of the individual data. However, the Web does not currently perform many sophisticated tasks with this data. The Web merely stores and retrieves information even after considering some of the “intelligent applications” in use today (including intelligent agents, Portals, and Web Services).
So far, the Web does not have some of the vital ingredients it needs, such as, a global database scheme, or a global error-correcting feedback mechanism, or a logic layer protocol, or a method of adopting Learning Algorithms systematically throughout its architecture or universally accepted knowledge bases with inference engines. As a result, we may say that the Web continues to grow and evolve, but it does not adapt. And adapting is an essential ingredient of learning. So the jury is still out on defining the Web as intelligent, but we can still consider ways to change the Web to give it the capabilities to adapt and therefore, sometime in the future, perhaps to learn.
Of the five emerging technology areas you identify as necessary to fulfill the vision of an intelligent wireless web, which do you believe will be the hardest to solve, and which do you expect to be the easiest?
Alesso: The development of the next generation of technologies will happen concurrently, for the most part, as each advance encourages progress in associated fields. I suspect, however, the intelligent programming will take the longest to develop simple because it will never be completed. The search for knowledge is often referred to as an insatiable appetite and I suspect this will be shown to be true for the Web. As we are able to produce Learning Algorithms that prove effective, we will experience positive feedback that encourages even more experimentation and progress. Just as there are always more questions than answers there is always more to learn.
Alternatively, there are some technologies that show a clear path to an important end-point for the Wireless Web. Wireless LAN and the WPAN for your Personal Space are becoming commonplace within our Internet infrastructure already. They bridge gaps for last mile delivery, where digging and laying of optical cable within inner cities is expensively prohibited. In addition, despite some stumbling about, broadband wireless handheld devices will make tremendous penetration within the next two years
On a 1-10 scale (with 10 being the furthest evolution we can now imagine, how far along are we on the journey to the intelligent wireless web? Corollary question: How would you describe the “science-fiction like end point”?
Alesso: There are a few distinct time markers by which you can measure our progress toward building the Intelligent Wireless Web. The first will be the integration of wired and wireless networks within just the next two years. As handheld devices become wide spread, demand for improved access and performance will grows. There should be distinct behavior changes in worker transactions and customer spending habits to illustrate this access. News reports and company stock prices should reflect this important trend.
Then, in 2005, the prototype of MIT’s Project Oxygen should be complete and reporting results. Without a doubt, the scientific community should be buzzing about whether it demonstrates success or failure. If it shows successful progress in many of the technologies necessary for the Intelligent Wireless Web, then I expect it will have a ‘cyclone effect’ of drawing technology research and development into its sphere of influence, as research laboratories rush to get on board the ‘discovery express.’
Progress on user interfaces, such as, touch, writing and speech recognition is continuing and will expand. However, several reports have found that the error rate of these technologies make them unattractive to consumers. We will have to wait until trustworthy applications are available before we will see wholesale replacement of small handheld device’s keyboards. Never the less, the time scale for this progress should be closer to 5 years than 10 years.
Again the final laggard will prove to be intelligent programming. As we have already discussed, it will never be completely finished.
So how far are we on this path? Actually, we have already seen nearly every technological necessity already demonstrated in the laboratory. It is more a matter of power, efficiency and cost to produce an equivalent outcome for the masses. So let’s say, in answer to your original question, that we are at 5 on the evolutionary ladder and that we will be at an 8 within another five years. We should expect the results to be sporadic, however. That is, the technology will not be uniformly distributed around the globe. Pockets, such as, Universities and large enterprises will most likely have a disproportional amount of the technological progress, while rural less populated areas will have to wait.
But the science fiction end-point of the Intelligent Wireless Web is not just possible, it is very highly likely outcome within the next decade.
You say how fast we communicate is becoming as important as what we have to say. Do you think our communication will become more intelligent the faster we communicate with each other?
Alesso: Fast-talking has never been seriously confused with intelligent conversation. Never the less, you should not doubt that a speedy answer is sometime your only chance for any answer.
There is a humorous commercial being run on television these days that perfectly illustrates this point. The commercial shows a young couple enjoying a romantic dinner at a fancy restaurant when the lady says, ”I love you, John.” The young man sits stone-faced, as several uncomfortable seconds go by. The young lady flushes and leaves. Then, the young man leans forward and says, “I love you too.” Alas, it is too late. She is gone.
For businessmen and engineers alike, rapidly solving a critical problem may be their only opportunity to solve that particular problem. Once missed, you may be faced with a brand new situation requiring greater effort to resolve.
The point is, that a timely answer is sometimes the only chance you get. You had better be well connected, well informed and ready to deliver.
What are the unique challenges of writing for the technology market?
Alesso: Proprietary competition is the most difficult and unique challenge because competing vendors are deliberately secretive to protect their product’s advantages. In addition competitors will put out a product with a great deal of hype, sometimes as vaporware. As a result, a technology writer must gain first hand knowledge of products to gage actual performance and capability. In addition, when exploring a complex integration of various converging technologies the problem becomes complicated by system compatibilities and interactions.
Eventually as standards develop these problems disappear, but it is just in this period of chaos when the technology writer is most needed. He can offer others a change to side-step all the proprietary pitfalls between rival systems.
In my books, I try to particularly draw comparisons between rival products and identify their advantages and disadvantages. In addition, I look at existing standards and explore possibilities of future convergence.
You were an engineer before you began your writing career, what made you decide to start writing?
Alesso: I was an engineer at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory for over twenty years. Half of that time, I was a Group Leader over computational physicists and engineers. I led a variety of advanced research programs; including efforts involving developing state-of-the-art parallel processing physics computations.
Throughout my time as an engineer, I have written computer code in over a dozen different languages for many different operating systems, designed experiments, and written papers, journal articles and reports.
So, actually I was doing various forms of writing throughout my career. Only now I have found a great deal of satisfaction in writing books. I guess it is because I have always been a “Big Picture” thinker and a book gives me both the latitude and length to explore a subject to a depth I can enjoy.
“We could all be billionaires. Politics are all invalid. War is obsolete.”
R. Buckminster Fuller
Impossible Dreamer
“By 1985 we will know what way it’s going to be — whether we will all be destroyed or on our way to Utopia and finding a new way of living.”
Educator,
inventor,
mathematician,
philosopher,
poet and prophet …
R. Buckminster Fuller
is truly a model for future man.
Called the Leonardo da Vinci of our time, “Bucky” has contributed to nearly every aspect of life on Spaceship Earth, a term he coined. He is best known for his geodesic dome invented in 1947, an architectural breakthrough which uses less structural material to enclose more space than any other building design. Other inventions include his 1927 low-cost, mass-produced Dymaxion House, a “dwelling machine” deliverably by helicopter and installed as easily and quickly as a telephone pole; his Dymaxion Wolrd Map, which contains no distortion of land areas; his World Game, played with computer to predict and presolve problems of distribution of the world’s resources; and his 25 books, including Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, Critical Path, and Grunch of Giants, just released (in 1982). At age 87, Fuller is busier than ever writing, speaking and spinning the most hopeful vision of our age. In his geodesic crystal ball he can see the possibility of all humanity living at a higher standard than ever before dreamed, and the equally real chance of the planet’s total destruction. In this late 1982 interview he explains why a human utopia is now within reach, and talks about the life-and-death decisions facing mankind.
About this interview. This interview — believed to be R. Buckminster Fuller’s last– was conducted by John Gerstner at Fuller’s home in Pacific Palisades, California, in November, 1982. Fuller died on July 1st 1983 at the age of 88. His wife, Anne, died just 36 hours later, on July 3rd, one week before their 67th anniversary. What is so remarkable to this day is the unflinching optimism and prescient foresight that Fuller practiced until his death. Although he spoke the words in this interview more than 20 years ago, the messages for humanity still ring amazingly true. This interview of Fuller was first published in the Spring 1983 10th anniversay issue of JD Journal, the corporate magazine of John Deere.
GERSTNER: You’re the first person I’ve met who has spent a lifetime thinking about the problems facing the planet and who actually has worked out a plan to allow the world to survive and prosper at an unprecedented level. What could life be like for humans in the best future that you can imagine?
FULLER: I know that if we stop wasting our money on armaments and use our high technology on livingry instead of weaponry, within 10 years we could have all humanity, all 4 1/2 billion, living at a higher standard than anybody has ever known. In other words, we could have a billion billionaires. It is now physically and technologically possible. All the warring is on the misassumption of all politics that there is a fundamental inadequacy of life support. This is incorrect. It was correct until yesterday, but not today.
GERSTNER: What if population doubles?
FULLER: I have plotted the population information of all the nations on the planet right now, and each of the 160 nations shows that as the electrical energy consumption per capita rises, the birth rate descends at exactly the same rate. In the most advanced countries, population has already stopped increasing. The population will never go beyond 6 billion. When people are successful they stop making babies; nature regulates local birth rates so there will be adequate human life going despite sickness and ill-fortune.
GERSTNER: You say in Critical Path that the computer will allow people to work only 141/2 years to earn their living. Do you still see work as being central to most people’s lives even if they aren’t required to work for economic reasons?
FULLER: I can think of nothing more powerful in human life than the drive to demonstrate competence in respect to the challenges. So there would be great competition to see who is going to be allowed to do the work. Nobody is going to be paid for it. You will do it because you like to.
GERSTNER: What impact might human greed or laziness have on your projections?
FULLER: We can go 30 days without food. We can go about a week without water, but less than two minutes without air. When people have to have something and don’t get it they panic and go looking out for themselves. So I find that selfishness and aggressiveness are innate only as fail-safe secondary circuits to keep life itself going. Selfishness comes out because humans have been deprived in some great way.
GERSTNER: What do you consider yourself, an architect, inventor, thinker, futurist?
FULLER: I call myself a comprehensivist.
GERSTNER: There aren’t too many comprehensivists around, are there?
FULLER: Every child is born so, but the power structure funnels it. The power structure has a grand strategy that is inherent: divide and conquer, to keep conquered, keep divided. For eons, specialization has been the means of keeping bright people professionally divided and powerless.
GERSTNER: In the current recession, a lot of people want work but can’t find it. Yet people want and need things that aren’t being produced. Has the system broken down?
FULLER: Yes, the system is not correct, but evolution is at work and eventually we are going to lay off everybody.
GERSTNER: Because of automation?
FULLER: Yes.
GERSTNER: Should people be afraid of that?
FULLER: No. They should be afraid of not being paid now. The system as run is that they are supposed to die if they don’t earn their living. The system is based on the misassumption that there is not enough to go around.
GERSTNER: How well known is your discovery that, because we have learned to produce so much more per each pound of materials and erg of energy and second of time invested, there is now for the first time in history plenty to go around?
FULLER: It is very difficult to say, but nature has me on the TV and on the plat- form so frequently that there are many millions now who comprehend what I am saying and they are spreading the news. For instance, one 175-pound trans-ocean satellite communication system can out-perform 375,000 tons of trans-ocean copper cabling in both fidelity and capacity of performance. One human-baby’s-little- toenail-size silicon chip contains all of the trigonometric and calculus computing capability, plus all the information-storing and retrieving requirements of a large corporation. One earthquake- and hurricane- proof geodesic dome of 300 tons can enclose the same volume of space as that of the 80,000-ton Queen Mary, or the circa-l-million-ton cathedral Notre Dame. So narrowly focused are the specialists’ scientists who make the more-with-less technology breakthroughs that they do not see the synergetic significance of their individual gains along with the myriads of others which altogether now make possible the physical success of all humanity, the obsolescence of all politics, and replacement by a world-embracing, selfishly incorruptible, electronic democracy.
GERSTNER: Yet you say we are at a very critical stage in human history.
FULLER: It’s very touch-and-go as to whether the news that there is enough for everybody can get around fast enough. The invisible technology that people don’t understand is their only means of exercising their option to make it on this planet. I say 1985 is the critical year. It’s right at hand. In other words, within the next two or three years we will know whether humans are going to stay on this planet or not.
GERSTNER: Is that mainly because of the arms buildup and the confrontation between the U.S. and Russia?
FULLER: That is nothing. That is a mess man has got to get rid of. It is clear as can be that up to now monev makes the most money with weapons. The big rnoney has to keep their media saving that Russia is a threat in order to warrant spending all these billions of the people’s money. I am sorry to say it is rather a mean picture. Russia has no interest whatsoever in destroying us.
After World War II when we officially turned against Russia, the Russian leaders were all wearing peasant clothes. They’re not wearing them anymore, because thev discovered that evolution had introduced a completely different revolution… a revolution of benignly pulling the bottom up instead of revengefully pulling the top down. The USSR is intent on comprehensive disarmament so that thev can turn their industrial productivity on their people which the arms race frustrates. That means that the United States doesn’t have anything to worry about in Russia. The best thing to worry about is evervbody’s standard of living. it’s a very tough one, but everybody has to be a billionaire.
GERSTNER: How is this going to occur?
FULLER: The way it’s going to occur is that the power structure is getting itself all involved with money, and monevy is not wealth. And thev have been stretching it bevond its popular credibility. Mv book Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth is the most popular English-language book in China now. It describes and differentiates between wealth and money. I make it clear that wealth is everything that humanity has accomplished to take care of a given number of humans for a given number of forward calendar days. This wealth is basically of two kinds. The first one is phvsical–the walls that keep you warm, clothing, food, etc. Anvthing that is phvsical is energy and it is agreed bv scientists from the beginning of this centurv that energy cannot be created or destroyed. The other component of wealth is the know-how, the metaphysical, the discoverv of cosmic principles by the mind and the ability to use them. The very extraordinary thing about the metaphysical know-how is that every time we use it, we alwavs learn more; you cannot learn less. Since the phvsical part cannot decrease and the metaphysical can only increase, wealth is something that can only increase–it’s very exciting.
So we are in an incredible position todav with all these banks around. Every building is a bank. And everyone is playing games with our money there, and increasing interest rates. The big power structure today is really going to be in trouble. The United States government is completely bust. It can’t pay the interest on its debt. To be talking about buying armaments is preposterous.
GERSTNER: Do you expect a crash?
FULLER. Yes, a world accounting crash, very soon.
GERSTNER: And this will be beyond the U.S.?
FULLER: It will be the whole world.
GERSTNER: You say that the 160 nations of the world act as 166 blood clots blocking the free and unobstructed exchange of ideas, scrap metals, tools, and real wealth. But isn’t it hard to imagine the world’s people giving up their strong nationalistic instincts?
FULLER: No, it isn’t. I have been around the world 48 times. The United States isn’t a nation. It is a crossbreeding world of humans. In one section of Los Angeles there are 81 nations’ people interbreeding.
R. Buckminster Fuller
In honor of the 50th anniversary of Buckminster Fuller’s patent for the geodesic dome, the U.S. Postal Service issued these Buckminster Fuller Commemorative stamps in the fall of 2004. The image is based on a Time magazine cover illustration by Boris Artzybasheff. On the back of each stamp is this text: “Renouned as the mind behind the geodesic dome, R. Buckminster Fuller (1895-1983) was an inventor, architect, engineer designer, geometrician, cartographer, and philosopher. His pioneering solutions to the world’s problems reflected his commitment to using innovative design to improve human lives.” You can learn more a man ahead of his time, R. Buckminster Fuller, at the Buckminster Fuller Institute.
GERSTNER: What has been the most important invention in your lifetime?
FULLER: I was born in 1895. Reality when I was born was everything you could see, smell, touch and hear. The year I was born, X-rays were discovered and Marconi invented the wireless. When I was 3 vears old, the electron was isolated. When I was at Harvard, in the back of my physics book there were some yellow pages that had been glued in called “electricity.” From that time on, technology disappeared completely into the invisible reality of alloys, chemistries, electronics. Today, 99.999 percent of everything that is going to affect all our tomorrows is being conducted in the realm of reality non-contactible bv the human senses. It’s a completely different game. We’ve actually million-folded the realms of reality that we employ. Until I was 28, we knew astronomically only of the Milky Way. When I was 28, Hubble discovered another galaxy. Wow! Up to two weeks ago we had discovered two billion galaxies and two weeks ago we discovered another 200 billion galaxies. That gives you an idea of the magnitudes in the rate of acceleration now characterizing all human affairs.
GERSTNER: We are then greatly advanced from when you were born.
FULLER: When I was born, humanity on our planet was 95 percent illiterate. Today humanity is 65 percent literate. The average six-year-old now has a vocabulary of 5,000 words. The average workman when I was voung had only 100 words. They mainly talked the way they spat.
GERSTNER: Should we legitimately fear intelligent machines taking over?
FULLER: Absolutely not. I differentiate between brain and mind. Machines can do what our brains do. The brains of all creatures are alwavs and onlv recording and integrating the information of our senses — smelling, seeing, touching, hearing. We find then the human mind from time to time discovering a mathematical relationship that is purely intellectual and can onlv be expressed that way. There’s an intellectual integrity operating in the universe. The human mind has some access to the great design of the universe. No other creature has it nor can employ this information objectively. Wow! This means that we humans are here for some very important reasons which we have not as yet come to think out publicly. I made the working assumption that we are here as local Universe information-gatherers, and local Universe problem-solvers in support of the integrity of an eternally regenerative Universe.
GERSTNER: So the mind makes the diifference?
FULLER: We are completely metaphysical. We’re not our body. At mv age, I have consumed over 300 tons of food, air and water that became temporarily, my hair, flesh and bones, and I am sure that’s not me. We’re not physical. What is unique about humans is this mind thing.
GERSTNER: In 1927, at age 32, you decided to make vour life into a scientific experiment to see what–if anvthing–one average human could do to improve the support and success of all human life aboard Spaceship Earth, and not for monetary reasons. Is this something that you would expect other people to do?
FULLER: No. Most people assume that you have to earn a living. That’s what is drilled into them. And I made up my mind to run this experiment to see what would happen if you paid no attention to that, and only concentrated on trying to help man-kind succeed on the planet. I saw that the grass didn’t have to pay the clouds to rain, and that all the money business was a very small game.
GERSTNER: And you’d recommend this?
FULLER: I never give advice to others. I am saving that humans are a verv good invention and I’d like to develop the environmental artifacts that will complement them. If I’m doing that, if I’m doing what the Universe would like me to do — trying to make humans a success, then I’ll survive. And I have. I’ve really experienced miracles.
GERSTNER: Are you worried about a nuclear holocaust?
FULLER: Yes. There are an enormous number of short-sighted, selfish people who think they can get away with limited nuclear bomb warfare. And if anybody starts one they are all going to go off automatically due to the automation of the electronic alerting svstem. So we are in constant peril. I call it absolute peril. We have the capability of making it now but we are on touch and go. By 1985 we will know what way it’s going to be — whether we will all be destroyed or on our way to Utopia and finding a new way of living.
How has it happened that the great questions of where we are going are all being handled bv politicians? It goes back to Thomas Malthus and the rise of the British Empire. In 1805, compiling data for the first fime on a closed, spherical system, he concluded that life-support capability was increasing at only an arithmetical rate and population was increasing geometrically. Therefore, only a few humans were destined to survive successfully. So the working assumption of all political economics is that there is not enough to go around which is now actually invalid. So politics are all invalid. War is obsolete. We may be able to see some sort of sweeping way in which it becomes evident that the authority is plaving only money-making games with those bombs and so forth. But it will take some time. Things are happening, but we don’t have any instant babies. The biggest things take the longest.
GERSTNER: Did you say that there may be some supernatural impact or event that would affect our decision as to whether we go toward weaponry or livingry?
FULLER: No, only supernatural to the extent that we have a majority who are literate and doing their own thinking. Doing what I call discovering their own access to the great intellect governing Universe. I think that, next to the atomic bombs, the most dangerous things on our planet today are the organized religions … each one saying they have a monopoly on access to God and to heaven. They get people worked up and start the fires going. I find the great antibody to this is the young people making their own discoveries and doing their own thinking. I say everybody has their own hotline to God. I say humans as an invention are in final exam. Is the individual human able to demonstrate enough intellectual courage and integrity to justify his divine insights? Are humans going to be able to constructively and livingly use their beautiful minds and the cosmic laws to which we all have access? If they do, we’ll make it. This is the big test.
GERSTNER: But 1985 is so near.
FULLER: More will happen between now and 1985 than has happened in the whole of history up to now. Changes are coming that fast.
GERSTNER: Wouldn’t your Dymaxion House imply that we would all be living in the same house? Doesn’t this conformity go against the grain of individuals?
FULLER: Do you want three eyes and five nostrils? You have been living in a very standard device for a long time–the human organism. The more the technological uniformity, the more individuality is free to articulate.
GERSTNER: Education plays such a key role. What needs to happen to improve our current educational system?
FULLER: Get rid of it.
GERSTNER: Replace it with video?
FULLER: Video and computer. You don’t go into Grand Central Station to study. You go to your own home. And then you can come together for social experience.
GERSTNER: What recommendations do you have for people to prepare for the future?
FULLER: Listen to the truth. My great aunt, Margaret Fuller, said “truth is the nursing mother of genius.”
GERSTNER: Do you believe in an afterlife?
FULLER: I don’t believe in anything. But it’s obvious there could be. I say we are not physical: whatever we are is metaphysical. Whatever we are doesn’t die when our body dies. Life is not this body.
GERSTNER: You speculate that man arrived on the planet fully developed?
FULLER: I think it is a very reasonable assumption, yes.
GERSTNER: Does that imply that he might have been sent here by another intelligent force?
FULLER: Yes. It’s very probable.
GERSTNER: So you have no difficulty in accepting the idea that there are many other life forms on many other planets?
FULLER: No. They won’t look like us unless they come from the particular kind of biosphere we have. Humans consist 60 percent of water. Water freezes and boils within close limits.
GERSTNER: Do you expect us to inhabit space?
FULLER. That’s all we’ve ever done. We’re on a very lonely little spaceship.
GERSTNER: Do you expect us to inhabit other little space ships?
FULLER: We’ve already done it.
GERSTNER: Are you convinced that your work will go on after you?
FULLER: I certainly don’t do it for that purpose. I’m eager to help my fellow humans appreciate some of the extraordinary conditions under which we are conceived and developed.
GERSTNER: But you’re not intending to change the world?
FULLER: I never try to in any way. I don’t try to outguess God.
GERSTNER: Are you an optimist?
FULLER: No. To discover that we have an option to render all humanity physically successful is not to be optimistic. I think it is absolutely touch-and-go.
DIGITAL DAD
Don Tapscott
“For the first time in human history, children are an authority on the big revolution that is changing every institution in society.”
Sixth in a series of interviews on ‘The Civilization of Cyberspace’ by John Gerstner, ABC, first published in the December 1999 issue of Communication World Magazine.
A few weeks ago, I bought my three-year-old grandson, Mason, an educational CD-ROM. I sat him on my lap in front of the computer and proceeded to show him how to launch the program. He was ecstatic, because this was the first time I actually let him do more than just peck at keys, and it’s been obvious for quite a while that Mason loves computers.
“First, go to Start, then Run, then Browse, then D Drive,” I told him clicking the mouse slowly on each word, as if he could read. “Click the abcd.exe,” I showed him. “Then hit OK.” After this demo, I turned the mouse over to him, his first solo on a computer Without a shred of hesitation, he quickly went through all the steps I had showed him. He shook with laughter when the CD started bleating out the theme song I would soon regret ever buying: “There was an old lady who swallowed a fly.” Wow, I thought. My grandson is one of Don Tapscott’s “Digital Kids.”
According to Tapscott, cyber-author and researcher, there are now more than 88 million of them (one to 21 year-olds) in the U.S. and Canada alone. These are the first kids to grow up so surrounded by digital technology that they see it as nothing special. This so-called Net Generation is e-mailing, chatting, gaming, learning, shopping, working and inventing their own virtual world… at a passion and pace that is baffling to most webophyte adults.
In researching this phenomenon for his latest book, “Growing Up Digital,” Tapscott found that two-thirds of the “Net Generation” use a personal computer either at home or in school. According to Teenage Research Unlimited (TRU), the percentage of teens who say it is “in” to be online climbed from 50 percent in 1994 to 88 percent in 1997, on a par with dating and going to the mall. “E-mail me” is this generation’s parting shot.
To be sure, this is the group on the have-side of the “digital divide.” More than half of the 1.2 billion children in the world (aged six to 11) have never placed a phone call yet. Still, says Tapscott, the N-Gen is well worth paying attention to, if for no other reason than that they are destined to be the dominant voice of the 21st century. “Our kids are a formidable force for social transformation,” he says.
“Digital Kids” are just one of the cyber-topics Tapscott is speaking and writing about non-stop these days. As chair of the Alliance for Converging Technologies, a think rank in his hometown of Toronto, he has serious investigations under way on how the Net is changing business, the economy and society.
Why? “There has never been any technology or innovation in human history that comes close in the Net’s speed of adoption, significance and impact,” he says.
The velocity of change is stunning, Tapscott adds. “Products are becoming digital. Markets are becoming electronic. Industries are in upheaval. Organizations have to fundamentally rethink everything about themselves and their future. When information becomes digital and networked, walls fall and no business is safe.”
Tapscott speaks about such upheaval with the clarity and calm of… well… a wise parent. “Not to worry, you native webophobic adults,” Father Tapscott seems to be saying. “Trust and learn from your children.”
One thing I’ve already learned from Mason, who is now absolutely proficient in finding his favorite web site, nickjr.com, is that you don’t have to get stressed when a page takes forever to load. He just jumps off his stool and runs around the room doing his whirling dervish song-dance that only three-year-olds can do. When he sees his new page is loaded, he jumps back on the stool and grabs the mouse.
There’s still one thing I’m trying to teach Mason, though: how not to throw a major tantrum when his mother says it’s time to shut off the computer and go home.
GERSTNER: What single trait of youth gives them the greatest advantage in dealing with computers? Is it partly that they don’t even see the computer, just the words on the screen?
TAPSCOTT: I think that you have nailed it. For these kids, technology is like the air. My two children are teenagers. They’re incredulous that I can make a living writing, consulting and speaking about technology. To them it’s like the refrigerator and about as glamorous. It’s the applications and the people online and the functionality and the information that they care about, not the technology. So this is leading to a unique period in human history where for the first time, children are an authority on something that is really important. I was an authority on model trains when I was a kid. Today, children are an authority on the big revolution that is changing every institution in society. This is about to — like a tidal wave — sweep across all of our institutions. It is already affecting schools profoundly. The kids know more than their educators about the biggest innovation in learning ever.
GERSTNER: Generation gaps are nothing new. Does youths’ advantage in technology aptitude complicate that tradition? What’s different now?
TAPSCOTT: In the sixties, when there was a generation gap, the big differences between kids and parents were over values and ideology. Today, we have more of a generation lap, where kids are lapping their parents on the info track. And that does cause some fear and unease. As John Seely Brown at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center says, “The eleven-year old at the breakfast table is an authority.” Kids coming into the work force now know more about the most powerful tool for business competitiveness than managers who have been there for many years. We also fear what we don’t understand, and fear gets in the way of doing the right thing, so we mistrust kids. We try to slap blocking software on them in the home rather than discussing values and negotiating agreements about proper and improper Internet use. In the schools, we deny kids access to the computers and the Internet because we don’t understand how it may change the model of learning. And in the work place, ditto. Why nor be like Procter and Gamble which has implem ented a reverse mentoring program? They used to have older employees mentor new employees in the P&G way. Now they have new young employees mentor older P&G employees in the Net-Gen way.
GERSTNER: The criticism I hear about computer-assisted learning is that children are going to lose the discipline and pleasure of taking a book off the shelf and quietly reading and reflecting on it. What’s your answer to that?
TAPSCOTT: The main victim of time spent online is not reading books, it is television. TV took away 24 hours of the week for the baby boomers. Television viewing in American homes where children are online is cratering. Furthermore, there is no evidence kids are reading novels less. As for textbooks and finding information, well absolutely, they naturally turn to their computer as opposed to turning to an encyclopedia or to a newspaper to find out when a show is playing and so on. Reflecting on a textbook will become a thing of the past, absolutely. But it’s just the medium that is changing, not the amount of reflection.
GERSTNER: Alan Kay of Apple Computer said television should have been the last mass communication medium to be naively designed and put into the world without a surgeon general’s warning. Do you think someone should have spent more time thinking about all the bad things people would do with the Internet before it was unleashed?
TAPSCOTT: I think that was a tongue-in-cheek comment on his part. Though there is a dark side to this technology, it also offers a profound and far-reaching opportunity to improve the way that wealth is created and dramatically enhance social development. The only way that we’ll really understand both the promise and the peril is to experience it and to learn from it. It’s very difficult in the abstract to predict the future. I’m of the school that believes the future is not something to be predicted, it’s something to be achieved. We just need to use this technology and as we go along to develop the social norms and agreements — and in some cases even legislation — that will help ensure that this smaller world our kids inherit is a better one.
GERSTNER: You entered the world of cyberspace a lot before many of us. How might you describe cyberspace to someone who has never experienced it, or for that matter hasn’t even seen a telephone, which is about half the world’s population, I guess? What does cyberspace feel like to you?
TAPSCOTT: Those are two different questions. I wouldn’t describe it to someone who had never experienced a telephone. I work hard to create the conditions whereby they could have a telephone and also have Internet access. There’s no reason why this technology cannot be accessible to everyone. The cost is dropping. We as business leaders have the responsibility to ensure that people get sufficient access.
Now what does cyberspace mean to me? That’s a very different thing. I would say that this is not just about the networking of technology. It’s about the networking of human intellect, in hope of breakthroughs in areas such as wealth creation and social development. I wonder if it’s possible that we can create some kind of consciousness where we’re “inter-networking” human intellect and know-how. I wonder if we could create organizations and societies that can actually learn. Perhaps the big obstacle to creating learning organizations is that we’ve had organizations that lack any kind of consciousness. Perhaps organizations that are not conscious, like people who are not conscious, cannot learn. So this is one of the big tantalizing opportunities for me.
GERSTNER: When you say organizations have been operating without a consciousness, what evidence do you have?
TAPSCOTT: There’s been no theory of conscious organizations. All organizations are unconscious, but as we Internet-work people’s minds perhaps we can achieve something where the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. In doing so maybe we can create organizations that can learn. When I give speeches, I try to be entertaining and funny and I tell stories because I find that people learn more when they are conscious. Perhaps the difficulty we have in creating learning organizations indicates that we’ve been missing the precondition, which is organizational consciousness.
GERSTNER: Is the Internet, then, the first real tool to allow organizations to achieve a measure of consciousness?
TAPSCOTT: You know what it’s like when you have a small team and you all work together on a project and you start to complete each other’s sentences. You’re starting to achieve some kind of collective consciousness, in a sense. Well, now we have a skin of networks that surrounds the planet. This collective consciousness now can be achieved across geographic boundaries and with people who have never met. That’s just one interesting opportunity in cyberspace.
GERSTNER: How would you label yourself?
TAPSCOTT: Fundamentally I’m a researcher. Everything that I do is based on research and my goal is to understand through investigation. I suppose I’m also interested in changing things, as I’m quite unsatisfied with our current business models and many of our social models as well.
GERSTNER: Is there a priority in your mind between those two — social and business?
TAPSCOTT: Increasingly, they’re becoming interconnected. Privacy is not just a social or ethical issue; it’s a business issue. Companies need to protect the privacy of customers or they will face a coming firestorm as the public wakes up to the fact that this very fundamental right can be destroyed irrevocably if we don’t change our behaviour.
The digital divide is not just a social or ethical issue; it’s a business issue. It’s not just that we’re creating a structural underclass, but that we’re creating a very volatile, explosive business situation as well. Increasingly I’m of the view that ethical behavior and business success will go hand in hand as people have more complete access to information.
GERSTNER: Did you really coin the term “paradigm shift”?
TAPSCOTT: No, the idea of a paradigm as a mental model was developed decades ago by Thomas Kuhn in a book called “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.” As far as I know, I was the first to analyze how technology and networking are changing business paradigms.
GERSTNER: You wrote “Paradigm Shift” in 1991, way before the dot-com fury hit. Did you use those two particular words for your title as a way of trying to shake people out of their tranquility and passivity?
TAPSCOTT: Absolutely. Sometimes a phrase can capture something profound that is occurring. Throughout this decade there has been a fundamental shift taking place in the nature and the role of technology and business. As the computer changes from being a tool to automate to becoming something much broader, a communication tool, and as this new medium of human communication extends out into the economy and society, we are beginning to fundamentally change the firm as we’ve known it. To call that a paradigm shift is not to misuse the term.
GERSTNER: You say that this new age of network intelligence is giving birth to a new economy, new politics, a new society — that businesses will be transformed, governments renewed, people will be able to reinvent themselves, all with the help of the new information technology. Did anyone say similar things when the last great transformation took place, from an agricultural to a manufacturing society? What makes this technological earthquake so great?
TAPSCOTT: In the last big shift there was a new communication medium, the printing press. Before the press, knowledge was concentrated in a tiny handful. As knowledge became more broadly distributed it began to change economies, power and institutions. Feudal structures broke down. We saw the rise of new socioeconomic classes, the creation of new forms of governments such as parliamentary democracy, and so on. The size of the change was never really understood until afterward. It is through the lens of hindsight we can see its vastness and also the role of the printing press in achieving those transformations.
We are smarter this time around; it has been possible at a very early stage of this thing to understand its main contours and dynamics. But we’re still in the early stages of understanding the new business models. At the Alliance for Converging Technologies, we describe the new forms of wealth creation as being “business webs.” Today’s company is one part of a digital eco-system brought together by the Internet. This Internet-worked enterprise is a completely different beast from the old industrial-age corporation, which was in turn completely different from the feudal craft shop of the penultimate agrarian economy.
GERSTNER: How seriously do you take information overload? Are you concerned about the quantity of information and what that might be doing to the quality? Does the bad drive out the good?
TAPSCOTT: Well, it’s an obvious problem for anybody who has been online. You can drown in data. But if you provide structure to data you get information. And if you provide context to information, you get knowledge. And if you provide human judgment and trans historical insights, perhaps we can get wisdom. What’s happening is that the Net is becoming not only ubiquitous and robust and high in bandwidth, but rich in functionality. There are all kinds of new agents, softbots, rating schemes and software applications and so on that are helping us manage this information.
The most primitive and first of these was the search engine. That, in a sense, helps you manage information. On the other hand, when you get 7,000 hits to your request, you suffer from overload. Fortunately search engines are becoming much more sophisticated. But we’re just at the very beginning of this. All kinds of new capabilities are growing so that you will be able to create a “virtual you” that understands you and knows what you consider to be junk and good stuff. The virtual you will help you manage all these environments while you sleep, presenting you with information that in a sense you have prejudged to be helpful. It can do this because you have provided the virtual you with the critical aspect of knowledge, which is context.
GERSTNER: Are you at all concerned about the blur between the physical you and the virtual you, and that some people may become schizophrenic?
TAPSCOTT: First of all, schizophrenia is a mental disorder, which is very carefully defined. It has to do with people being out of touch with reality to the point that they develop a psychosis, and there is no evidence in anybody’s research that shows participation online can cause schizophrenia, or for that matter, any psychotic disorder. This is just a question of fearing what we don’t understand. In my book “Growing Up Digital,” I looked at the kids who have grown up using all this stuff, participating in chat groups and virtual worlds and so on. The evidence is not that it causes some kind of disorientation. Indeed, the opposite is true. It helps very young people discover themselves and learn who they really are. For example, kids have different names for themselves online, called handles. You’re “Mooselips” or “Cyberchick” or someone. And if, for example, you say something online that is borderline racist, you get criticized very sharply. You think about it-and realize that that was really off and it’s not the re al you. Now, if you do that in the schoolyard, that remark can stick with you for years. In cyberspace, you just change your handle and come back as some body else, and that somebody else is a lot closer to who “you” really are. So it turns out that during adolescence, it’s actually a very good and helpful environment where kids can go through that process of discovering themselves and who they are. It’s the opposite of what people fear.
GERSTNER: Your writings about the Internet and the new digital economy are often laced with the words “if we do this right.” From your vantage point, what are we doing right, and what are we doing wrong, and whom should we praise and blame?
TAPSCOTT: Well, it depends on which culture you are referring to. In America, the big thing we are doing right is that we are using the technology. We are not afraid of it. In other cultures, senior managers don’t use computers and the Internet because that’s for secretaries to do. Somehow in America we have found the curiosity to experience the new communication medium directly, and this personal use is the precondition for any kind of comprehension. You can’t understand how the Net will change the business models, unless you use it yourself with your own fingers. We also have a lot of openness and curiosity regarding new business models and that’s going to be very important as the traditional firm is bypassed and replaced.
As for what we are doing wrong, I think we are moving too slowly in figuring out how to manage the dark-side issues. We try to deal with porn and sleaze by undesirable, infeasible and unnecessary instruments like censorship. We are not moving fast enough to bridge the digital divide. On the question of privacy, we have resisted government legislation to deal with this issue. Yet the private sector, with a few exceptions has not fully stepped up to its responsibilities to ensure that information is protected and used for the purposes for which it was collected.
We have barely begun to think about how the Net will change the nature of the democratic process and the future of democracy, the relationship between citizens and their state; and, I would add, the nature of the state itself. My group, The Alliance for Converging Technologies, has launched a multi-million-dollar initiative on this issue called Governance in the Digital Economy.
There are many difficult issues, but there is no technological imperative. There’s nothing inherent in the technology that assures that we will see the good side or the dark side. It’s not technology that designs institutions and values and rules and governments and societies; it’s people.
GERSTNER: Do you think than that is a force for or against democracy, as we know it?
TAPSCOTT: I think the Net has awesome neutrality. It can be the most powerful force for democracy ever. But unscrupulous people can also abuse it. If, for example, we implemented something like the so-called electronic Town Hall, where people could vote every night after the evening news, I’d call that the electronic mob. So, again, we as human beings need to shape this powerful new medium for the common good. Past technological revolutions — the broadcast media, printing press and so on — were all centralized, one-to-many media, and therefore carried the values of their powerful owners. This new medium is the antithesis of that. It’s distributed, highly malleable, one-to-one and many-to-many. Ultimately it will be what we want it to be.
GERSTNER: What do you see beyond the Internet? What’s the next big thing after that? Or is there anything?
Well, for silicon- and network-based technologies, today’s Internet is equivalent to the first movable type of the Gutenberg bible. We’re in the early days of a vast new multimedia communication infrastructure. We can only just TAPSCOTT: imagine in our wildest dreams where that will take us. Beyond that, clearly there’s a whole biotechnology revolution that is yet unstarted. This holds promise in many other areas, not just in changing the way that we compute things, but in eradicating many blights and diseases. That surely will have a huge effect on the quality of life.
GERSTNER: Do you see any connection between the year 2000 and talk about transformation of society, etc.? Do you find there is any connection here, or is this just a coincidence?
TAPSCOTT: I think it’s a coincidence. The year 2000 problem is a real one that needs to be confronted and is being solved in most developed countries. But I’m not someone who sees some great mystical meaning in Y2K. I am a scientist by training and by general predilection.
GERSTNER: What’s the best future you can imagine?
TAPSCOTT: That we achieve an awakening on this planet. That this new communication medium help us better understand each other and learn from each other. That we change our models of how wealth is created. That we harness the powerful energy of networked human intellect to solve the enormous and dangerous social problems that have vexed us for many years. There is no reason economically why there should be hunger, why people should be dying of cholera, or why all children should not be vaccinated and educated and should not get to participate fully in the global economy and the emerging global society. It’s really up to us humans to exploit this potential.
GERSTNER: If you were a betting man, and I guess we all are in this regard, are you betting on the positive outcome, here, or…?
TAPSCOTT: To me the future is not something to be predicted, it’s something to be achieved. I’m working hard to do my little bit in achieving that kind of future. If tens of millions of others join, we can create a very different kind of social order on this planet.
Manuel Castells
Cyber-Scientist
“The illusion we can live on a wonderful, shrinking planet, and ignore the 40 percent of the population hardly surviving with less than two dollars a day, is simply self-denial. Epidemics, wars, terrorism and moral outrage will reach us in our protected world.”
This interview by John Gerstner ABC, first published in the March 1999 issue of Communication World, dissects Castells’ 1,500-page encyclopedic trilogy, The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture, published in 1998. Castells has been described by The Economist as “the first significant philosopher of cyberspace.” Castells’ latest book is The Internet Galaxy.
“The 21st century will not be a dark age. Neither will it deliver to most people the bounties promised by the most extraordinary technological revolution in history. Rather, it may well be characterized by informed bewilderment.”
“It is indeed, brave or not, a new world.”
“The glut-of-information idea is simply a primitive, misleading, cheap shot of neo-Luddites. There can never be enough information.”
Could there be any connection between the amazing rise of global information technology and…
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…the alarming increase in the sexual exploitation of children?
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The spread of U.S. militia hate groups and religious fundamentalism?
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The radical destruction of the patriarchal family?
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The menacing rise of illegal drug and weapons trafficking by global crime syndicates?
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The gross income inequality between the world’s richest and poorest nations?
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The alarming and rising number of adults under correctional supervision?
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The overwhelming sense of confusion in the Information Age?
Unfortunately, yes to all, says Manuel Castells, professor of sociology and planning at the University of California, Berkeley. “The rise of informationalism at the end of this millennium is intertwined with rising inequality and social exclusion throughout the world. The global network society is shaking institutions, transforming cultures, creating wealth and inducing poverty, spurring greed, innovation and hope, while simultaneously imposing hardship and instilling despair. It is indeed, brave or not, a new world.”
Castells did not arrive on this dark side of cyberspace easily or lightly. He is almost apologetic for the negative news, as if it were his fault. With the perseverance of a monk and the shrewdness of a very sharp prosecuting attorney, he has spent the past 14 years piecing together the economic, social and political impacts of the new information technology. He is a scientist – he tells it as he finds it.
The fruit of his labor is a 1,500-page encyclopedic trilogy, “The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture” (Blackwell, 1996-98). For his ability to read the underlying currents in contemporary society, Castells is being compared to two earlier sociologists, Karl Marx and Max Weber. Among colleagues, Castells is being called the “first great philosopher of cyberspace,” yet most people have yet to hear his name.
The Information Age is undoubtedly the most extensive and original investigation yet of the new global communication revolution. The work is all the more remarkable because Castells faced what he thought was an unforgiving deadline. He learned he had cancer just as he was about to begin writing. Fortunately, the cancer is now in remission.
The Information Age starts with the premise that “a technological revolution, centered around information, is fundamentally altering the way we are born, we live, we learn, we work, we produce, we consume, we dream, we fight, or we die.”
As more of people’s lives are made up of their daily experiences in the virtual world, our concepts of time and space are radically altered. Castells, born in Spain and author of 17 other books, introduces the terms “timeless time” and “the space of flows” to consider these abstract concepts.
“Timeless time” means that technologies, including bio-technologies, make it possible to manipulate the natural sequence of events (postponing the conception of a baby by in vitro fertilization, for instance) to suit our desires or time zones. The “space of flows” means that the flow of information brings physical spaces into closer contact through network organization.
These changes give rise, says Castells, to “real virtuality.” The day-to-day lives of humans (wired ones, at least) more and more depend on the content and meaning of the text, images and sounds streaming into their laptops. This phenomenon raises the real question: If it didn’t happen on the Net, did it happen?
Castells’s Volume I, “The Rise of the Network Society,” documents how far flung networks, powered by digital technology, have become the basic structure and building blocks of society. Networks allow the almost instantaneous flow of information, capital and cultural communication, globally and in real time. “The world is becoming organized not just by a common set of capitalist rules, but by informational capitalism,” he says. Unfortunately, those left unwired are doomed to an “informational capitalism black hole.”
“By combing the globe ceaselessly for things of value, the network society excludes everything, and everyone, not of value. And those excluded are not just those in ‘fourth-world’ countries; they are in the South Bronx, or Naples.”
Because networks are infinitely adaptable organisms with no center and no geographic boundary, they are more powerful than any company, institution or government. “This means the main political arena is now the media, and the media are not politically answerable,” says Castells.
Where all of this is leading, Castells has little to say. Only in the final chapter of Volume III, “End of Millennium,” does he indulge in a bit of futurology. “The dream of Enlightenment, that reason and science would solve the problems of humankind, is within reach. Yet there is an extraordinary gap between our technological overdevelopment and our social undervelopment.
“Valuable locales and people – and switched-off territories and people – will be found everywhere. The global criminal economy will be a fundamental feature of the 21st century.
“Fundamentalisms of different kinds and from different sources, with their potential access to weapons of mass extermination, east a giant shadow on the optimistic prospects of the Information Age.”
And finally: “The 21st century will not be a dark age. Neither will it deliver to most people the bounties promised by the most extraordinary technological revolution in history. Rather, it may well be characterized by informed bewilderment.”
GERSTNER: What prompted you to spend 14 years working on your trilogy, “The Information Age”?
CASTELLS: The main motivation to undertake the research that led to this trilogy was to understand our world, not just the technology. I felt, in the early 1980s, that the intellectual (and political) categories we were using had become an obstacle for our understanding, and without new concepts/interpretations, we were blind in our world. Information technology was the obvious and most spectacular transformation, but it was not the only object of my research. It was the entry point to the new economy/society/politics that we were entering.
I was highly dissatisfied with the superficiality, lack of rigor, and techno-hype of the prophets of the new world – Toffler, Gilder and the like. I am an academic researcher and an empirical sociologist. I think and write only about evidence, and the theoretically rigorous interpretation of this evidence.
GERSTNER: It was reported in The Wall Street Journal that a few of your university colleagues implored you to boil down your trilogy into one condensed book. You replied, “In all modesty, this is condensed.” How do you react to criticism that your writing is too academic?
CASTELLS: My work is totally academic, and I consider that a quality. The world has enough intelligent business consultants, well-informed journalists, and best-selling writers apt at storytelling. But I saw a need for rigorous academic research that would be willing to take the risk of investigating uncharted paths, such as the new social structures and processes associated with the information technology revolution.
There were some major analytical efforts; Alain Touraine in Europe, Daniel Bell in the United States. But their books, published in 1969 and 1973, predated the core of the information technology revolution. The development of the networked economy, the end of the Cold War, the rise of environmentalism and feminism, the crisis of the nation state – all were major issues that I had to take up anew.
I also wanted my analysis not to be ethnocentric. Too many views of the information society had been based exclusively on the U.S. or Western European experiences. I wanted to see what was happening in different cultures, in the world at large, since one of the characteristics of this world is precisely that core activities are globally interconnected.
Then in 1993, after 10 years of research, I decided it was time to elaborate and write. I sent a draft of each chapter to a group of experts in each topic, so I was both writing and correcting. It was strenuous, but by following a traditional scholarly practice, I felt more secure about the basic facts and interpretations on which the book was based. Voila!
GERSTNER: Did you think no one else had grasped the essential import of “The Information Age”? It was Marshall McLuhan, one of my heroes (is he one of yours?), who said: “We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future.”
CASTELLS: I am certainly not so pretentious as to think that no one else is grasping the Information Age. I think a number of researchers/analysts are developing very good insights, and generating useful data (Sherry Turkle, Claude Fischer, Barry Wellman, David Lyon, Geoff Mulgan, William Dutton, Brian Arthur, Hal Varian, etc.). I think what is specific to my work is the macroperspective, and the connection between many domains of society – that is, technology, economy, culture, and politics – all interacting with each other. The essence of my work is about connections and about multicultural perspective. And yes, McLuhan is also a great intellectual hero for me – in spite of his not being able to think correctly about what he could not see in his time.
GERSTNER: There seems to be a dearth of information about you on the Net. Is this a conscious attempt on your part? Are you an active Internet user?
CASTELLS: Yes, I use the Internet daily, but not much in real time interaction. I simply do not have the time, not only because I work very much, but also because it is still precious for me to go for a walk in the woods around my house with my wife. As for information on me, there is considerable information on me on the Net. If you search under my name, and you eliminate all the historic castells [castles in Catalan], you still find hundreds of references to my work. But, yes, not to me, and not to my life, except when a clever journalist has found out and published an article on me. I keep it very private. I am not an exhibitionist, and I want people to relate to my ideas, and to my work, not to me as a person – thus no web page, and I do not plan to have one. In fact, I try to conceal my e-mail, not to be overwhelmed by thousands of messages per week, as was the case with my first, and public, e-mail, which I simply cannot process.
GERSTNER: What is your opinion of the growth, commercialism and value of the Internet that has exploded into many of our faces in the last several years?
CASTELLS: Commercialism in the Internet? I am not against it. The Internet is life, and our life is full of commercialism. I would be opposed to exclusive domination of commercial interests in the Internet, but I do not see this happening. The critical thing is to keep phone access cheap and software affordable and user-friendly. The rest…people will find their niches, and their paths. The Net is unlimited, no scarcity of space of flows for the foreseeable future. Let a hundred flowers blossom on the Net.
GERSTNER: You are clear in your books that – despite the “prophetic hype and ideological manipulation” surrounding the information technology revolution – we should not underestimate its truly fundamental significance. What makes the information revolution so different and so much more disruptive than the industrial revolution?
CASTELLS: The information technology revolution is about how we generate and process information. And information is the key substance of all human activity, and is directly related to culture, to institutions, to experience. So for the first time there is a direct connection between what we think, what we believe, and how and what we produce. Minds become the direct productive forces, and minds are rooted in culture and in social relationships. So there is interactive connection, for the first time, in real time, between nature and culture, through information processing enacted at light speed.
The IT revolution is spreading faster than any other revolution for two reasons: a) Because it is about information, everybody in the world needs its tools, and every activity that does not use these new tools becomes obsolete and is washed out by competition. b) But it is also about communication technologies, so it has created its own infrastructure to diffuse globally.
GERSTNER: You say we are witnessing a point of historical discontinuity. This is related to the “virtuous circle” that emerges when a networked, deeply interdependent economy becomes increasingly able to apply its progress in technology, knowledge, and management to technology, knowledge, and management itself. Isn’t this, to borrow from the world of hip-hop, “all good”? Are we beginning to draw up the blueprint for Utopia, Planet Earth?
CASTELLS: There is historical discontinuity in the current technological revolution, and there is a virtuous circle in which new technological discoveries generate new generations of discoveries. For instance, the biological revolution is accelerated by computer power, and electronic networks become increasingly independent from computers’ hard disks. But what happens with this technological revolution is an open process, depending on human action, values, and institutions. My volume III is a full report of the miseries and suffering inflicted on much of the planet by the process of economic restructuring and by technological apartheid. And I show that the uses to which we are putting new technologies do accentuate inequalities in our society, and in the world at large. In this sense, I do not observe a happy Utopia, but a painful experience for a considerable proportion of the human population, as I tried to convey in Repin’s painting on the jacket of my third volume.
GERSTNER: What is it about the topology of the network that makes it crucial to the rise of the informational economy?
CASTELLS: Networks are a very old form of relationship, as old as humankind. What made them different is the power of new information/communication technologies, and this is expanding. Networks are flexible, adaptive structures, but they traditionally had a major problem: how to coordinate resources efficiently, how to keep the unit focused on a project, bringing together decentralized units with imperfect knowledge of each other. New technologies allow networks to decentralize execution, but to coordinate decision-making. So networks came first, but they became all-embracing, self-expanding, efficient structures of action by the power of information/communication technologies.
GERSTNER: You and others argue that the integration of text, images and sounds in the same system in an interactive global network, with open and affordable access, fundamentally changes the character of communication – and, therefore, our culture. How?
CASTELLS: If I can find anything I want and need on the Internet, and have links between all forms of TV, radio, videotapes, video games, films, music, theater, literature, news, science, history, and art, and I can play back and forth with all these sources, and recombine them, I can dwell in the hypertext.
We will certainly still go for a walk in the woods, but much of our system of representation and communication is being rooted in this flexible, personalized hypertext. This is not for everybody on the planet, however, so we will have different levels of exposure to this hypertext, and thus different cultural expressions. Yet the dominant cultural expression, for the highly educated groups in society, generating values and beliefs, is likely to be enclosed in this hypertex. But we need to research more, and talk less, until we really know what is going on.
GERSTNER: You say a new culture is forming at the end of the milennium…a culture of “real virtuality.” By this do you mean the more we live and work in cyberspace, the more we rely on fleeting bits of electrons to form opinions and make decisions that determine our material world? Is our future, then, to become a world of make-believe? Can you explain the concept of “real virtuality” more fully?
CASTELLS: The culture of real virtuality is a culture in which many of our cultural representations/ideas/beliefs depend on images/sounds processed in/by the electronic hypertext. It is virtual (electronically produced/transmitted images). It is real because it forms a substantial part of our reality. Our minds are populated by these images, and our opinions interact constantly with the messages received from the electronic hypertext.
GERSTNER: How relevant is it to a dissection of the impact of media on culture that the new computer-mediated media enter the human senses as an endless parade of fleeting, ephemeral electronic pulses? Does it make everything else humans touch also seem more transitory and expendable?
CASTELLS: Electronic impulses link machines and human brains. Our brains – therefore we – are made of chemical reactions and electronic impulses. So the relentless interaction with electronic communication devices certainly has a neuro-physiological influence. But we do not know what, because we know so little about the brain. I would say that the most important frontier for research, and human transformation, in the Information Age is the study of the brain, and of its interaction with increasing brainpower in the electronic networks. This is not science fiction, but what scientists are doing. We are in for some major surprises.
GERSTNER: When you say, “the message is lagging the medium,” are you speaking only about what many call the vacuum of good content on television, or are you extending this criticism to communication conveyed through all other channels, including the Internet?
CASTELLS: The message is lagging the medium everywhere, but particularly on the Internet. With so many communication possibilities, we do not know what to say. We become repetitive, unimaginative and monotonous. New Hollywood studios are cranking up as much new content as they can, with limited success. The Internet is littered with senseless information, and our browsers are still so primitive that we waste huge amounts of time finding what we want. But browser technology is improving decisively, and a new generation of artists, writers, filmmakers and journalists is coming up to the new medium.
GERSTNER: Cheap energy fueled the industrial revolution. You say cheap inputs of information derived from advances in microelectronic and telecommunications technology are driving this one. But can’t there be too much of a good thing? Are we threatened as never before by the glut of information, often from unreliable sources?
CASTELLS: The glut-of-information idea is simply a primitive, misleading, cheap shot of neo-Luddites. There can never be enough information. We ignore so many important things. And on a planet largely illiterate, and ignorant (including widespread ignorance in a large segment of the American people – for instance, who knows what DNA does?), to speak of information glut is simply an insult to intelligence. The issue is the relevance of information for each one of us, how to find it, how to process it, how to understand it. For this we need more information technology, not less. We need much better browsers, we need more sophisticated design of web sites, we need user-friendly, mobile devices. We need a quantum leap in information/communication technologies, information storage/retrieval systems, and education systems. The technology part of this is coming fast. The educational part, which is essential, is lagging way behind.
GERSTNER: A central point of your trilogy is that the wonderful technological infrastructure that allows us to communicate, innovate, produce and consume with ever-increasing global efficiency at the same time wreaks havoc on large segments of the world’s population who are unwired. Are you saying, here, that the fruits of technology will never trickle down to the info disadvantaged…Paradise Lost?
CASTELLS: The fruits of the technology revolution will never trickle down by themselves. The inherent logic of the system is exclusionary, and the gap is increasing. This is not an opinion; it’s an empirical observation. But this is not the fault of technology, it is the way we use it. Technologies are so powerful that they amplify social effects of our institutions. Democratic, egalitarian societies may do wonders with new information technology [e.g., Finland]. Unequal, undemocratic, exclusionary societies, on the contrary, will see the power of technology dramatically increase social exclusion. We need, more than ever, socially oriented government policies, and social responsibility for business and institutions, working together to reverse the trends toward an unsustainably unequal world beyond the wonderland of Silicon Valley. This is particularly true of Africa, a continent ravaged by AIDS, famine, atrocious and absurd civil wars, corrupt politicians, rapacious companies.
GERSTNER: You say that Africa is dropping further and further behind in the global economy with each leap forward by the techno-elite, and that the “disinformation of Africa at the dawn of the Information Age may be the most lasting wound inflicted on this continent.” Is this more the result of politics than technology? What needs to be done to help reduce the information technology gap between the haves and have-nots around the world?
CASTELLS: New technologies allow linking up the few valuable segments of Africa to the rest of the world and disconnecting most people, letting them perish in their own horror. It will come back to haunt us. The issue is not to send more computers to Africa, but to devise a realistic, down-to-earth international aid program that will reverse the trend, starting from the grassroots, and using technology for it. A number of NGOs (Non-Governmental Organizations), both African and international, are already working along these lines. I wish some high-tech companies would use a small percentage of their profits in helping out Oxfam, Doctors without Borders, and similar organizations, as well as technology diffusion grassroots groups, working with the youth. The illusion that we can live on a wonderful, shrinking planet, and ignore the 40 percent of the population hardly surviving with less than two dollars a day, is simply self-denial. Epidemics, wars, terrorism and moral outrage will reach us in our protected world.
GERSTNER: Your third book in the trilogy, “End of Millennium,” chillingly details the dark side of the Information Age. What about the network society is hazardous to children?
CASTELLS: I think what is happening to children is one of the most striking contradictions of the Information Age because we build our future not with our machines but with our children. Poor children around the world are being exploited at work, abused, abandoned, neglected, sold for sex, massacred as child soldiers, by the tens of millions. See data in my volume III, or in UNICEF publications. But in our societies, even for middle-class children, there is increasing neglect of child care by overworked parents, by single parents trying to survive the daily rush, and by the lack of government-sponsored child care. Technology of course is not the guilty party here. Although, again, powerful technology applied to a sick society produces nasty effects, such as easy access to a plentiful child pornography on the Internet.
As to why children are wasted, I dare to cite my own paragraph in Volume III, page 161: “Children are wasted because, in the Information Age, social trends are extraordinarily amplified by society’s new technological/organizational capacity, while institutions of social control are bypassed by global networks of information and capital. And since we are all inhabited at the same time, by humanity’s angels and devils, whenever and wherever our dark side takes over, it triggers the release of unprecedented, destructive power.”
GERSTNER: Why have almost all spokespersons for the advent of cyberspace (three out of the four I’ve interviewed so far) tended to be very positive and optimistic about the fruits of information technology?
CASTELLS: All of my negative observations are not arguments against new information technologies. We are in fact in a most extraordinary moment of history, full of potential creativity, both for individuals and for society at large. But, probably unlike your other interviewees, I am an empirical sociologist, and I observe what is happening. And what is happening is a mixed picture of increased productivity, economic growth, personal emancipation, and cultural creativity, together with devastating effects for many people and countries around the world. This is not because of technology, but because of the social impacts of a new network society, in which other processes (economic, political, cultural) interact with technology to induce a new society, and its social effects. Furthermore, what happens in Silicon Valley is not the same as what happens in Chicago. Palo Alto is on a different planet from East Palo Alto, and Indonesia was both propelled and destroyed by information-technology-based, economic globalization. So I observe all these processes, and they all, together, form the new Information Age.
GERSTNER: You also say a global criminal economy will be a fundamental feature of the 21st century, and its economic, political and cultural influence threatens to control a substantial share of our economy, institutions and everyday life. Are drug lords, political terrorists and the Mafia now hiring computer programmers?
CASTELLS: The global criminal economy is indeed a fundamental feature of our world, and it is expanding. It is a business that yields nearly one trillion dollars a year. That is more than the GDP of Britain. It relies mainly on money-laundering systems that benefit from the electronic infrastructure of money transfer. And most of these criminal businesses are run by sophisticated computer systems. All this is a well-known fact, documented by numerous reliable press reports. Here again, it is not technology that induces the criminal economy, but the kind of economy and society and politics we have created at the end of this millennium. Once in existence, the global criminal economy expands by using all the power of new technologies.
GERSTNER: You shy away from futurology in your writings, but you do drop a few predictions for the 21st century: the global informational superhighway will be completed; there will be a full flowering of the genetic revolution; human labor will produce more and better with considerably less effort; global terrorism will become more technological and dangerous. Are you optimistic or pessimistic, and what do you hope your trilogy will contribute?
CASTELLS: I refuse futurology because I strongly believe it is not a serious intellectual activity. It’s made of hype and pop sociology, always looking for a sound bite. Most of what people think is the future is, in fact, the present. They just do not know. For instance, most of what Negroponte talks about are trends rooted in the present, observable developments. He is knowledgeable about it, so I am interested by many of his writings. But when Gilder extrapolates to society at large, and historical development, a few technological trends – rationalized with his ultra-conservative ideology – I find myself very distant. It’s a simplified vision of a very complex and contradictory process, the emergence of a new society, associated with new technologies.
I hope my trilogy contributes to understanding our new world, period. After that, it is up to people, and to their institutions, to make informed decisions to shape and improve their lives, both socially and individually. I am a researcher, not a prophet, not a politician, not a business consultant, all honorable professions, but not mine; thus my hope is to contribute relevant, rigorous knowledge about the interaction between information technology, economy, society and culture. I may be wrong in many ways, but there are objective criteria (as accepted in academia) to judge the relevance of the work. It is not a matter of opinion, but of fact and logical interpretation.
GERSTNER: In the final paragraph of your third book in your trilogy, you argue that there is nothing that cannot be changed by conscious, purposeful social action. This is followed by a long list of “ifs,” including “if people are informed and active and communicate throughout the world, if business assumes its social responsibility, if humankind feels the solidarity of the species throughout the globe, and if the media become the messengers, rather than the message.” Could you please elaborate on what you mean by that last “if”?
CASTELLS: It means that too often, media impacts are about a report being in the media. People have a quick notion about a sound bite concerning something, some potential scandal affecting a politician, for instance, and they retain the politician and the scandal, without receiving the context, the analysis, the meaning of the whole matter. Informative, responsible media should concentrate on providing context, on deepening the analysis, on helping people to understand, moving away from simple infotainment. Since media, and particularly TV, are the essential source of information/ideas for people, and this will increase with Internet-based media reporting, it is essential that journalists and media businesses add substance to their work. New media are an essential tool to induce a new culture and a new society.
GERSTNER: This may be an unfair question – sort of like asking an artist what her painting means – to which she is totally justified in answering: “If I could express it in words, I would have written a few sentences instead of applying paint to canvas.” Still, what two or three ideas would you like the public to glean from your 14 years of grappling with the Network Society?
CASTELLS: New information technologies revolutionize our capacity for thinking, extending our brain to the whole world of production, communication, enjoyment, and decision making. Thus who we are and what we want become an explosive force. But who we are and what we want are largely conditioned by the values and institutions of society, most of which are rather primitive, unequal, and undemocratic. Unless we use our new thinking power to change or reform society, at home and in the world, we are in for a round of destructive creation, in contrast to the possibilities of creative destruction offered by technological and cultural innovation.
Cyber-Realist
Esther Dyson
We haven’t created a perfect society on earth, and we won’t have one in cyberspace either. But at least we can have individual choice, and individual responsibility. It just means, again, relax and don’t try to fix everything. But try and fix something.
This interview by John Gerstner was first published in the June-July, 1998 issue of Communication World Magazine.
She’s the doyenne of the digital age, a cyber-social butterfly. She flits between being a high-tech analyst, author, newsletter publisher, conference impresario, venture capitalist, and electronic-liberties lobbyist as if – at age 47 – she still can’t quite decide what she wants to be when she grows up. The New Yorker calls her a “cyber-schmooze specialist…the perfect high-tech hostess…with a sharp sense of who needs to be hooked up with whom.”
Internet guru John Perry Barlow (“Cyber-Cowboy,” Communication World, November 1995) says she is “the smartest woman I know…there is a quality to her insight that is not masculine and is incredibly powerful as a result.” The New York Times Magazine pronounced her “the most powerful woman in the Net-erati.” The rest of the media crown her with titles such as digital-age philosopher, high-tech priestess, cyber-cheerleader, powerbroker, knowledge entrepreneur and brilliant nerd.
Esther Dyson prefers court jester. “The jester represented the causes of the meek and the powerless to the establishment. People thought they were entertaining, but they were really telling the king that these peasants had a real problem and they had better listen.”
Dyson raises some of the thorniest problems swirling around cyberspace in her 1997 book, “Release 2.0 – A Design for Living in the Digital Age.” On issues such as electronic privacy, security, anonymity, pornography, governance and intellectual property, Dyson offers – not simple solutions – but preferable paths. Her philosophy is pretty much, “Hey, the Net is a powerful instrument for both good and evil. Let’s all work to make cyberspace a nice place for humans.”
It’s clear Dyson and her followers would much rather see individuals (aided by new tools from technology companies) responsibly self-govern cyberspace rather than to have some government impose freedom-restricting laws. As head of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a strong lobbying group for freedom of expression on the Internet, she has been able to help persuade the U.S. government to hold to its strong libertarian course on electronic commerce and communication.
Vice President Al Gore has been particularly strident in his support of Dyson’s views. “Our approach to electronic commerce must be guided by a digital Hippocratic oath,” he said in a 1997 speech. “First, do no harm.” Dyson couldn’t have said it better.
“This sounds really corny,” she says, “but I simply hope to encourage more good people to get on the Net and not be scared. I want to invite nice new neighbors into my neighborhood.”
You could say Dyson was born to her computer crown. Her mother is the esteemed mathematician, Verena Huber-Dyson. Her father is Freeman Dyson, renowned in science circles for his work in quantum electrodynamics, and appreciated far beyond academia for his futurist books, the most recent being “Imagined Worlds.”
As a youngster, Esther remembers seeing Nobel laureates at dinner parties in her parent’s home in Princeton, N.J. So it was almost natural for her to head off to Harvard at age 16, where she majored in economics. She soon spent much of her time hanging out and writing for the Harvard Crimson newspaper.
Her dad once chastised her for wasting his tuition money by not going to her classes. With typical Esther aplomb, she countered, “Daddy, you don’t understand. You don’t come to Harvard to study. You come to Harvard to get to know the right people.”
After graduating in 1972, she took a job as a reporter for Forbes magazine, followed by a stint as a security analyst focused on computer and software companies. When her employer, Ben Rosen, now chairman of Compaq Computer, was forced to sell his small high-tech newsletter, she bought and renamed it Release 1.0.
Dyson’s probing, off-center columns on important ideas and people in the about-to-explode computer industry made it a must-read by the captains of such little (at the time) U.S. West Coast startups as Microsoft, Sun Microsystems, Silicon Graphics and Intel. Release 1.0 is now mailed monthly to 1,700 of the most powerful and influential people in the computer industry (at U.S. $695 per year). Many of these subscribers join her annual PC Forum, a workshop/social-mixer for the “tech-know.” There new technology is unveiled, deals are made and gossip exchanged between sessions on weighty issues such as “Identity, Transparency and the Net” and “Will the Net become what is promised? Or what is feared?”
As chairman of her own company, EDventure Holdings Inc., Dyson has the added respect among technologists for putting her money where her mouth is. Her current investments include the light-emitting polymer (LEP) technology by Cambridge Display that promises to make possible TVs as thin and light as picture frames which can be hung on walls. Her other high-tech investments are in, of all non-tech places, Eastern Europe. She owns a piece of Poland Online, Scala Business Solutions (started in Budapest) and TerraLink in Moscow.
GERSTNER: What attracted you to a high-tech career?
Dyson: I was actually hoping to get a job with Variety and write about movies. But more people wanted to write about movies than wanted to write about business, so I got a job at Forbes and ended up enjoying it more than I expected. I like explaining things that people don’t understand. The Internet and social structures in developing countries such as Russia are particularly fine examples.
GERSTNER: Why aren’t more women working in the field?
Dyson: Oh, lots of reasons. Lack of role models. Being discouraged by parents and teachers. That community still isn’t terribly welcoming to women.
GERSTNER: It’s’ nothing in the genes then?
Dyson: No. There are differences between men and women, but there’s more to it than that.
GERSTNER: You lead a very private life, and others have reported that you have no telephone or television in your home, you do not drive a car, and you swim an hour every morning. Are these habits part of the way you’re coping with the digital age?
Dyson: I wouldn’t use the word cope. It’s not as if it was imposed on me. It’s the way I like to live. I’ve had no phone for quite some time. It wasn’t the Internet that caused that. When I go home, I simply don’t want to deal with all that stuff.
GERSTNER: And the swimming…is there an Internet metaphor here?
Dyson: Probably, or at least you could create one if you insisted. But basically I started swimming in college and I think it is healthier than running, although someone will probably discover that chlorine causes cancer. It certainly is easier on your bones. The only trouble is, I travel a lot and it can be a real challenge finding a pool in some of these places.
GERSTNER: What is your favorite metaphor for the Internet?
Dyson: Well, I definitely see it as an ocean, not a highway. It’s something you float in rather than something that has well-defined paths. It’s really an environment in which things happen. It’s not a single place; it’s a platform for lots of places.
GERSTNER: What effect will the Net have on content creators’?
Dyson: Long run, they need to be cleverer and more imaginative about how they get paid. The ever-greater proliferation of content on the Net (much of it by individuals doing it for love, not money) means much more competition for people’s attention. There will be way too much content, and not enough people with time to consume it. In fact, the time spent by amateurs creating content competes for the time they could spend consuming it.
This means we’re entering an “attention economy.” The source of commercial value will be people’s attention, not the content that consumes their attention. And so you will find people hiring communicators because they want good content to attract people’s attention, but they won’t necessarily sell the content to the reader or viewer. They will give it away. Businesses who make content will have to figure out ways other than selling copies to make money. One model might be to creatively bundle content with unique, customized products and services – selling spin-off goods, memberships, face-to-face conferences.
GERSTNER: What does this mean to intellectual property rights? Is copyright obsolete?
Dyson: No, I think copyright is moral and proper, but its use is going to change dramatically. The Net makes it easy and almost cost-free to send or retrieve content anywhere in the world. It hasn’t changed people’s morals, but it’s probably made people more careless about stealing content and breaking the law. At the same time, in light of the new attention economy, I think a lot of people are unrealistic about the value of the content they create. The best way to get your works known is to give them away for free.
GERSTNER: But you’re not giving away your newsletter or book on the Internet are you?
Dyson: No. I certainly want both to make money. We put bits of it online, but basically we stick to paper. Content may be declining in value, but it hasn’t hit zero yet. However, I make most of my money, not from writing, but from activities that flow from the writing such as hosting conferences, consulting and speeches.
GERSTNER: There’s the Internet-As-Savior-of-the-Planet school. Then there’s another faction that says the Net is way overrated because half of the world hasn’t even used a telephone yet. What’s your take?
Dyson: I think the Internet is tremendously important, but I don’t think it’s the savior of the world. It is a very important tool and it’s going to trickle down, especially in the parts of the world I spend time in. Only a small part of society has access to it now, but I think they’re going to use it to change things fundamentally. It’s very long-term.
GERSTNER: One of the themes in your book is that the new digital age brings with it more chances for abuse as well as opportunities. What specifically should those of us-toiling in this new frontier be doing to exercise more responsibility in the world we are creating?
Dyson: The golden rule – do unto others as you would have them do unto you – is particularly suited to the Net. I would also suggest disclosing who you are, assert your own rights and respect those of others. Have a sense of humor and dignity, and don’t misbehave just because you can.
GERSTNER: You’ve mentioned trust is a key ingredient to seeing this technology reach its fullest potential. How can we get to that point?
Dyson: There are both social means and technical means that can allow you to know whom you are dealing with. Ask for and use systems like TRUSTe, a non-profit labeling and certification’ organization. “Trustmarks” will allow visitors to a web site to choose whether or not to do business based on what the site owner will do with the data collected. This enables you to make sure that people who need your information are not going to reuse it in some form you’re not expecting.
GERSTNER: Isn’t the fear of losing one’s privacy the reason many people don’t use the Internet?
Dyson: It’s still a big issue. Some people are paranoid about it. Some people don’t even think about it. The interconnectedness of the Net makes safeguarding privacy an increasing challenge. People are rightly concerned about the ease of combining data from different sources. But people are also revealing much more about themselves today everywhere, for better or worse. I think it’s inevitable that people will simply become more comfortable with the fact that more is known about them on the Net.
GERSTNER: You say in your book that the Internet can change our “overall experience of life.” How optimistic are you about this?
Dyson: The Interact is not a mystical entity in itself, but the widespread availability of two-way electronic communication will change all of our lives. It will flatten the landscape by sucking power away from central governments, mass media, and big business. It gives awesome power to individuals…a powerful lever to connect with other people to accomplish their goals. But that will change human institutions, not human nature. The Net doesn’t create the bad people; it just gives them another place to exist. But I’m fundamentally optimistic because I believe people by and large would rather be good than bad.
GERSTNER: With the rise of the Internet, you say companies now need to learn to live with increased visibility and loss of control over corporate image. How so?
Dyson: In the networked world, the boundaries of what can be held private are narrowing. The world can easily see organizations for what they are, not for what they pretend to be. Plus, on the Internet, people will say anything they like, which can be a mixture of fact, fiction and opinion. Successful companies and leaders in the future will be those who learn how to respond to feedback rather than crush it. They will be adept at influencing what they can no longer control.
GERSTNER: You’ve been described as a brainy college professor in a classroom of cyber-millionaires. Accurate?
Dyson: Not a university; I’m more like a one-person explorer. The job of the university, with all due respect, is to do research and be a repository and a transmitter of existing knowledge. What I like to do is go find the stuff that is not written down and not yet discovered.
GERSTNER: So, Esther, what’s the computer world’s next big thing?
Dyson: I think applications that help us automate the handling of mail are going to be a really big area over the next year or two.
GERSTNER: Filtering?
Dyson: Filtering, automated answering. You don’t want my agent sending e-mail to your agent, but I do want to be able to have an agent deal with the routine stuff.
GERSTNER: Are we as humans simply incapable of coping with the torrent of messages that are flowing today?
Dyson: Well, it depends on how many you are getting. I think there is going to be more and more and that’s why I think there is going to be a big market for things that will help us deal with all this.
GERSTNER: In the realm of using software to filter sites for, say, pornography, is there a danger in totally trusting the tool to do that? You don’t really know all of the sites that it is blocking, do you?
Dyson: Well, if you read a magazine you don’t know what the editor left out. Let’s face it, in your life you’re always making choices with incomplete information and you just have to relax about it. Years ago when I was covering this industry, it was quite small and there was some sense that I could know everything that was going on. But every day of the week somebody knew Bill Gates was having dinner with somebody and it wasn’t with me. I can’t be everywhere and know everything. It’s not a question of ever hoping to do that, it’s a question of setting your priorities and deciding are you going to do the first five or 10 things on your list, but never kid yourself that you will do them all. That’s what mortality teaches. Actually, it’s very relaxing because it says, don’t worry…you’re not going to do it all so just do what you can and do what is most important to you.
GERSTNER: I must say you seem very calm amidst what could be a very pressured lifestyle.
Dyson: There are days that I try to fit too much into one day. But fundamentally, I don’t feel that this technology is forcing me to do stuff. I’m dealing with trade-offs all the time, but I’m doing what I like and that’s the real issue. Too many people think they need to deal with someone else’s likes, whether it’s to answer someone else’s phone calls, or please their parents, or make a lot of money because that’s how other people define success.
GERSTNER: But l feel like the pace of my life has sped up simply due to my involvement with the new electronic media.
Dyson: Well it probably has, and you have to decide how much you are going to let it do that.
Just being conscious that you can’t do everything, and never will be able to, can help. Just decide your priorities and do those.
GERSTNER: Which brings to mind another thread that I found interesting in your book. It is simply that life is not perfect. Is that truly your philosophy?
Dyson: Yes. We haven’t created a perfect society on earth, and we won’t have one in cyberspace either. But at least we can have individual choice, and individual responsibility. It just means, again, relax and don’t try to fix everything. But try and fix something.
John Gerstner – CEO, Communitelligence
John Gerstner, ABC, estimates he now spends about 75 percent of his time on Internet and intranet issues as Manager of Internal Communication at Deere & Company, Moline, Ill. Previous interviews in this Communication World series include John Perry Barlow, Nicholas Negroponte and Cliff Stoll.
Cliff Stoll
Cyber-Skeptic
“I’m not afraid of technology. I love the technology, but I distrust the claims made for it. It’s like drinking from a firehose. You get plenty wet, but still walk away thirsty.”
This interview by John Gerstner is the third in The Civilization of Cyberspace series. It was first published in the June-July issue of Communication World Magazine.
“One of the dirty little secrets of the Internet is that users are remarkably cheap. Even if you could bill them, users are not willing to pay a nickel.”
‘Click.’ Feather-weight Cliff Stoll, in the ring with heavy-weight champion Mike “Internet” Tyson. Stoll, weaving and bobbing . . . scrawny and long-haired … stuns the crowd as he lands a series of sharp blows to the head.
“Computers dull the skills we use in everyday life.”
“The Internet, that great digital dumpster, confers not power, not prosperity, not perspicacity.”
“Why are drug addicts and computer aficionados both called users?”
“Click.” Cliff Stoll, astride his faithful donkey . . . steadfastly flailing at the flotilla of Internet windmills that dot the high Spanish plain of LaMancha. Gleaming white in the moonlight, he can make out their perfectly lettered nameplates: “Enlightenment” “Prosperity” “Utopia” and he scoffs:
“There is a technocratic belief that computers and networks will make a better society. That access to information, better communication and electronic programs can cure social problems. I simply don’t believe it.”
“Click.” Cliff Stoll single-handedly gripping the tether of a gargantuan Internet dirigible. It is crammed with noisy Internauts, thrilled to be bound for the promised Cyberland. Stoll grips the rope with all of his might, but the incredible blast of hot media air finally wrests it free. As the huge craft rises overhead, he shouts one last warning, which no one onboard seems to hear:
“Much of what happens over the networks is a metaphor – we chat without speaking, smile without grinning, and hug without touching. How sad to dwell in a metaphor without living the experience.”
So at a time when you can’t pick up a newspaper or watch a television commercial without confronting the word Internet – and big Internet fish are eating the little ones – Cliff Stoll is the long-haired hippie standing beside the Great I-Way waving a yellow caution flag and holding up a hand-scrawled sign that reads: “www.enough.already.” Maybe it’s high time.
Stoll’s version of where the Information Superhighway is taking us, and at what cost, is entertainingly packaged in his 1995 book “Silicon Snake Oil: Second Thoughts on the Information Highway.” It is a conversational and witty meditation on what Stoll believes are powerful and dangerous Internet myths … such as that electronic data exchange is faster, more reliable and less expensive than communication by phone, fax or even the postal service. And that computerizing our schools and libraries will improve education. And that connecting to the Internet is a wise use of your time.
“Every minute spent on the Internet is one minute you didn’t spend with your loved ones,” he says. “While you’re connecting to the stranger on the other side of the globe, you’re not teaching your child how to draw.”
Stoll’s attack on cyber-life would be easier to dismiss if he were simply another neo-Luddite smashing computers out of ignorance or fear. But Stoll is more reformed technogeek than technophobe. A planetary astronomer by training, he cobbled together his first computer in 1976 and logged onto the Arpanet, the ancestor of the Internet, soon after to share research with colleagues. Even today – on the World Wide Web he loves to loathe – he has a home page (http://www.OCF.Berkeley.EDU/^stoll/) where he advertises his books and apologizes for not answering all his E-mail.
In 1989, Stoll helped make hyperspace hip with his best-seller, “The Cuckoo’s Egg.” It is a revenge-of-the-nerd true tale of how he used programming wizardry to track down a gang of German hackers that were stealing U.S. security information and selling it to the KGB. The crooks had cracked the computer system he managed at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory in Berkeley, Calif., and it took Stoll a year to catch them.
Stoll still lives (without a car or television set) in Berkeley, which may partially explain his sunny ’60s sentimentalism. For all of us who’ve ever cussed a computer when it crashed for no good reason, or simply felt guilty about spending so much time online for so little, Stoll’s views strike a vibrant chord. Even though you can’t help feeling Stoll’s cynicism is tongue-in-cheek at times – and there’s a sinking feeling that we humans are probably powerless before the onslaught of technology anyway – Stoll’s download of doubt rings loud and refreshing: Enter the Internet with caution, and keep a sharp eye on your rearview mirror.
GERSTNER: What tipped you over the edge . . . you didn’t start out being anti-computers, did you?
STOLL: Quite the opposite, I have always been very intrigued by computers. I love technology. I love computers. I own six of them. I’ve been using computers for 35 years. I’m on the Internet daily. I’ve been online for more than two decades. I simply began to take note of the private doubts my fellow computer jocks were voicing in the cafeteria and hallways. Things like how frustrating, time-consuming and expensive it is to keep hardware and software current and working. Things like how the Internet promises so much, yet delivers so little.
GERSTNER: What kind of reaction did “Silicon Snake Oil” stir up in Silicon Valley?
STOLL: To my astonishment, the commentary from the computer field has been small; the commentary from the wider field of readers has been considerable. I’ve gotten a lot of reaction from teachers, librarians, and those who are critical of the runaway growth of the Internet. They agree the Internet is being grossly oversold. And that it’s high time to ask why.
GERSTNER: How have the media treated you?
STOLL: One article called me a techno-traitor, a traitor to technologists. Another said I’m just in it for the money, trying to publish the first anti-Internet book. Neither of these is correct. I’m simply trying to keep the field honest. We need skepticism.
The resistance to criticism reminds me of the arrogance of nuclear engineers in the 1960s when they said, “Trust us, we know what’s good for you. We will give you low-cost, high-quality electricity.”
GERSTNER: You’re not saying there are dangers to the Internet equal to the dangers of nuclear energy?
STOLL: Oh no … I’d say it’s much closer to the promises and reality of a highway system in the 1970s. The argument then was that high-speed roads would be good for the country, good for the cities, good for farmers, good for defense. They will bring us closer to one another. All of these promises are similar to promises of the Internet. But no one asked the obvious question: Might this highway system be bad for the country? Might it create a civilization where people waste hours everyday commuting because they have moved to the suburbs? Might the highway system make the U.S. dependent on foreign oil?
Similar grand promises were also made for television in the 1940s. They said it will inform and entertain us; it will make us a closer nation. It will be good for the family by providing a place for all of us to gather in the evening. These promises are also surprisingly similar to the promises made for the Internet. The reality is that television has helped devastate society. But no one asked the obvious question: Do we want or need television?
GERSTNER: Do we have the choice of accepting or rejecting a new technology? Doesn’t it just get thrown into our laps, and we don’t find out its ills until much later, when it may be too late?
STOLL: This much is certain: Unless we debate these questions in public, we move blindly. We listen to some cyberguru who says this is the way the future is, close your eyes and trust me. I don’t believe in gurus. I believe in skepticism, in discussion, in public debate. It’s our responsibility as citizens, as technologists, to debate where this stuff is likely to go and to ask difficult questions.
The easy questions are things like, “How will we deliver mega bandwidths into people’s homes?” That’s a technical question. The tough question is, “For what purpose will this be used? Will this actually help people’s lives or will it be used for interactive Nintendo games? Will 500 channels of television give people a better lifestyle or might it be better to spend this money on books for libraries? Do people genuinely need and desire T-1 bandwidth Internet or might it be more important to spend that money on forests? On preserving parks?
“Is our vision of the future that of virtual communities or friendly neighborhoods where people know their neighbors and work together?” To me those are important questions. Maybe it’s more important for me to spend time with my aging parents than to spend time prowling around the World Wide Web. Accessing 100 home pages is 60 minutes that I could be spending teaching my daughter how to draw.
GERSTNER: What are your biggest concerns about our move toward cyberspace?
STOLL: That the Internet is a terrifically effective way to waste time that might otherwise be difficult to waste. I spend almost as much time figuring out what’s wrong with my computer as I do actually using it. Networked software, especially, requires frequent updates and maintenance, which gets in the way of doing routine work.
Why are workers no more productive now than 15 years ago? Might it be that the time you save with a computer is exactly taken up by the time needed to maintain and use the computer? Could it be that E-mail is offset exactly by the time wasted by the time spent to make the damn stuff work?
I’m also very concerned that the Internet is promoted as a great educational tool when in fact it is a way of avoiding learning about logic. That the Internet is promoted as a way to meet people, to bring us closer together, when in fact it isolates us from one another. It puts me in contact with distant strangers while taking me away from my neighbors, my friends, my family. This is as obvious to you as it is to me. I have spent an hour online without realizing that all of the people who are important to me were gone.
GERSTNER: But I’m sure you agree there is some value to electronic communication. We’re able to do this interview over the phone, for instance . . .
STOLL: This interview would be much better and far more memorable for us both if you came over to my house and had coffee. By talking over the phone, it’s less personal, less memorable, less fun. If we were to conduct this interview over the Internet, it would be even more boring.
GERSTNER: It depends on how fast a typist you are, to some degree.
STOLL: Yes. One effect of the Internet is to undermine quality journalism and substitute shallow reporting. It’s much easier for a reporter to just fire up the Internet and search on a keyword than to call someone up on the phone or dig for substantive information in the library.
GERSTNER: What do you make of the growing number of online publications?
STOLL: You keep hearing people say whoever can supply content will make money on the Internet. I no longer believe it. One of the more pernicious myths is that the Internet will prompt a literary revival. The computer is not something that promotes reading for more than a small amount of text. Second, you can’t bill people for stuff on the Internet. One of the dirty little secrets of the Internet is that users are remarkably cheap. Even if you could bill them, users are not willing to pay a nickel. Result? It’s a terrific way for unpublished science fiction authors to get their works out, but is it a good way for a magazine to publish serious editorial content? Heck no! And if the advertisers don’t get anything out of it, the whole thing goes away.
GERSTNER: But many people are making money on the Internet, right?
STOLL: There is no question that some people are making a small amount of money from the Internet, such as Internet service providers. But Internet content providers are not. The Internet is based on people trying to get something for nothing, and I don’t think you can. It violates the first law of economics . . . mainly, there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.
GERSTNER: What’s your assessment of the quality of information on the Internet?
STOLL: If you like television, you will love the World Wide Web. Instead of having 200 or 500 channels, the World Wide Web provides 100 million channels. The Web alongside television makes people think they are getting information when in fact they are getting low-quality data. And there is a wide gulf between information and knowledge. Knowledge means understanding; you can’t download understanding from an FTP site. The World Wide Web may provide lots of answers, many of them wrong.
One of the lies of the Internet is that it is an information superhighway and that we need lots more information. But I have never met anyone standing on a street corner, sign in hand, saying we need more information. Just the opposite, many of us, especially those of us working in technical fields, say, “I’ve got all the information I need. Give me less, but give me higher quality information.” And that’s what’s missing from the Internet, quality. When it doesn’t cost anything to post the stuff, people naturally post anything they wish. As a result, when I need quality information, I turn to that which is published on paper for the obvious reason that it costs money to publish on paper. Because of that, there is a built-in filter. They are called editors. Because it costs money, they will only allow that which has quality content. So when I want quality, I look on a piece of paper. I look at that which has been edited. And that’s what is grossly and desperately missing from the World Wide Web: editors, critics, reviewers, reporters.
GERSTNER: You’re really addressing the audience of this interview now. There is a real ferment in communicator ranks about what to do with the new technology. Are we supposed to abandon print and jump to the online world, and if so, how do we do it with quality?
STOLL: The answer to me is self-evident. It’s economic. You get what you pay for. When it’s cheap or free to publish something on the World Wide Web, you will naturally publish that which costs the least, has the least and has the least economic value. If you have a catalog or parts list, you put it online. When you have something you want people to study and think hard about, you’ll put it on paper. Quality writing takes time. Somebody who puts time and money and effort into it . . . are they going to give it away for free? Maybe, but I doubt it.
GERSTNER: Unfortunately I think companies are finding that it’s not exactly cheap to put words on the Internet either.
STOLL: They are pricey, but that will go down. They’ll nosedive real soon. Around here there are college students putting businesses online for U.S. $2,000. Businesses paying thousands of dollars to have big web sites are wasting their money.
“Silicon Snake Oil” very passionately argues for living in rite real world rather than the virtual world. It’s strange that this distinction would even need to be brought up, but it does seem valid to remind people that when you are on the Internet, you have left the real world.
And you are escaping into nowhere. I don’t want to stick my head into some kind of an ostrich hole. I want to deal with real people, real experience. I want to taste and feel and see and hear and touch what is around me. I want real human interrelationships. When I read all these newspaper reports of this coming virtual reality world, I roll my eyes and say, this is bogus. Computers teach us to withdraw, to retreat into the warm comfort of their false reality. No computer can teach what a walk through a pine forest is like. Sensation has no substitute.
GERSTNER: But yet you admit you are a heavy and long-time Internet user.
STOLL: I am a long-time user, but I am no longer a heavy user. I might be online for a few minutes a day. I am not saying the Internet is worthless. I’m saying we need to be skeptical of the claims made for the Internet. When people say the Internet is useful, nail them down. Say “useful for what?” When people say it is essential, say “essential for what?”
I gave a talk in Silicon Valley and this guy came up and he said, “I find the Internet to be infinitely valuable.” I said, “I’m an astronomer . . . you don’t use the word infinite around me, guy.” And he said, “Nope, it’s infinitely valuable to me,” When I asked, “what for?” he said, “I’m a bicyclist and I keep up to date with the French Tour de France by reading postings on the Internet.”
I thought he was going to tell me he discovered the cure for his sister’s cancer on the Internet. No, his definition of infinite value was that he could keep up to date with a bicycle race. I told him if he really wanted infinite value, he should go to France and watch the race in person.
Better yet, instead of spending time with your hands on the keyboard, spend your time with your hands on the handlebars . . . go bicycling. You’ll learn a lot more about bicycling, and you’ll be a better athlete for it. Time that you spend on the Internet is time that you are not spending bicycling, feeding your fish, chatting with your neighbors, talking to your spouse or working on your relationships.
GERSTNER: Another point you make clearly in your book is that the torrent of information that flows through the Web makes us terrifically overloaded, and even splinters our thinking. Do you think we are actually devaluing words here?
STOLL: The medium in which we communicate changes how we organize our thoughts. We program computers, but the computers also program us. I rarely sit back and contemplate what’s on my screen. It’s too immediate, too demanding, and the next file is pressing.
It’s like drinking from a firehose. You get plenty wet, but still walk away thirsty. Every day, well over a hundred megabytes of postings flow by – far too much to even skim, let alone read. I get glassy eyed from reading innumerable postings that have nothing to say – a vast echo canyon, endlessly repeating calls from people who want to hear their own voices.
The ability to read and reflect upon a long document is being lost because people expect multimedia, ritzy, multicolored, icon-driven pretty pictures. We are losing the ability to read, reflect and analytically report on what one sees. Quite the opposite, television coupled with multimedia gives us a sense that all you have to do to learn about something is to see a fancy CD-ROM complete with video clips and soundtrack. Well, I don’t believe it. Learning requires much more than seeing something. Learning requires homework, discipline, commitment, responsibility. Learning requires work. It requires a good teacher. Those things are antithetical to multimedia.
GERSTNER: I know many term papers today are being written by cutting and pasting off the Internet.
STOLL: Sure . . . open up a lousy encyclopedia like Encarta, copy and paste a section onto my term paper. Result . . . poor writing, or worse . . . believing the myth that all one needs to do to write is to copy from someone else’s work and paste it into yours. We need not think analytically; we’ll find somebody else who has done a similar paper and paste it into ours.
GERSTNER: What else do you think the Internet is hurting more than helping?
STOLL: I look around the San Francisco Bay area, and essentially every school district and high school teaches some form of computing. As a result, I can hire a computer programmer for $30 or $40 an hour, sometimes $50. None of the schools around here teach plumbing. As a result, when I hire a plumber, Roto Rooter charges $120 an hour. Now I can get along quite well without a computer for a week or a month, but when my toilet backs up, I’m desperate. Yet nobody knows what to do because we are losing the skills that we no longer value.
GERSTNER: You’re also concerned about the problems of archiving information electronically. Why?
STOLL: Because electronic media aren’t archival. The physical medium isn’t the problem; it’s the reading mechanism. Think of the extinct formats: 78-rpm records, 2-inch quad-scan videotape, phonograph cylinders, paper tape, 80-column punch cards, 100-column punch cards, 7-track digital tape, reel-to-reel audio tape, 8-track tapes, 8-millimeter movies. And today: 45- and 33-rpm vinyl records; 5 1/4 inch floppy disks; Betamax tapes. To which do you entrust your cultural heritage – Mead Data Central or 10,000 libraries across the continent?
GERSTNER: Do you have a vision of how all of this may wind up in the next five years or so?
STOLL: No, I don’t. I’m an astrophysicist, I don’t predict the future. One of the things I find offensive about computer people is their willingness to try and predict the future. With no training in sociology or humanities, they feel they can go out and say what our society will look like in five or 10 years. Instead of predicting the future, I observe the present.
GERSTNER: How would you describe yourself if you had to pin a label on? A Luddite?
STOLL: Oh no, no, no, could a Luddite fix computers? Would a Luddite typically wire his own printed circuit boards? Would a Luddite take apart a disk drive on a Sunday evening? No.
GERSTNER: How about curmudgeon?
STOLL: Nor am I a curmudgeon. I am not cynical. I feel it is important to be skeptical, but not cynical. I have hope for the future. I look forward with optimism, but I am cynical of claims made for the future. I’m an astronomer and a physicist and as such I am paid to be skeptical.
GERSTNER: And you wind up being ambivalent about the Internet?
STOLL: Yes, deeply ambivalent. I’m not afraid of technology. I love the technology, but I distrust the claims made for it.
GERSTNER: Does your long experience with the Internet make your criticism of it more credible?
STOLL: I’m not sure about that. Suppose an English professor who never used the Internet said the exact same thing I did based upon his analysis of sociology and television. Would that make his analysis invalid? People think that because I am a technician I should understand the social impact. That’s a little bit like asking the cameraman at a TV station how television would change our society. The right person to ask about television would be a Latin scholar. In that sense, you’re asking the wrong guy. I’m the TV repairman.
GERSTNER: Are you amazed how fast the Internet has grown just in the last year without any real discussion about the effects of this technology?
STOLL: No, the people who are building computers want to sell them. The people who are making multimedia yearbooks want to say they’re revolutionizing the world. People who want to talk about cyberspace want to say they’re building a whole nation. Well, I don’t believe it.
Cyber-Architect
Nicholas Negroponte
He helped build it, and they are definitely coming. It’s now 11 PM in cyberspace. Do you know where your children are?
Second in a series of interviews on ‘The Civilization of Cyberspace’ by John Gerstner, ABC (First published in the January/February 1996 Communication World Magazine.
You must forgive Nicholas Negroponte if he is jaded about all the buzz over the Internet. Having logged onto the original ARPNet back in 1972 — when there were just a few scientists and cyber-pioneers online — he’s truly “been there, done that.”
Today, the founder and director of the distinguished MIT Media Lab — and arguably one of the founding fathers of the Information Age — spends at least three hours a day, seven days a week inhaling and exhaling E-messages with about as much ceremony as he devotes to the act of breathing.
Whether at work, home or abroad, Negroponte prides himself on answering all his message, usually within hours. “I’m incredibly hooked,” he says. “Take away my TV, refrigerator or cat, but leave my online connection. I depend on it enormously.”
Which is not to say that Negroponte is your basic computer dweeb in tweed. Bring up the state of 20th-century cyberspace (as many people are wont to do since his book, “Being Digital,” was published last year), and he will spin a web of terse -and some-
times obtuse -observations, predictions and concerns, such as: “The value of information about information can be greater than the value of the information itself. (American Airlines makes more from its reservation system than from carrying passengers.)”
“Videocassette-rental stores will go out of business within a decade. (It makes no sense to ship atoms when you can ship bits.)
“In the future, there will be almost as few humans browsing the Net as there are people using libraries today. Agents will be doing that for most of us.”
And my favorite: “In human-to-computer interaction, your model of the computer is less telling than its model of your model of it. When this third-order model matches the first (your model of it), we can say that you know each other.” (Really?, I murmur to myself … this guy has lived in cyberspace so long he doesn’t even talk like an earthling.)
Actually, it is simply in Negroponte’s nature (and architectural training) to want to zoom through the technology and build something useful. Increasingly, he believes, computation will be embedded into things like sneakers, cufflinks, toasters, chairs and lamps. “Computing is not about computers any- more,” Negroponte says. “It is about living.’
To usher in that era, the Media Lab is launching a new research consortium called “Things That Think” that will look at everyday objects in a radically new light. In this vision, there are intelligent doorknobs that recognize you and open the door so you don’t have to put down your bags. Inside, the lights turn on, and your CD player, sensing your need for relaxation, cues your favorite Mozart piano sonata. The carpet uploads the day’s news into your shoes for personalized delivery to your glasses. Really.
Unlike most mortals, Negroponte is in a position to make some of this stuff happen. His world renowned Media Lab is an interdisciplinary research hotbed spawning way-leading-edge ideas at the convergence of computers, telecommunication, learning and entertainment. Negroponte is fond of saying that all communication media and technologies are poised for redefinition, and his life’s work is to help do the redefining.
Which, perhaps, explains why he doesn’t have an office. What could be more impressive to the Digital Rich and Famous that regularly tour the Media Lab and fund its research than to see the director eschew both paper and the office in which to store it. Imagine their envy as he shows off his Media Lab closet, home of his 10-year-old dinosaur computer that he uses to connect to the Internet when he’s not traveling. (He takes two Powerbooks and a pack of batteries with him on the road.)
“The future is about computer understanding,” he wrote in his November 1995 Wired magazine column. “It’s not about pixels, but objects. It is not about ASCII, but meaning. For this reason, an incredibly difficult problem like ‘computers with common sense’ is a major part of the future for the Media Lab. This is not a new problem, just a hard one. In fact, it’s so hard it has been more or less dismissed as impossible. What better challenge is there?”
GERSTNER: In “Doing Digital” you use two little words – bit and atoms — to help readers understand some of the digital change we’re experiencing. How do you define the two terms, and why is it important to distinguish the two?
NEGROPONTE: Atoms are things you can touch, such as newspapers, magazines, books and videocassettes. Bits are the smallest atomic element in the DNA of information. A bit has no color, size or weight; it can travel at the speed of light. We are definitely in the information age, but most information is still delivered in the form of atoms. Out mind-set about value is driven by atoms. Companies declare their atoms on a balance sheet, but their bits, often far more valuable, do not appear. Strange, but true.
GERSTNER: The change from bits to atoms is uncontrollable and unstoppable, and this is causing immense changes. When you borrow a book (atoms) from the library shelf, no one else can read the book until you bring it back.
NEGROPONTE: When you check out a book online (bits), the bits remain, accessible to someone else. As more and more things now delivered as atoms become delivered as bits, all this information becomes instantaneously and inexpensively accessible. When information is embodied in atoms, there is a need for all sorts of industrial-age means and huge corporations for delivery. But when the same information is shipped as bits, the traditional big guys are no longer needed. In a world of bits, you can be small and global at the same time.
GERSTNER: You have long said the fox machine has been a serious blemish on the computer landscape. Why?
NEGROPONTE: The fax machine allows us to ship pages in exactly the wrong way … atoms instead of bits. The fax is a step backward because it is nothing more than a picture of something. It is no more computer-readable than the page you’re reading this on. The same information delivered as an E-mail message takes much less bandwidth to send, plus it can be retrieved, filtered, sorted and edited. You can’t do anything with a fax except read it.
GERSTNER: Were you surprised about the explosion of the Internet today and the ramifications?
NEGROPONTE: No one predicted what’s happening, not even the founders of the Internet, I think we’re all underestimating the meaning and impact of it. The number of Web sites is doubling every 53 days. This is not a small event.
GERSTNER: Do you agree with John Perry Barlow that this is the greatest transforming event since fire?
NEGROPONTE: John’s pretty dramatic. I think there is something to that. I think what’s very telling is the way that people in general are responding to it. It turns out that the digital homeless of the United States tend to be very intelligent, affluent and well educated. It’s really the kids, and ironically the elderly, who are getting online very fast. The big slug of people in between, who tend to be the decision makers, executives and politicians, are really out of it. They are not part of this digital world; they don’t understand it.
GERSTNER: You’ve offered this advice to digital illiterates trying to learn the ABCs of cyberspace: “Hire a kid.”
NEGROPONTE: Because they’re wired at birth. The demographics of computing are much closer to rock music than theater. It’s totally generational. The information haves and have-nots have nothing to do with economic distinctions anymore. The control bits of the digital future are more than ever before in the hands of the young. And actually, nothing could make me happier.
GERSTNER: Do you worry about people using this advanced communication technology to disseminate disinformation rather than information?
NEGROPONTE: Any medium of expression can express things that are not true as well as true, you know. Just because they are bits doesn’t make them truer than if they weren’t bits.
GERSTNER: How might the Internet change the role of the journalist?
NEGROPONTE: Journalists will have to learn how to write stories in more than one dimension. Right now, you’re off the hook. You can basically make one version of an article and put it to bed. Tomorrow, you’ll have to report the story from multiple perspectives, which will be at least twice the work. . . but very important work. In fact, one of the professions that’s probably going to increase in terms of number of jobs per capita will be journalism.
GERSTNER: Is that partly because of the increasing need for more perspective in a rapidly changing world?
NEGROPONTE: Absolutely. . . somebody’s got to filter the onslaught of bits. The personal information filter business will be a big business of the future.
GERSTNER: What is your definition of information?
NEGROPONTE: That’s in the eyes of the beholder. It is that which is meaningful to a particular person at a particular time. If it’s not meaningful people don’t call it “information.” But again, information and understanding do not necessarily go hand in hand. I’m personally more interested in the other side of the equation, which is the understanding. I think it would be nice to spend a little bit more time on the understanding.
GERSTNER: I’m curious about your interaction with computers. Is it a love relationship. . . or love/hate?
NEGROPONTE: I think my interaction with computers is probably like yours is with air. In other words, I don’t think about it until it’s missing. I just use it all the time. I’m on a keyboard three to four hours a day, minimum, every day of the week, every week of the year.
GERSTNER: Are you ever frustrated by computers, with all the new upgrades and gadgets?
NEGROPONTE: Oh, sure. I’m frustrated that the last six years of advances in personal computing have resulted in diminishing returns on performance. My old Mac 5I2K went “boing” and it was on. My new computer takes forever to start up. Each new release of an application seems to come with an army of tiny icons, the meanings of which I no longer remember. I’m also frequently frustrated by the fact that I can make a tiny typing error and it doesn’t understand my command.
GERSTNER: Are you satisfied with the progress being made in the human-machine interface area?
NEGROPONTE: I’ve spent my life worrying about that, and no . . . human input to machines is still Paleolithic. That’s why so many of our parents and friends aren’t wired. We give a great deal of attention to human interface today, but almost solely from the perspective of making it easier for people to use computers I think it’s time to reverse this thinking and ask how to make it easier for computers to deal with people, not the reverse. I advise people to put yourself in the place of your computer. You can lift your hands from a computer keyboard and your computer does not know whether pause is for momentary reflection or for lunch. Your face is, in effect, your: display device; it makes no sense for the computer to remain confined to it. Computers are still vision- and hearing-impaired. It is time we moved on this interface backwater.
GERSTNER: Do we know the effect of working with a computer over time? Does it affect such things as human thinking patterns, decision making and writing?
NEGROPONTE: There are many answers to that question. I can give you examples of where autistic children use computers to communicate with other children over the Net and gain so much confidence from doing that that they find they can talk to adults in ways they never could before. I can give you examples of somebody like myself who has been on the Internet for 25 years. It makes my life very independent of space and time. In other words, it isn’t a nine-to-five, Monday-to-Friday life. It’s much more integrated. Sometimes I’ll stay in my pajamas until noon. Sometimes I work all weekend. That kind of lifestyle might have been associated with a studio painter at the turn of the century. Now it’s becoming part of. . . banking. There are so many effects. I find myself very impatient by having to wait that millisecond while the computer brings up the next screen.
GERSTNER: Does this impatience carry over into your personal life?
NEGROPONTE: I wonder? That’s a very interesting question. . . sort of do you tolerate fools less? Maybe. It’s a nice thought.
GERSTNER: How far are we on this continuum toward intelligent machines?
NEGROPONTE: Thinking of it as a continuum is exactly the right way to do it. This continuum is a mile long and we’re only a few inches down that mile. There’s a long way to go.
GERSTNER: Are the PC and TV becoming one machine… a PC-TV?
NEGROPONTE: I may be a little bit PC-centric on this question, but it makes no sense to think of the TV and the PC as anything but one and the same. They are both processors; they both deal with bits. The real difference is in the viewing experience. The TV set is a PC you look at from the sofa. It’s more important to focus on the broadcasting side. We won’t be pushing bits at people like we do today.
The Media Lab is now 10 years old. Is it just beginning to be understood? Whether the Media Lab is understood or not understood is not something I’ve paid much attention to. I think that it’s fair to say that 10 years ago we were considered sort of all icing and no cake. Now 10 years later I think people are understanding that what we’re dealing with is pretty deep. Just because it sounded like color in motion doesn’t mean that it’s superficial topping.
GERSTNER: Where do good new Ideas come from?
NEGROPONTE: That’s simple. . . from differences. Creativity comes from unlikely juxtapositions. The best way to maximize differences is to mix ages, cultures and disciplines. That’s why you’ll find at the Media Lab a mix of engineers, artists and scientists who collaborate, not compete.
GERSTNER: Stewart Brand’s hook on the Media Lab quotes computer visionary Alan Kay saying that the way to improve is to get the first good image of the thing that is least prejudiced by what we already know. Do you have any advice on how to do that?
NEGROPONTE: Alan is brilliant in his remarks like that. The corollary to that, which I would credit to Marvin Minsky, is that the way to implement what Alan said is to make sure that you understand things from more than one perspective. This is something that corporations are very bad at doing.
GERSTNER: Do you have advice on that?
NEGROPONTE: Seeing things from more than one perspective? I think it requires looking outward more than companies do, and I hope the Internet and the Web helps that. Corporate America spends too much in meetings with itself. New concepts and big steps forward come from left field. The global landscape is the most fertile ground for new ideas.
GERSTNER: What’s the best future that you can imagine? What would it he composed of?
The best future would first be global, not nationalistic. It’s certainly a future that has a lot more communication and consequently less tension. A lot of our problems, from fundamentalism to bigotry to all sorts of other nasty things come from a lack of communication. We’re not going to solve every problem in the world with better communication, but clearly an interconnected world is going to be better than a world that’s not. I think you’re going to see the differences between the haves and have-nots shrinking over time, and that to me would make a really wonderful place to be.”
Cyber Cowboy
John Perry Barlow
“Imagine discovering a continent so vast that it may have no other side. Imagine a new world with more resources than all our future greed might exhaust, more opportunities than there will ever be entrepreneurs enough to exploit, and a peculiar kind of real estate which expands with development.”
John Perry Barlow describing cyberspace in 1981.
First in a series of interviews on ‘The Civilization of Cyberspace’ by John Gerstner, ABC (First published in the November 1995, Communication World Magazine.
“Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation … A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity: Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding…” William Gibson, from Neuromancer
“The Internet is growing like slime mold.” – John Perry Barlow
As if communicators’ so-called lives weren’t already pressurized, a few new tasks are suddenly popping onto our “to do” list. Such as … buy a modem; find an Internet access provider; get intimately familiar with FTP, gopher, HTML and PDF; subscribe to some Usenet newsgroups and learn “Netiquette”; and design and launch a Home Page for your organization. Plug in, boot up, get wired.
Ready or not, this is the reality of cyberspace, an alluring yet threatening frontier that in some ways conjures up an image of the 19th-century American West. While we settlers are still secure on our covered couches, content watching television or America Online, the cybercowboys, cyberpunks, netheads and byte drovers are restlessly staring at a different screen. With Gold Rush fervor, they are lording over incompatible protocols, braving arcane computer interfaces and leaping past those infernal error messages to forge virtual communities, cultures and consciousness.
Just as in the Wild West, the digital pioneers tend to be tribal, idealistic and iconoclastic. They despise anything that resembles rules or laws in their virtual villages, preferring to let Netizens write their own codes as needed, asserting that any law in cyberspace cannot be enforced anyway.
Depending on whom you believe, there may be as many as 30 million “Internauts” now surfing the Net (albeit they may mostly be American males and under the age of 50). This number is said to be doubling about every nine months, and has been since 1968. Many predict at least a 10-fold increase, to 300 million, by the year 2000. This online explosion means – especially for the communicator – it has truly become a matter of lead, follow or get out of the way.
The good news, according to John Perry Barlow – who is surely on the short list of prominent Cybergurus – is that the communicators’ skills of perceiving and explaining reality will be increasingly valued as we advance toward lives increasingly virtual. The bad news, says Barlow, is that the institutions communicators work for are doomed.
“The Net is about taking power away from institutions and giving it to individuals,” Barlow told a large audience at the 1995 IABC International Conference in Toronto. “Great big, centralized, hierarchical companies are just going to keel over and die.”
It was not a universally appreciated message, of course, but Barlow – tall, bearded, and rugged like the cowboy he once was – prides himself on speaking his mind. “I’m incredibly blessed to be one of very few people in society that can say whatever he thinks without fear of being denied a paycheck. I wish for a world where everybody will have as much of that same freedom as they can take.”
Recently declared by the Utne Reader to be among “100 Visionaries Who Could Change Your Life,” Barlow arrived on the cyberscene in the same roundabout fashion you use when you explore the Web … following whims, hyperlinking from one unrelated site to another. So, after earning an honors degree in comparative religion from Wesleyan University in 1969, Barlow went into cattle ranching in Cora, Wyoming, his hometown. His interest in music and poetry led him to start co-writing songs for the U.S. music group, Grateful Dead. He was one of the first Deadheads to begin using the Internet to stay connected. He eventually became so engrossed with the possibilities of virtual communities and the direction computer information was taking the world, he sold the ranch in 1988 to write about it, and indirectly make the Internet his life.
In 1990, he and Mitchell Kapor founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an organization that promotes freedom of expression in digital media. He currently serves as its vice chairman.
Today, Barlow circles the globe lecturing on the “virtualization of society.” He is a recognized commentator on computer security, Virtual Reality, digitized intellectual property, and the social and legal conditions arising in the global network of connected digital devices. He is a contributing editor of numerous publications, including Communications of the ACM, Microtimes, and Mondo 2000. He is also a contributing writer for Wired.
His 1995 summer travel schedule hints at how in demand a genuine cyberspace guru is these days. Just in August of this year Barlow’s speaking engagements took him to Colorado (twice), New Zealand, Australia, Minnesota, California, Austria, Washington, D.C., and New York City (where he also has an apartment). In pondering his new career, Barlow comments with typical cowboy humor: “I concluded there is a lot more money in BS than in bull.”
You say the Internet is the greatest invention since fire. Really?
The Internet ultimately will transform what it is to be human more than any other technological development since fire. The Internet is not a machine, it’s a life form, growing to fill every possible space, making use of all the energy that the surrounding ecology will provide it. It is growing exponentially and if it continues to grow at its present rate, every man, woman and child on earth will have an E-mail address by 2003. That won’t happen; the exponential growth curve will flatten out. But in terms of the way the world is organized cosmologically, this is certainly the most sweeping change that has taken place in the West since Moses. Monotheism is about to be replaced by something that looks a lot like pantheism, and that’s a profound change. I honestly believe that there will probably not be anything that looks like a federal government left on this planet in about 50 years. And there will probably not be any large human organizations in less than that.
What about the Internet makes it so powerful?
The Internet has an incredibly flattening effect on everything that it touches. E-mail has a way of going through a corporate org. chart like meat tenderizer. There is no hierarchical organization pattern on the Web. What you’ve got is the same system that life uses, which is flat and inclusive – and efficient. Having a world view where God is in heaven and the CEO is just below, and the president is there, and dad is here, just doesn’t work anymore. Now we’re all everywhere on a pretty even footing. When you talk about things of that nature, you’re driving right to the heart of reality, which is what communicators define.
Buckminster Fuller talked about a day when everyone would be millionaires because of the tremendous efficiency that technology would bring. Do you think he was describing the Internet?
Yes, absolutely. He knew that information was giving us a longer and longer lever everywhere he looked. He could see what was happening in manufacturing processes and distribution of materials. Just look at agriculture. We went from 40 percent of the work force feeding 80 million people to less than one percent of the work force feeding 260 million people, largely because of information.
You say information becomes more and more valuable as it is processed?
You take a piece of information and share it between two people and that same piece of information becomes more valuable, because it now has a context that automatically makes it more complex than it was before you shared it. It layers new forms of value onto itself with each iteration. You get a deeper understanding, a better strategy, a more finely tuned approach. This is a very different way of looking at the economy than the one we have been using, which is based on physical objects. Scarcity of physical items increases their value, which is not necessarily true of information. With information like music or books, the better something is known, the more valuable it becomes. Most of the economic value now is coming out of the informational world, not the physical.
How will the Internet change the lives of professional communicators?
It changes the job utterly. You are now able to communicate with a great many people on an interactive basis. You can have a conversation that is ultimately a lot more communicative than dropping leaflets from 35,000 feet, which is the old communication model. We are now involved in a conversation about ‘the conversation.’
Is this good or bad for communicators?
Both. The good news is that the skills that you have acquired in trying to concisely describe some aspect of reality are going to be in ever-increasing demand. If you have a point of view that seems valid and a way of telling the truth that seems like the truth, people are going to want to buy that validity and point of view because there is going to be an incredible shortage of authority. If you can perceive and speak with authority, you’ll be very useful to society and you will be well paid. The bad news is that the institutions that you work for are doomed.
What about the mass media?
I think the Internet will eliminate the mass media … the one-to-many media. I think people are sick to death of getting their understanding of how the world works that way. What the mass media does for a living is sell the attention of the public to advertisers. Well, that’s easy. The brain stem responds every time to sex, fear and violence. So spreading a view of the world that includes plenty of all three is in the media’s best interest. That’s why we are all convinced that there is a massive crime wave loose among us, even though the statistics tell us that crime has been declining in the U.S. on a pretty steady curve for about 20 years, and in most parts of America it is at its lowest point in a long time. It’s in the mass media’s interest to sell a view of the world that it is very dangerous.
How do you get your news?
I get on the Net and look at the conversation that’s taking place on subjects or places that interest me, and listen and interact. I assume if it’s coming over the channel, it’s a distortion. If all I knew about current events is what I read in the papers or saw on TV, I would know less than nothing. I would know the wrong things. During the Gulf War, for example, I watched CNN – which seemed like pure virtual reality to me – and I had friends who had laptops in the desert and were doing E-mail and contributing to newsgroups on the war. Their view of things seemed much more credible to me and was quite different from CNN’s, and turned out to be a much more accurate predictor of events than CNN. A lot of people are going to get hip to that.
What is your definition of Cyberspace?
Cyberspace is what happens when you leave the landscape and move onto the map. Cyberspace is any place where you can interact with other human beings on any level without actually being in physical proximity. Every one of your readers has experienced it because cyberspace is where you are when you are on the phone. You could stretch the point and say that literature is a form of cyberspace.
Is the real question of making Cyberspace more like real space. or reality, just a question of band-width?
It’s a question of band width, but also some philosophical and theological issues. The real question, I think, is whether or not you can get breath and spirit through the wire, and I’m not sure you can. We don’t know very much about the difference between experience and information yet either. I don’t think we have even really gotten started on what will be the way in which we communicate in a many-to-many medium with a lot of band width.
Would our conversation be more meaningful if this were an interview by videoconference?
A little bit. There’s a lot to expression and body language. I think people pay a lot more attention to the music than the lyrics, and what you’d see in that video image would be closer to the music. Audio is incredibly important. There is a huge difference between talking to somebody on the phone and interacting with them in text. I am rarely surprised by people whom I have spoken to on the phone. People that I meet whom I’ve never dealt with through anything but text on screen are always shocking.
Were you a big fan of Marshall McLuhan?
Oh, huge … still am. McLuhan was an enormous revelation to me. McLuhan, Buckminster Fuller, Timothy Leafy and John Cage were all big, but McLuhan was huge.
Do you agree with Leary that most Americans have been living in virtual reality since the proliferation of television, and that all cyberspace will do is make the experience interactive instead of passive? Is interactivity the critical piece here?
Yes. I think the toxicity of television is largely a result of the fact that it puts you in a completely passive role. It diminishes consciousness. Consciousness is very much about defining and redefining a point of view that maintains itself in direct exposure to lots of different sets of data.
The Internet certainly makes it a lot less important where you reside in the future, right?
So it seems. The really ironic thing is that I thought the Internet was going to make it possible for me to plunk my body down where I’d been ranching and let my mind roam the planet. What has actually happened is that my mind stays in one place, Barlow@eff.org, and my body roams the planet.
Which do you think allows you to think better?
I think better on the basis of experience rather than information. If I’m having experiences, it’s closer to what I think of as being reality. Instead of having to hear about what’s going on with, say, network development in France or Germany, I spend a lot of time in France and Germany talking to people who are on the ground, and my assumptions get blown out of the water.
What’s it like being famous in cyberspace?
There’s a real hazard in becoming a celebrity, which is the temptation sooner or later to buy your own poster. I’m far from that, but I feel overwhelmed by E-mail a lot of the time. I’ve had to start engaging in a kind of E-mail triage where I just say, “I didn’t ask for this. I don’t have any moral obligation to respond.” I really do worry about information overload. Without filters of some kind, we could just find ourselves up against the wall being hosed down by bytes, like those civil rights protesters from the ’60s.
Where may the civilization of cyberspace take us, as far as you can see?
The farthest out that it might be going is a condition where every single human nervous synapse on this planet is continuously hardwired to every other, so that all of the thinking flesh on Planet Earth is connected. On that day, you’ll have an organism for processing information the likes of which has not been seen around this part of the universe before. Lord knows what it’ll think, but it’ll be a very fecund ecology for thought. That’s an essentially religious vision.
Have you described nirvana or hell?
Neither. It’s just a very different kind of life.
Do you have a personal mission in cyberspace? How do you see yourself going forward in this field?
I have a bunch of different personal missions. One of them is to make certain that Cyberspace lives up to its promise of offering the greatest freedom of expression that human beings have ever had. If we do this right, nobody will ever be able to shut you up. I also have some kind of hippie mystic desire to just connect everything to everything else for its own sake. I don’t even know why I want to do that, but I think that there is some mysterious creature of mind that’s trying to be born here. There are a lot of us assisting in that process. And I want to get a more representative sample of society on the Internet. I want to see more women, blacks and poor people.
Your Electronic Frontier Foundation is currently engaged in a battle to deny an amendment, which would ban the constitutional right to free speech on the Internet. Since no country or organization owns the Internet, is censorship of cyberspace a real threat?
True, the Internet deals with an external imposition of censorship as though it were a malfunction … it just routes around it. But censorship is a real threat in that people could start to self-censor because of it. I’m more worried about people denying themselves freedom than the government being able to control it. Liberty lies in its exercise. If you’re not willing to act free, you won’t be free. People are so paranoid these days and easily influenced in what I consider to be totalitarian ways that it wouldn’t surprise me.
As I spend more time on the computer I’ve noticed I’m becoming more impatient with any milliseconds of wait time. And of course the Internet is one of the things that provokes that impatience. What is your experience?
There’s something about band widths that is very much like money, sex and power. It always feels short, and the more you’ve got, the shorter it feels. I experienced this at Ames Research Lab (NASA Ames). They had just gotten in a Cray YMP and I asked the guy who was there what he thought of it and he said, … well, it took us about two weeks to go from “Holy Shit” to “Come on, come on.” The thing that sets humans apart from all other species is that we’re perpetually dissatisfied; we’re always looking for more.
Do you find yourself multi-tasking more? [prompted by Barlow intermittently tapping his keyboard throughout the interview]
Oh, absolutely. I do that constantly.
Do you think that contributes to the stress we feel?
I think there are a lot of things contributing to stress, not the least of which is continuous and rapid change. But I think we generate more stress by virtue of all of the denial we have about a whole lot of social issues. People are sneaking around preserving so many different false faces, watching themselves constantly to make certain that they don’t say something that will offend their employer or family or whomever. Their government. I think there’s way more stress in that.
And you hope that some day, through perhaps the freedom that cyberspace allows, that there will be much less of that kind of stress?
That’s my hope. I long for a world where people can be who they are. Basically it’s the world that I inhabit now, but I’m practically the only person I know who has this luxury, and I think that’s pathetic.
Do you worry about cyberspace becoming so commercialized?
No. It’s inevitable.
Any last bit of advice you would give to a communicator who would rather leave the Internet to hackers?
Get on the Net and start experiencing it. Start figuring out what it is. Find out what it feels like to be there. Feel the thing out and see what it ignites in you, if anything. Regardless of whether you think it’s hype or not, it’s growing at a rate that you cannot safely ignore. And it’s changing very, very fast.
Do you think they’ll like it?
Some will, some won’t. It’s a huge place and it’s getting bigger by the second. I have no idea how far we will plunge into this strange place. Unlike previous frontiers, there is no end to this one. But why resist? In five years, everyone who is reading these words will have an E-mail address. I recommend entering open-minded, open-hearted, with excitement and hope. When we are all together in Cyberspace then we will see what the human spirit, and the basic desire to connect, can create.
In addition to keeping on the right side of the law, it’s important to realize that simply writing a policy does not protect the organization. The policy needs to be augmented with communication, training and monitoring. The policy is a living document which will need revision as the organization learns about social media. It will also need revision when missteps on social media occur – as they inevitably will. But with experience comes learning and that is a good thing.
The problem with many policies is that while they are often quite clear on what the company’s employees should not do, they leave some unanswered questions about what they should do. We believe a more useful approach for social media policy writing is to focus on the dos, rather than the don’ts.
Just telling someone what they should not do doesn’t automatically help them understand what they should do. In cut and dry situations – the ones we’ve all been through a dozen times before – it is easy to infer that if the sign says “stay off the grass” it means we should use the paved path instead. With social media, inferring the positive action that is desired from the negative action that is forbidden is not always so easy. Will every employee know how they can avoid violating applicable copyright laws and statutory requirements? Can they list the five signs that indicate when they are not appropriately safeguarding company assets?
Tourism Ireland is currently ranked the third largest national tourist board on Facebook, with approximately 700,000 fans across 20 markets in eight languages. In the absence of an accepted industry standard to assess the value of this beyond simply counting fan numbers, we developed the concept of Social Equivalent Advertising Value (SEAV).
Just as the PR sector has traditionally measured its impact by the cost of buying advertising to cover the equivalent column inches, so a similar approach can be applied to social media. The more a brand message is shared, the more “column inches” are gained and the value of this can be compared to the cost of equivalent online advertising.
We identified four levels of consumer engagement with brands in social media:
- Post Impressions: viewing a brand post.
- Page Impressions: viewing a brand owner’s social platform.
- Personal Actions: consuming brand content such as photos, videos or links.
- Public Actions: sharing brand content with their network.
We then categorized the actions that consumers can take across the major social platforms into each of these groupings, and attributed a financial value to the cost of delivering a comparable consumer engagement online. This allowed us to quantify the value of our social engagement in Facebook at the end of last year at an annualized level of €1.7 million.
At the Yammer Tour, David Obrand, Yammer VP of Global Sales, stated that most intranets are not participatory, and that most existing enterprise software tools basically suck (my paraphrasing). And he’s absolutely right. By comparison, Yammer has good functionality and a class leading, very familiar UI (taken almost pixel for pixel from Facebook). It exposes a lot of enterprise software products as the creaky, dated code pits that they are.
But is Yammer a viable intranet replacement? Yammer’s team says, ‘We want to be the place where work gets done. In time it will be’.
Whether you believe this really depends on your definition of intranet. If you perceive an intranet to be just about communication and social conversation, and the ability to co-author documents, then Yammer may be a viable intranet replacement tool. Yet it is missing a lot of pretty common CMS functionality, and is simply in the lightweight class of products compared to the best intranets out there.
You also have to ask, is it Yammer’s destiny to become a mid-level, cloud-hosted CMS product, with social capabilities? If that’s the case, what will happen first: Yammer adds all the CMS capabilities that organisations need, or CMS providers add a micro-messaging capability? Even with every necessary feature, you still have the cloud-hosted aspect, which remains a huge hurdle for many organisations.
Yammer’s increasing integration and connections with other tools – SAP, Salesforce, SharePoint etc – is notable here (and awesome in many ways). But I don’t see Yammer’s (or any other social tool’s) place in the enterprise as the single environment or unified interface, it’s much more of an accompanying tool – the social layer in a composite system.
Replacing the intranet is an ambitious statement and a great strategy, but at this stage it’s difficult to agree with it at anything but the most lightweight level. To top it off, ambitions to replace or ‘kill’ incumbent products rarely turn out to be realistic. This is why Lotus Notes still exists.
Companies are beginning to discover that social technology platforms provide a far more efficient way of communicating and collaborating. And, they give companies a way to dig out the “dark matter” of company knowledge that is buried in email inboxes and on hard drives. Unlike email, messages on social platforms are accessible to the entire team in real time, eliminating all the to-ing and fro-ing to get everybody on the same page. Even better, on social platforms, communications become content — forming a searchable archive that can be continually enriched with comments and additions by members of the online community. So, when the expert in the group answers the question about how to account for depreciation in Turkey, everybody can see it or find it later.
We estimate that “interaction workers,” (managers, professionals, sales people, and others whose work requires frequent interpersonal interactions, independent judgment, and access to knowledge) spend 28% of their workdays answering, writing, or responding to email. They also spend another 19% of the time trying to track down information (including searching through their own e-mail files) and 14% collaborating with co-workers. (And these are your most expensive employees, and the ones you count on to do more than routine work; they’re supposed to be innovating, figuring out how to improve business processes, and generally building you a better mousetrap — not wading through e-mail.)
These activities could potentially be done much more efficiently and effectively using social technologies — we figure by 20-25%. This assumes, of course, that time saved by communicating and collaborating via social technology is not used for viewing videos of cute kittens, but is dedicated to the most productive uses.
Naturally, there is also a catch: to capture this value, companies will have to do a lot more than buy some enterprise social technology. To get the improvement in knowledge worker productivity, organizations need robust and widespread participation by all sorts of employees (you never know where that dark matter is hiding). Firstly, social technologies will only succeed if they become part of the daily workflow, not an extra item on a to-do list that will never get checked off. Sometimes this means the company’s workflows need to change, sometimes the social tools must be adapted to workflows, and in many cases, both workflows and technologies will have to be adjusted. For example, in one computer-generated animation company, social tools did not become commonly used until they allowed people to post and interact on video clips — the preferred medium for discussion.
Participation, in turn, depends on having an environment of openness, information sharing, and trust — the sort of culture that many organizations have not yet established. For this to happen, leaders must take the lead — after all, these are social technologies. Leaders will have to role model the use of these technologies, explain how to use them to drive value, observe success stories and help them to scale up to the rest of the enterprise. At the same time, these technologies are only as effective as the degree to which individuals participate, so lessons from consumer social applications can be applied in the enterprise. How do you create applications that are as compelling to corporate employees as they are to those same people in their personal lives? Techniques such as self-reinforcing behavior loops (e.g. gamification), A/B testing, and mobile deployment can be applied in the enterprise, just as they are used in the consumer space. But overall, changing mindsets, behaviors and a culture that celebrates and expects sharing and openness is a real organizational challenge.
Like the rising temperature of the water the proverbial frog is sitting in, organizations are feeling the social era all around them, but failing to notice how significant a change it has produced. Because it has shown up in bits and pieces, via freemium models, crowdsourcing, online communities, virtual workforces, social networks, and so on, it is easy to miss how much the overall context has changed for the way value is created.
You might notice that I have used the term social era. It’s not to create more jargon, it’s to emphasize a point: that social is more than the stuff the marketing team deals with. It’s something that allows organizations to do things entirely differently — if we let it become the backbone of our business models.
How does this work? What are the rules? What does it mean for all parts of my business? That’s something I will be exploring in several posts for HBR. Here, let me start with three major shifts that I see:
Lean, not big. Most organizations operating today started when companies needed more operating capital. Being big was in itself a mark of success. And in fact, being big created a natural barrier to entry for competitors. The “big” mindset continues to form an organizational framework for many institutions. Take banking as a visible example. Bank of America recently considered a $5 fee for customers to get their own money via their debit card because they have to find a way to fund all those retail storefronts. But if they were launching today, banks would likely ask themselves how to accomplish the transactions (deposits, withdrawals, financial management) of banking without the physical commitment of banks. They might try what ING is doing with its café model. They might even reimagine what it is to lend money. Instead of competing with new startups like Lending Club or ProFounder, they might be the ones reinventing the space.
Conversations, not chains. Many organizations still operate by Porter’s Value Chain model, where Z follows Y, which follows X. These linear models optimized efficient delivery of a known thing. But this doesn’t help us when faster, fluid responses are what we need. Fifteen years ago, The Cluetrain Manifesto taught us that markets are conversations and that was a great starting point. But “conversations” can actually go deeper if you allow them to become central to how you work, rather than leave them on the perimeter of the work. How many companies have figured out how to shift from supply chain management to integrating customer feedback directly into their product design, distribution, and delivery? Because that’s the point.
Mass markets were a convenient fiction created by mass media. Television and major magazines could only reach only very vague demographic segments like “women of child-bearing age” and “college students,” so a lot of organizations still think of that as “targeting” their offer. But real markets are much more precise.
Finding out where any particular customers hang out and talking with them directly is central to accurately understanding demand and building it into the business model. Case in point: Gap missed many of its performance numbers in 2011 by believing that their only interaction with their customers happened at the cash register.
Altimeter Report: Making The Business Case for Enterprise Social Networks
View more documents from Altimeter Group Network on SlideShareData HighlightsThe report also includes input from 13 technology providers, 185 end users, and surveyed 81 ESN decision makers from companies with over 250 employees (see below in Related Resources for links to the data). A few of the findings and graphics from the report are included below. There was only moderate impact on business goals. On a scale of 1 to 4, the highest impact seen – improving collaboration between departments/teams — scored only a 2.91 (see Figure 5 below).
While most small business owners are starting to realize that social media is a necessary part of any marketing strategy, as a social media coach, the question I get most often is how to add social media to a day that is already way too full. For those of us working as solopreneurs or small business owners, it may, at times, feel like we are working virtually around the clock so when are we really supposed to tweet, post or blog?
I’ll admit creating a social media plan that will stick is like starting an exercise program. You just have to take that leap and do it. You need to look at it, not as a series of social media tasks that need to be done during the day, but more of a lifestyle change that you need to incorporate into your entire way of thinking.
5 tips to make the social media lifestyle change
- Coffee and Twitter: For most of us, a morning cup of coffee is sacred. Without one, our day cannot get off to a good start. Try to incorporate tweeting with your morning coffee, Instead of reading the newspaper, read your stream to find interesting articles to share with your followers. If you still need to read the paper, know that most publications these days are online and make sharing with your networks very easy. In addition to coffee first thing in the morning, take a moment or two to tweet during your mid-morning or mid-afternoon coffee break as well.
- Change the way you look at the world: Instead of walking through your day with blinders on, as most of us do, focused on the tasks we need to get done, try looking at the world with a different set of eyes. Examine everything — images, articles, conversations you have with co-workers — and use it as fodder for posts, blogs and tweets. This doesn’t mean that you need to be online all day, it just means changing the way you think to include a social media aspect to your day. Taking mental notes to save for your social media coffee breaks.
- Blog on the weekend: We all know that blogging for business is one of the most important factors to getting found online. It improves our SEO, increases our professional credibility and lets our audience know who we are and how we interact. Blogging can also be the most time consuming part of any social media plan. During your busy workday, as your taking in everything that is going on around you, take mental notes and save the blogging for the weekend when our schedule is more open. Most social dashboards will allow you to schedule posts to go live at a later time.
Here are 10 key actions to transform employees into ambassadors:
- Ditch social media guidelines for social media training – The internet changes everyday and with it, the norms, behaviors and destinations an ambassador must pay attention to. Static guidelines leave ambassadors with instructions that expire and little direction. The journey from employee to ambassador includes more than a set of rules, it includes the acquisition of skills. Those skills can only come from experience and training.
- Use game mechanics to incentivize participation – Building an organic audience is a long-term commitment. Not every ambassador will be energized by the prospect of daily production, reading, sharing and networking. To maintain momentum, break-down responsibilities into discrete and categorized actions. Weight each action by expected effort and reward accordingly. Make it all add up. Give ambassadors a set of quests that allow them to qualify for a particular specialty — set up a profile, make your first connection, unlock your newbie status. Design digital tools that monitor activities and allow constant feedback.
- Limit your audience to interest groups – The ‘mass web’ is an extremely competitive environment where the latest gossip, extraordinary news events and cat videos fight for attention. The size of the potential audience is huge, but the chance of being drowned out is even larger. Avoid irrelevance by engaging with interest groups. Focus on becoming a valued member of the community, not just a sponsor of it.
- Don’t get caught up in audience size – 100 good friends online can often trump 100,000 acquaintances, especially if those 100 friends are well connected. With a smaller network, the content that you produce and things you have to say become more focused. That focus improves the likelihood of engagement and strong referral. Good friends don’t just ‘pass things along’, they advocate for their circle of friends.
- Choose your speciality – There are many ways to become prominent online. Brands become obsessed with leading conversations and taking the authoritative role. But, not every brand has the qualities to lead audiences like a Seth Godin or Steven Colbert. There are other specialities. For example, Jason Kottke has won the attention of a large audience by exploring the fringe of internet and sharing links that would otherwise remain hidden. It’s not about what he says but, about what he finds.
You must decide – as an organization and as an individual team leader – what spirit you intend to convey with the participation of your employees in social media.
If your intention is for them to be simply mechanical amplification vehicles for a very carefully crafted marketing message, that can work. You’ll likely see some results in terms of absolute reach and volume of short-term message resonance. You will sacrifice a degree of credibility on behalf of your individual representatives and personality and genuineness on behalf of your brand in favor of a consistent, safe(-r) message. You will also likely sacrifice culturally, since your employees will realize they’re part of a marketing machine, not someone who is entrusted to help build and shape a brand.
If your intention is for employees to become individual voices for your organization and unique representatives of your company’s values, personality and diversity, that can work too. You’ll likely see results in terms of trust and affinity for your brand as well as better identification of your advocates, both internal and external. You will sacrifice a certain amount of stability and potential consistency of message in favor of communications that are more unique and individual. You’ll also sacrifice some predictability around outcomes and need to rely on strong education and culture initiatives to guide your teams and hone their own sense of good judgment.
The bottom line: governance and guidance is important. But it’s a means to more scalable social media, not the end.
We’ve said many times here — and will continue to — that social business transformation is far more cultural than it is operational. Getting your employees involved is no different, and your policies and guidelines need to consider not just what you don’t want to happen, but instead what values, vision and intent you want your teams’ social media participation to convey.
INTEL
Always pause and think before posting. That said, reply to comments in a timely manner, when a response is appropriate. But if it gives you pause, pause. If you’re about to publish something that makes you even the slightest bit uncomfortable, don’t shrug it off and hit ‘send.’ Take a minute to review these guidelines and try to figure out what’s bothering you, then fix it. If you’re still unsure, you might want to discuss it with your manager or legal representative. Ultimately, what you publish is yours – as is the responsibility. So be sure.
Perception is reality. In online social networks, the lines between public and private, personal and professional are blurred. Just by identifying yourself as an Intel employee, you are creating perceptions about your expertise and about Intel by our shareholders, customers, and the general public-and perceptions about you by your colleagues and managers. Do us all proud. Be sure that all content associated with you is consistent with your work and with Intel’s values and professional standards.
It’s a conversation. Talk to your readers like you would talk to real people in professional situations. In other words, avoid overly pedantic or “composed” language. Don’t be afraid to bring in your own personality and say what’s on your mind. Consider content that’s open-ended and invites response. Encourage comments. You can also broaden the conversation by citing others who are blogging about the same topic and allowing your content to be shared or syndicated.
If you’re hoping for your latest content to go viral, it has to do one thing: evoke strong emotion. Key word there is “strong”. If someone lightly laughs at something, or is slightly inspired, that doesn’t make them jump to the “share” button. It has to be to the level of awesome. Awesomely funny, upsetting, uplifting, offensive, whatever the emotion is–it has to hit it hard. P&G’s Olympics ad is doing that–to the tune of 5.4 million views. Your latest blog post on why you like your company’s product isn’t doing that.
If you hit one or more of those emotions, that’s when the spread starts. The key to long-lasting viral is to reach the Third Circle.
In the middle is you or your brand. When you push out content, it always hits a good percentage of your First Circle. That’s your brand fans on Facebook, your followers on Twitter, the creepy people still on MySpace. It can also be personal friends and family. A percentage of those in the First Circle will always share your stuff for a multitude of reasons. They know you, so there is more reason to find an inside joke funny, they think you’re attractive (that’s a hot logo you got there!) so they always “Like” whatever you share. That means your content can always easily reach the Second Circle. It’s getting the content to spread past that circle that is the difference between viral and spiral.
That Second Circle have little to no brand attachment or relationship to you. They will spread the content based on its own content merits. Once they start sharing it with no brand umbilical cord attached, you know you’ve got a good one on your hands.
Companies cannot survive (let alone prosper) without recognizing that Social as a phenomenon can allow us to redefine our organizations to be inherently more fast fluid and flexible by its very design. Not by doing a little bit more, or slimming down a bit here or there, or by doing a few things a little bit faster. No. We will not tweak our way into the future.
Today, too many organizations that think their status as an “800-pound gorilla” gives them an edge are struggling to survive, let alone thrive. They underestimate social to their great detriment. They see it as the purview of two functions: marketing and service. It’s either “Like us on Facebook!” or “We’re so sorry you’re having a problem.” While a few have figured out that they can use social to listen to the market — sort of like putting a stethoscope to the market heartbeat — they have yet to figure out there is more to this Social thing.
So before we can explore the Social Era, we need to disaggregate two words — social is not always attached to the word media. Social can be and is more than marketing or communications-related work.
When we look at all the parts together, we can see how Social affects all parts of the business model: the way an organization creates, delivers, and captures value. They also shift the ethos by which we lead and work.
