Social Research, Fall 1997 v64 n3 p1021(21)
Technology and the rest of culture: keynote.
(Technology and the Rest of Culture)
Arno Penzias.
Abstract:
Advances in technology affect our culture. In the future, technological
advances will prevent people
from remaining completely anonymous. Growth in the number of alternative
media sources will cause the media
to continue to vie for individuals' leisure time and focus increasingly
on the unique instead of the norm within
society. Changes in how information is produced and exchanged will allow
for more flexible working styles and
schedules.
Full
Text: COPYRIGHT 1997 New School for Social Research I have trouble understanding
the title to my
own article. What do these two much-used terms--technology and culture--really
mean? My favorite definition
of technology comes from John Kenneth Galbraith: the application of organized
knowledge. So far so good. But
what about culture? Based upon my 1950's education, culture is whatever
Margaret Mead, or perhaps Ruth
Benedict, said it was. Something like what your parents make you believe
before you're old enough to form an
independent opinion.
Let
me begin by focusing on the first of these two terms and seeing what it
reveals with respect to the second.
Among all the stuff that human ingenuity has produced, information technology
has probably had the greatest
impact upon culture. Just consider how the invention of, say, vowels--which
is indeed a technology--shaped
Greek civilization (and also the good press that they have gotten afterwards,
as a result of it). The technology of
today abounds in similar examples. Today's world is so pervaded by information
technology that we're
beginning to fuse the two together in our minds. Perhaps we should talk
about "cyberspace" to avoid confusion
with other stuff such as locomotives, hydroelectric dams, and dental drills.
But as far as we're concerned,
information technology so pervades our world today that we lose little
by restricting ourselves to that area. So
let me restrict myself to the information aspects of technology in trying
to answer, or at least address, a few
simple questions concerning technology and culture: Where are we? How did
we get here? What's out? What's
in? And, finally, What lies ahead?
Where Are We?
In
looking at today's cyberspace technology, three important elements emerge.
The first is the overwhelming use
of digital information storage. Most of the records of our civilization
today are created on computers--either as
text or, increasingly, in image form as well. While the new digital cameras
currently seem art expensive novelty,
pretty soon carting out film to some little place in a drugstore to get
your pictures developed will be a thing of
the past. But digital photography offers far more than merely avoiding
an errand or two. With digital cameras,
it's never too late to change all those almost-good snapshots in which
someone hadn't remembered to button a
coat or take off a name tag. In a digital picture, anyone can just sit
down at a computer and give the subject a
sartorial makeover. While that novelty will wear off over time, it will
initially sell a lot of cameras. More
important, digital technology will offer consumers and professionals with
an inexhaustible supply of "film,"
together with truly prodigious quantities of convenient storage space.
While
the digital creation and storage of images is growing rapidly, text-based
material still fills the bulk of
today's storage space--comprised largely of records of computer-supported
transactions. The sheer size of this
ever-expanding mass of data staggers the imagination. Every day, more and
more material produced and stored
in computer-accessible, readable, and modifiable form. Moreover, the older
material--the paper--that exists in
our world's archives is increasingly being scanned into its digital equivalents.
And so it is that digital information
of all kinds, in enormous amounts, is becoming available to its owners--and
those they choose to share it with.
An
article on mass data storage in a recent issue of Computer World speaks
in terms of terabytes, or trillions of
bytes. For text-based data, each byte equates to an alphanumeric character,
or keystroke. So a terabyte, or
trillion keystrokes, represents some four hundred million pages of text.
Today, many businesses must cope with
a terabyte of data, with the largest companies facing ten times that much.
Where will it all end? Who knows?
Tales of future hundred-terabyte systems pepper the table talk in Silicon
Valley cafes.
Alongside
digital information storage, there is the growing interconnection of the
world's computers. Computers
have played a series of roles, beginning with numerical calculation. The
first programmable string manipulation
machines--or computers--earned this catchier title by serving as replacements
for real computers. Originally,
computer was a job title given to people who sat at desks, read numbers
written on a pad, punched them into
mechanical calculators, and wrote down the results. So if you had happened
to visit Los Alamos during World
War II and happened to ask "Where are the computers?" your host might have
replied "They're just coming
back from their lunch breaks," or "They're off today because it's a holiday."
Sounds strange, doesn't it? While
other machines have taken on human tasks--the term dishwasher comes to
mind--none other so completely as
to make the original usage sound absurd.
And
so, a machine that could push its own buttons and remember what it had
done began its career by
crunching numbers. While retaining its original name, the computer has
taken on additional tasks, such as "data
processing." This new role began when memory got cheap enough to allow
the introduction and processing of
text by such machines.
In
that spirit, today's computers have taken on a new role, acting as windows
on the world for their users. So
we have the advent of today's networked world. Not just of the Internet,
but intranets within corporations,
extranets that link selected intranets, plus all the public and private
voice and data networks that serve the
general public, corporations, government agencies, and not-for-profits.
It seems little short of miraculous that
tens of millions of these computers can exchange information with one another
on a reasonably dependable
basis.
The
third element is the emerging dominance of electronic information sources.
There was a time when people
got their information from other folks. Spoken and written words were dominant,
and people relied on
newspapers, magazines, archives filled with paper correspondence, libraries,
stories, and even rumors. But so
much is now predicated on the explosive growth of information appliances.
Next year, according to some
pundits, the world will produce one hundred million personal computers.
A hundred million personal computers.
One sixteen-megabit memory chip in one of those computers contains at least
that number of transistors--each
sort of equivalent to a vacuum tube. The memory board of each machine probably
holds a dozen such chips, or
about two hundred million transistors. When we start thinking about all
the other devices in that one desktop
computer, our total might climb to something like a billion transistors.
Winston
Churchill called World War II the "Wizard War" because of its technology--radar,
sonar, smart
torpedoes, and a whole bunch of other electronic innovations. World War
II was fought with something like a
billion electronic devices per side; today, the number of transistors in
a single personal computer exceeds the
number of vacuum tubes employed by the entire United States during all
the years of that global struggle.
As
information appliances grow in number, their use grows even faster. The
number of computers produced
annually is going up by something over 20 percent a year, doubling, therefore,
every two to three years. But the
Internet doubles the amount of information it ships from one place to another
every few months, and futuristic
projections in recent magazines about the Internet always mention the same
underlying algorithm: everything will
at least double every single year for as long as the writer cares to predict.
Alongside
the technological features of this landscape, there are cultural ones as
well. What can be said about
cyberspace culture? Having recently moved to California's Bay Area, I feel
sort of like Margaret Mead. I've
moved out to San Francisco to study, and to take part in, the workings
of Silicon Valley. The definition of
culture I use to study Silicon Valley lists four attributes: a culture
1) evolves among a distinct people; 2) is
received through inheritance or upbringing; 3) makes moral demands; and
4) produces art.
How
do these attributes apply to Silicon Valley? As the home of a distinct
people, it's not an accident that this
uniquely powerful incubator of technology has appeared in the least-rooted
region of the world's least-rooted
country--the place where most people have just come from somewhere else.
Among countries, the United
States seems least tied to tradition, and within our country, where but
in California do iconoclasts abound in
such numbers?
Is
this culture received through inheritance, or upbringing? They do talk
about generations out there, but they're
not the traditional ones. Cyberspace's generations outpace biology by a
wide margin. People out there think in
terms of Moore's Law: every year and a half, the number of components on
a chip doubles, and a new product
generation emerges.
Does
the culture make moral demands? Yes, as evidenced by the limits on vaporware.
Vaporware is a Silicon
Valley term for products that are in the pipeline but have yet to be developed.
Vaporware allows companies to
express their aspirations, rather than just hard-and-fast accomplishments.
Properly used, announcing vaporware
can keep customers and investors happy, and discourage would-be competitors
from venturing onto one's turf.
Silicon
Valley executives seem surprised at how indignant the folks in other parts
of the country get when they
take one of these claims too seriously. On the other hand, a company recently
made news by actually producing
a product on the same day that they had announced it. Apparently, they
had pushed the community's tolerance
a little bit too far in the past--so they had to make amends to local moral
demands.
Finally,
concerning the production of art, quite seriously, I think that cyberspace
contains a form of art in the
construction of elegant metaphors--somewhat like collage, the creation
of beautiful constructs from seemingly
mundane constituents. The World Wide Web, for example, was created by an
inspired human who, looking at
an empty space, filled it with a series of logical operations, putting
them together in such a way that others say,
"Wow, that's beautiful" and--more important--in a way that causes others
to say, "Why didn't I see that?"
This
is what happens when we go to a museum: people look at great art and say,
"Why didn't I see that?" I had
that experience when I looked at Van Gogh's The Road Builders. While trying
to make some sketches of that
celebrated masterpiece, it suddenly dawned on me that the gnarled muscles
of those men bent over their shovels
were echoed in the bent trees lining the road on which they were working.
And so I caught a glimpse of the
artist's genius in seeing and capturing that relationship. Seeing something
others don't see. In that spirit, I think
it's fair to say that elegant constructs represent art in a different kind
of medium. Allowing for its idiosyncracies
therefore, we can perceive the attributes of culture.
How Did We Get Here?
The
current state of affairs was achieved by a march of technology unprecedented
in it's size and scope,
beginning with an exponential growth of microprocessor power. This process
can be illustrated by the story of
the scholar who asked a king for chessboard full of wheat, with a single
grain of wheat on the first square, two
on the second, four on the third, and so on. By the end, having doubled
the number of gains just sixty-four
times, the chessboard would contain some ten-billion-billion grains. More
than the kingdom's gross national
product in value. Nothing can double indefinitely, of course, but exponential
growth can produce quite a ride
while it lasts.
The
realm of possibilities resulting from this growth can be hinted at by the
fact that the actor who played
Forrest Gump's friend really had legs. The illusion was achieved with a
computer, pixel by pixel (pixels are
microscopic picture elements). Think of each frame of digitized film as
a mosaic of infinitely small tiles, with each
picture element so small that the mosaic looks as if it were painted with
continuous brush strokes--or a
photograph of a real object. In this instance, each of the "tiles" corresponding
to the supposedly legless actor
was subtracted out of the picture, and replaced by another tile from a
picture of the identical scene with that
actor missing.
The
number of mathematical operations required is astronomical. Identify a
location, go to the corresponding
memory location, replace the value stored there with one from another table.
This sounds simple--if we were
discussing a color-by-numbers picture, we could probably do it by hand.
But think in terms of millions of picture
elements per frame and hundreds of thousands of frames per film. Operations
quickly mount into the trillions for
that one task alone, the achievement of which is only possible because
of this exponential growth of processor
power.
Another
factor in today's computing environment is the plummeting cost of computer
memory. When I first
mentioned that "cheap" computer memory changed the world of computing by
enabling data processing, I had
the dollar-per-bit memory of the IBM 704 in mind. When that machine came
on the market in the 1960's, it
offered 128,000 eight-bit bytes for a mere million dollars. In those days,
a million dollars would buy you an
apartment house just off Central Park West. Today, on the other hand, the
purchase price of a million bits
worth of memory would only suffice to make the smallest of repairs to such
a building. Today, if you went to a
hardware store with the cash equivalent of a million bits worth of memory,
you'd probably have to get the clerk
to open a blister pack and give you a replacement for one of the building's
wood screws; something as
expensive as a doorstop would be totally beyond your means. Imagine the
price of an entire apartment house
collapsing to that of a single flat-head brass wood screw.
I
once used this analogy on Gordon Moore, author of Moore's Law, but he topped
me without batting an eye.
"I remember when memory was a dollar a bit per month," he told me, "because
we had to replace the vacuum
tubes." Think about what that would mean in terms of cost. A modern, twenty-megabyte
personal computer
contains over one hundred million bits in its memory. Imagine running such
a personal computer with 1950s'
technology: two billion dollars per year for memory maintenance alone,
and not in 1997 dollars, but in much
bigger 1955 dollars. That illustrates the pace of today's continuing decline
in the cost of memory.
The
use of computers has also been facilitated by global deployment of optical
fibers. Our world has become
girdled by strands of optical fibers, each one capable of carrying tens,
and soon hundreds, of billions of bits per
second almost anywhere. What does a hundred billion bits per second mean
in practical terms? Enough
transmission capabilities to carry one million simultaneous telephone conversations--each
one a private
conversation with someone on the other side of the world. While the cost
of installing an optical fiber cable can
get pretty expensive--especially when deploying one across an ocean--the
fiber strands themselves have
become relatively inexpensive. So inexpensive, in fact, that a length of
this ultratransport glass doesn't cost a lot
more than some kinds of kite string in an upscale store. So now these multibillion
bits form a networking
fabric--the lanes, if you will, of the much-discussed Information Superhighway.
Finally,
computing ability has been enhanced by the growing power of modular software.
Consider the challenge
of producing bug-free programs. Such work is tough enough when it encompasses
as much text as an essay, or
a high school textbook. But programs frequently contain millions of lines
of code. How can one possibly test all
possible interactions in advance?
Fortunately,
most of the software we encounter behaves itself rather well because programs
are increasingly
modular; that is, they are constructed from "chunks" of other, previously
tested programs. When you send out a
query on the Internet, for example, you launch a program that sifts through
electronic nooks and crannies
around the world. Usually the only problems stem from the user not being
specific enough about what is
wanted. The program itself has little trouble making itself understood
by the computers it encounters. When I
recently wanted to check on a Bell Labs product called "Inferno," for instance,
I got back pointers to over
20,000 published references to Dante's poem, in addition to the material
I wanted. I also got back a couple of
so-called "applets"--small programs capable of running on my machine--offered
by information providers
whose companies also happened to be listed under that same title. And all
from one little query message.
The
interesting thing here was that I had no advance knowledge of the various
kinds of computers my query
would reach, who owned them, or who programmed them. Moreover, the folks
who wrote the applets, and
organized the data I received in return, knew equally little about my computer.
Yet the material I asked for
arrived in usable form, with no problems with compatibility or unforeseen
interaction. The modularity of the
software involved reduced the problem to one of swapping building blocks
that vary in their internal makeup,
but plug into one another like the pieces of a Lego set.
How Did We Get Here?
There's
more to the technology story than the growth of its parts. Today's spectacular
progress in individual
technologies merely represents the tip of the iceberg. Throughout modern
history, the most significant impacts of
technology have come from its combinations, and today the dramatic changes
taking place largely stem from
technology mergers.
One
example is what happened to three familiar appliances once the addition
of microprocessors gave them the
power to negotiate with one another: facsimile machines, modems, and radio
telephones. Each one of these
devices languished for more than a generation in its original form. Facsimile
machines have been around since
the 1930's; modems appeared shortly after World War II; and radio telephones
are well over sixty years old,
but the use of these three devices has only taken off in the past ten years.
Today,
people wonder how anyone could have conducted business without a fax machine,
but for about half a
century the technology was used by only a handful of people. What happened?
Why did these things only take
off now when they had been out there for so many years? What changed? The
basic fax machine continues to
do its job. But, in former times, potential users faced a world filled
with a whole bunch of different facsimile
machine models. Each model could only "speak to" one of its siblings. Moreover,
uncertainties in the quality of
telephone lines sharply restricted transmission speeds. Today, on the other
hand, each one starts by chirping the
message: "I'm a fax machine," and listens for "That's good. I'm a fax machine
too, and I can deal with the
following formats." "How about Group IV?" "Fine with me." "Let's do it!"
"I can transfer data at the following
baud rates." "I can go only up to a baud rate of x." "Beep. Beep. Beep.
Chiiiiiirp." Why bother translating? Just
listen to it next time, and ponder the fact that those two machines are
negotiating with one another, so as to
transfer images most efficiently.
And
that same underlying technology allows computer modems to interoperate
at high speeds. The first thing
that a high-speed modem does when it gets on a telephone line is tell that
line: "Turn off your echo canceler.
Don't help me." Because modern telephone lines employ a special circuit
that prevents the annoying echoes of
former days. (Years ago, folks calling Europe, for example, generally heard
an echo of their spoken words.
Today, special electronic devices kill such echoes before you can hear
them. They make the system sound
echo-free by listening for echoes and canceling them electronically.) The
last things the modem wants is that
kind of "help," so the first thing any modem must do is turn that canceler
off. Then it starts trading information
with the modem on the other end. It sounds different from a pair of fax
machines starting up, but the principle
remains the same. My first modem had a two-position switch, for low speed
and high speed (high speed was
1.2 kilobits). But today, modems negotiate, working at the best data rate
that the line can transmit.
Radio
telephones, which are now called cellular phones, have benefitted from
the same technology. In the old
days, a radio telephone would barely fit in the trunk of a car, let alone
in someone's pocket. But again, because
new phones negotiate with local cell sites, together they can decide which
local radio beacon the phone ought to
use, and at which frequency; they authenticate the user's right to service
and, with the newest phones, even
decide how much power to put out. These days, phones try not to drown out
the neighbors, so that they all may
use the spectrum as efficiently as possible.
Another
technology merger underlies the advent of the World Wide Web, which stems
from the merger of at
least three technologies. Before the Web, the Internet was used by expert
techies for things such as electronic
mail, the transfer of data files, and an application called telnet, which
allowed sophisticated computer users to
connect to distant computers.
The
Internet provided a fabric that was primarily good for techies and a few
others, but then, new software,
together with fast modems and high-resolution personal computer screens
that could handle nice pictures,
changed it dramatically. When those three technologies came together, we
got the World Wide Web. All of a
sudden, ordinary people could access the Web, which offered attractive
graphics in place of dreary rows of
typed text. In such fashion, the merger of computing and communication
has created this new environment we
call "cyberspace."
What's Out?
The
advent of cyberspace places us in the middle of a revolution: out with
the old and in with the new. A recent
cartoon in the New Yorker pictured today's pace of change in terms of a
well-dressed couple riding in a taxi
cab with anxious looks on their faces. The caption said: "Step on it driver,
this restaurant may be out before we
get there." "Out" presumably meant, "consigned to the out list" or "out
of style."
Today's
"outs" include industrial economies of scale and hierarchical organizations,
together with their
investments in mechanical technology. Picture a sequence of rigidly controlled
machines, with each stage in the
sequence assigned some task repeated over and over again. In the case of
automobile manufacture, say, you
might start with a bare chassis, drill holes for engine bolts, add the
mounts, the engine block, a cylinder head,
and so forth. As long as every station along the way does its task with
rote reliability, the production line works
well. No room for individual initiative. Everything controlled from the
top. In bygone days, such hierarchical
investments in rigid mechanical technology prompted Henry Ford to say,
"My customers can have any color car
they want, as long as it's black." Imagine such a philosophy in today's
market.
Out
also is organizationally generated paperwork. Say you worked in a university,
a business, the government,
or whatever. If you needed something really quickly, and you were lucky
enough to find a helpful human being,
that person might well have said, "Okay. Here. We'll take care of it and
now, fix the paperwork later." Getting
the task accomplished seemed the easy part. Paperwork frequently took on
a life of its own.
But
organizationally generated paperwork is on it's way out. Think of all the
paperwork generated by dealing
with a bank teller. Slips to be filled out, checked, stacked, rechecked,
moved, sorted, read, and so on. All that
back-office work disappears in a world in which customers can just punch
buttons on an ATM. In that way,
customers can effectively access the bank's ledger directly, and draw cash
right out of the vault. All that internal
paperwork has disappeared.
Another
"out," one whose disappearance will, I think, have profound importance,
is erosion of dedicated
resources. In the bazaars of Byzantium, each purchase would trigger a long
negotiation. I remember going to the
Middle East in the 1960s and visiting a Bedouin encampment on market day.
I saw an old coin I wanted to buy
and learned that its owner wanted the equivalent of seventy-five U.S. cents--about
three times the amount he
actually expected to get for it. Before I knew it, I was sitting opposite
him, with a referee at our side to help the
bargaining along. I'm afraid I didn't do much for peace and understanding
in the region. I ruined the merchant's
day by pulling the equivalent of seventy-five cents out of my pocket and
giving it to him right away. So much for
a time-honored way of conducting business.
This
misunderstanding can be blamed on my Western notion of efficiency: all
I wanted to do is get up from the
carpet, get my coin, move on to the next display. Unaccustomed to the overhead
exacted by prolonged
negotiations, I wanted to conduct business in the manner I'd grown up with.
Ever since Adam Smith pondered
the wealth of nations at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, division
of labor has outperformed individual
producers. Traditionally, the value of each employee's contribution has
been fixed in advance and exchanged
freely within the bounds of the enterprise.
In
practical terms, corporations might not have had the world's most efficient
library, secretary, or stockroom,
but, because these services came from dedicated resources that everybody
in the company used, the employer
saved the staff time that would have been consumed by per-transaction negotiations.
This arrangement made a
lot of sense from an employee perspective as well. The boss wouldn't fire
someone who got sick for a couple of
days, for instance, because the cost of hiring a replacement presented
too much of a barrier. Imagine workers
having to submit their skills to an auction every time the need for some
task sprang up.
Now,
however, that exclusive reliance on dedicated resources no longer goes
unquestioned. Bargaining, and the
other elements of transactions, have all become very, very cheap. Most
corporate libraries now charge users for
their services on a per-item basis, for instance, and occasionally lose
business to outside suppliers.
As
transaction costs plummet, mass media's economies of production and distribution
move toward the "out"
column, as do distance-related barriers to commerce.
What's In?
What's
in? Today's economies benefit less and less from scale, and more and more
from economies of
interoperation. For example, an electronic gadget called Palm Pilot, a
pocket-sized electronic notepad, will hold
some 2500 addresses, a five-year calendar, and handy things like a "to
do" list. While it's quite useful, the
important point at issue here is its economies of interoperation: primarily,
the fact that it costs the manufacturer
less to produce this gadget (because it comes with a means of connecting
to a personal computer) than it would
to produce its stand-alone equivalent. Whenever the user needs to create
an up-to-date backup copy of the
data stored in the Pilot, or add new information from another source, it
can be placed in a little cradle attached
to a personal computer and files then can be transferred back and forth
with ease. This interoperation with a
personal computer makes the hand-held unit simpler and cheaper. Instead
of including a rechargeable power
source, for example, it makes do with a couple of inexpensive triple-A
batteries. It doesn't have a keypad, nor
on-board backups or elaborate technology for error recovery. All those
functions are located elsewhere, on the
personal computer.
As
a result, the interoperation benefits the manufacturer as well as the user,
which makes a big difference. In a
competitive market, the economies of interconnection will incite more and
more producers to interconnect their
offerings. Since it will be so much cheaper to create interconnected products,
consumers will have to pay extra
to get stand-alone ones, resulting in a world in which everything is connected
to everything else.
What
else is in? Direct information access: the world-wide links to people,
data, and machines. Today, there is
also an increase in outsourcing via low-cost transactions. Take Wal-Mart,
for instance. They have outsourced
their purchasing, and no longer buy anything. Wal-Mart no longer needs
a conventional purchasing organization
anymore, because their suppliers handle most of that operation for them.
Every time a box of Pampers
produces a "beep" on the check-out counter's bar-code reader, for example,
Wal-Mart credits Proctor and
Gamble's account with the wholesale price of that package. Transactions
have become so cheap that they can
be handled independently.
Micromarketing
via massive databases is also in. While many people believe that every
time someone tries to
create a large database of consumer information, there's an uproar, that's
not true. Massive consumer databases
are continually sprouting all over the place, some of which are even available
free on the Internet. More
important, huge amounts of data about (almost) everyone and everything
are available for sale everywhere.
Mining that data allows for micromarketing--knowing enough about an individual
to custom-tailor an offer to
that person or small group of people.
But
small isn't always beautiful. Micromarketing also allows zealots of all
kinds to identify, recruit, and organize
small groups of like-minded people. In the past, someone might have been
ashamed of being the only person in
town who harbored some particular kind of bigotry. Whatever hatred one
might harbor today, however, can
find positive reinforcement in its own (virtual) community, thanks to communication
technology.
And
finally, instead of the geographic barriers of the past, we have global
products for global consumers. Of all
the places in the world, I can think of none with a more durable culture
than the one we see in France. Yet
when Disney produced its version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame recently,
they had a special display at the
Victor Hugo Museum; and the French loved it. Instead of Charles Lawton,
they flocked to view mementos of
this happy-go-lucky guy who sings with the birds.
What Lies Ahead?
Even
though global communications have shrunk distances, there remain continuing
advantages for physical
communities. For example, Silicon Valley's venture capitalists can locate
anywhere they want. They have plenty
of money, so would-be investees ought to be willing to come to them. They
have video conferencing, and all
kinds of other telecommuting stuff. And yet, one of the largest of the
venture capitalists--a very successful
company--recently moved its office some forty miles, from downtown San
Francisco to Palo Alto, thereby
adding that distance to the daily commute of the company's principal owner
and many of the other partners.
Why? They felt that San Francisco was "too far away from the action," so
they had to move their offices.
The
action referred to takes place along Sand Hill Road, a kilometer-long stretch
of highway, just off Interstate
280. A single cluster of office buildings contains most of California's
significant venture capitalists. While they
compete fiercely with one another, they also cooperate with, and learn
from, one another as well. Physical
proximity builds trust, and trust leads to mutual benefits.
Communities
of this kind pop up in quite unexpected places. Even though China boasts
the world's oldest and
largest ceramics industry, for example, its luxury hotels use imported
tiles in their bathrooms. "Tile is tile" you
might think, but there's enough of a difference to cause hard-headed investors
to cart this particular item halfway
around the world because the center of high-quality tile happens to be
concentrated in a small region around
Bologna, Italy. Anybody who wants to be really good at manufacturing high-quality
ceramics locates there--it's
the Silicon Valley of tile.
In
both these cases, community members cluster in order to benefit from physical
proximity, but what does this
provide? Among other things, neighbors provide one another with means of
nongovernmental recourse. It's not
just a matter of "sue me if you don't like it"--you have to face your neighbors
if you act badly. In Silicon Valley
terms, your physical presence shows you're more committed, willing to show
what person you are through your
day-to-day behavior. In the Bologna case, your children may well wish to
marry someone from that community,
so you'd better not be a bad actor. Neighbors feel freer to share information,
as well as infrastructure, so
learning and sharing takes place.
Both
these examples illustrate the advantages of physical proximity. "On the
Internet, no one knows you're a
dog," as a New Yorker cartoon so aptly put it. The Internet is a fine location
for a chat room, but hardly a
trustable source of community in day-to-day living. Proving oneself a trustworthy
neighbor still counts.
Another
phenomenon that will only increase in the future is computer support for
human contact. We use
technology more and more, to get hold of the people with whom we wish to
connect. We joke a lot about
recorded responses, "push one if you have a touch tone phone, push two
if you don't." Some folks pretend to
have rotary phones in the hope of getting to a human operator faster. While
these call centers can be annoying
some times, they cull out routine transactions so as to make help from
human operators more affordable.
On
the nonbusiness side, many families are beginning to put up home pages
on the world wide web. Someone
puts up the family tree, circulates news, organizes get-togethers, and
soon, distant family members get to know
more about one another. So computers can make possible an enhanced degree
and quality of human contact.
Another
development from the rise of technology is an expanding range of lifestyle
opportunities. Some would
argue that women remain in exactly the same economic position as that of
past generations. Compare today's
situation with the era of the so-called organization man. In that environment,
lifetime corporate employment
meant that the husband was recognized as the breadwinner. Wives couldn't
sustain a career because the family
had to pick up and move every three years or so as the husbands climbed
the organization ladder by moving
from one assignment to another.
Today,
on the other hand, my daughter-in-law may sometimes start her workday in
a bathrobe and bunny
slippers, but she still manages to run a very successful company. Except
for scheduled meetings, she can pretty
much choose when to go to the office. Early mornings often suit her best,
so she gets on her computer, scans
overnight faxes, or returns phone calls to time zones where conventional
offices are already open for work. And
so she and my son, who also works for the company, are able to take care
of their children in ways that would
be impossible without networked information technology.
In
my own case, the expanding range of lifestyle opportunities offered by
technology allows me to telecommute
from my San Francisco apartment, even though my assistant maintains her
office at Lucent Technologies' New
Jersey location. Together, the two of us maintain an electronically supported
information bridge between Silicon
Valley and Bell Labs.
Finally,
the future can point to healthier human-machine relationships. Today, people
understand computers as
electronic tools, no longer as so-called electronic brains. In the past,
popular opinion frequently succumbed to
the notion that nature's workings resembled those of the highest technology
then current. Fortunately, millions of
personal encounters with computer stupidity have undermined the grandiose
claims once made in the name of
"artificial intelligence."
Computers
do not provide a very good role model for how to solve problems. While
some people would feel
complimented if somebody were to tell them they thought logically, logic
is actually a terrible problem-solving
methodology. That's why people use it so rarely, and why computers sometimes
freeze up when confronted
with absolutely simple questions.
What Lies Ahead?
The
developments that information technology has spurred are merely milestones,
if you will, on a path to a
future destination. I can best describe this place as a Glass Village,
a global information supermarket rather than
superhighway. Unprecedented transparency: everyone, and everything, is
available for view via on-line
packages. Much like a supermarket, because it's composed of packaged items.
Cyberspace information leans
heavily toward numbers, heavily toward constructs that work well with computers.
Despite the rich variety,
furthermore, each item bears much of its creator's imprint. For example,
if someone wanted to view the weather
outside via an electronic window via a remote camera, the location and
orientation of each camera available for
viewing has been predetermined: while there may be a large choice, each
selection is prepackaged, just like in a
supermarket.
In
another aspect of the Glass Village, the recognition of individual identities
will be heightened to small-town
levels. Within ten years, for example, there will be a kind of "caller
ID" for personal encounters. What happens
when computers learn to recognize human faces?
When
I go to our local dry cleaner these days, I like the fact that the person
behind the counter knows who I
am, because I rarely remember to bring the slips. I get my stuff and it's
never a problem. For all I know the
clerks might have created a crib sheet, something like: "Penzias. Balding,
loquacious man. Lives up the street.
Always returning from a trip." That seems okay.
But
what happens if the owner decided to set up a video camera in the shop?
Furthermore, suppose the system
were to record the transaction, extract my name, speech characteristics,
facial features, and whatever other
parameters--such as height, body build, and gender--might help it to identify
me on subsequent visits. What a
neat memory aid for people who have trouble remembering names and faces.
How about a miniature unit with
an unobtrusive earphone prompter? I can see the ads now: "No more embarrassing
encounters. Improve your
social life! Start a new career as a maitre d'!" A bit scary though, isn't
it?
No
matter how deep and well-argued privacy concerns become, however, it is
hard to imagine any combination
of steps or circumstances that could block the deployment of such technology
for any significant amount of time.
What can be done to prevent it? All it takes is one computer whiz anxious
for an improved social life and willing
to post software on the Web. Like it or not, big city anonymity may well
prove a momentary detour in the social
history of our species. In its place, we'll all be living in small towns
with potentially nosy neighbors. Hiding will
take a lot of work, in a Glass Village.
Perhaps
even sooner there will be an information-glutted competition for attention.
It must be easy to create
information. Just look how hard people work to give it away--on the Internet,
in your mailbox, on television,
even handbills when you walk down the street. Who has time to digest it
all? The scarce thing is attention: all the
media compete for it.
While
competition among media sources seems far better than the alternatives,
there is at least one unfortunate
side effect. As news broadcasters, magazines, and the authors of would-be
best-sellers vie with one another for
audience share, they naturally look for new, different, and exciting material.
But in doing so, they invariably
highlight rarity at the expense of normality.
Imagine
what would happen if one a student came empty-handed to class with the
claim that "the dog ate my
homework." A highly improbable event at best. But the perceived probability
of such an event--along with a
host of others--has been much enhanced by television. Because, if a dog
took even the smallest nip out of a
homework page anywhere in the United States, you know it would be on the
next six o'clock news. In other
words, the rare, the unusual, is sought out eagerly and brought to our
attention. So much so, that it's very hard
to see the difference between the unusual--brought to us because it attracts
our attention--and the world of
everyday experience that our senses encounter at first hand.
There
are some good things that will happen also in the Glass Village. For example,
there will be new
alternatives to congestion rationing. In the relatively near future--probably
within no more than ten years--there
might be answers to the problem of cars and congestion. As networking technologies,
precise navigation aids,
electronic maps, and the like become available, I think we may very well
see a renaissance in public
transportation. Not mass transit in today's sense, but a customized public
transportation system, one that can
offer door-to-door service at affordable prices.
One
possible service will provide the ability to call up, get a multipassenger
van to arrive at your doorstep
precisely when you want it, and take you to wherever you want to go, in
a guaranteed amount of time. It will be
so much like a chauffeured limousine that you can leave your car at home
most of the time--with tremendous
positive implications for general well-being. In the Glass Village, bits
and bytes will stand in line for us.
And
finally, the Glass Village will offer our society an unprecedented growth
in individual options and resources.
Technology acts as an enabler--and we, as human beings, are the enabled.
Technology, the application of
organized knowledge, by humans and for humans, will allow us to be whatever
we are already--only more so.
Article A19952022