Or, What’s the Big Deal, Anyway?
The National Mall sweltered, the humidity was impenetrable, and thunderstorms boomed and rolled just across the Potomac, so I shuffled into line behind an unruly swarm of overheated, overstimulated, overspent tourists heading for the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. It was air-conditioned, it was free, they had Archie Bunker’s chair.
I had long wanted to see that chair and maybe get a quick glance at Edgar Bergen’s wooden pal Charlie, but once inside the museum, I instead found my eye drawn to a big blue sign:
Information Age: People, Information & Technology
I was in our nation’s capital for a reason, pursuing some sensible explanation for the sudden explosion of interest and speculation about the so-called Information Superhighway. Why, I wanted to know, was everyone from Vice President Al Gore on down so sure this would change the world? Why was every magazine, newspaper, and television chat show suddenly treating the Internet as if it were the Second Coming of some electronic messiah? What was the big deal, anyway?
Moments before, in the Gerald R. Ford House Office Building, I had listened politely as eager congressional staffers stuffed my brain full of utopian visions of democracy unleashed. They tried to explain, held up statistics, but the picture was far from clear. I was reaching a point where the more I knew, the less I understood.
To clear my head, I’d hoped to take a relaxing journey through the Golden Age of Television; but instead duty called: the Age of Information was beckoning to me again, with additional info. I took a deep, long breath and was directed by the sign into a hallway lined with glass cases.
At the exhibit’s start, I saw a crude machine: Samuel F. B. Morse’s telegraph, “the beginning of instantaneous communication in America.” From there, the corridor led me rapidly past old telephone poles, a mannequin family crowded around an enormous art deco radio, a blurry early television with a screen the size of a small watermelon, and finally into the Computer Age, with its ponderous mainframes, vacuum tubes, and banks of tangled wires.
To my considerable disappointment, though, the much-heralded Internet was represented by a single computer terminal, and that terminal was stuck under a glass box. Did the Smithsonian know something I didn’t? Was the Information Superhighway so dangerous? I noted that the computer’s keyboard had been removed as well, in case the glass should break.
A small white exhibit card underneath the imprisoned computer promised this:
By using the telephone to connect their home computers to those of information companies, people can shop for groceries, exchange messages, pay bills, move money between bank accounts, and play computer games.
Dangerous? Hardly. Not even revolutionary. The Smithsonian’s display made the Internet sound like nothing more than a cross between the Home Shopping Network and Nintendo. I stared at the blinking screen and thought, for the moment at least, that perhaps I had found the truth. Would the Information Superhighway be nothing more than a glorified ATM machine with laser blasters? Was it destined to become yet one more diabolical method by which retail conglomerates moved the point of sale a step closer to our wallets? Was the rest just so much hype?
On that oppressive July afternoon, it seemed I was the only person in the Smithsonian who really cared. The crowds of tourists ignored the glass box, jamming themselves instead around a nearby exhibit on high-definition television. The sleek screen displayed a pair of cumbersome Japanese sumo wrestlers facing off on a blue mat. As the wrestlers tossed themselves to and fro like a pair of shaved bears, the tourists grinned, pointed, and nodded their complete approval. The only information revolution they wanted, it would seem, was one with a really clear picture, a really big screen, and really big men trying to knock one another down.
The Information Superhighway. The Internet. The new frontier that science fiction writer William Gibson dubbed cyberspace. Whatever you call the network of networks that links upward of 35 million computer users worldwide, it is certainly bigger than a sumo wrestler, bigger than an arena full of sumos. Estimates are that someone new plugs into the Internet on the average of every ten minutes, and that dizzying rate of growth is itself expected to increase. In fact, based on current growth rates, some have estimated that every person on the planet will be “networked” by the year 2003. Soon, they say, we will all be hooked in, turned on, electronically joined at the hip.
But what will it mean?
If you believe the proponents, the zealots, those who not only love computers but see them as mankind’s salvation, this amazing phenomenon will in the very near future transform our culture, alter the political process, rearrange the balance of world power, and change the way we think, the way we learn, the way we fall in love. Experts, armed with bits of bright, shiny jargon, assert in no uncertain terms that the Internet will change absolutely everything, right down to the fundamental ways in which we relate as human beings.
On the other hand, oracles of doom see nothing but evil: international computer sabotage, government agents snooping into every aspect of our lives, anti-government anarchists exchanging plans for making bombs, pornography in every home, a world filled with anemic drones laboring away at sterile keyboards, never seeing the light of day, never tossing a Frisbee to their dog. The Internet, it seems, is the final nail in mankind’s coffin, a glowing nail, sharp as a tack but evil through and through.
So, who is right? Which will it be?
I think, if you will excuse my using technical terminology here, that both sides are full of hooey.
When it comes to the Information Superhighway, this much is clear: one side’s overstatement rapidly drowns out the other side’s hyperbole, and that hyperbole is itself instantaneously suffocated under a smothering layer of gross media exaggeration. No one really knows, in other words. They are all just guessing.
To counter this, to find something vaguely resembling an actual fact, I undertook my own investigation. The experts, you see, are already so smitten with technology that they can hardly be objective. I, on the other hand, am not smitten in the least. My technologically current friends inform me regularly, in fact, that the computer I own is dangerously out of date. It won’t run the newest, hottest software. It runs the old software rather slowly. The screen displays just two colors: orange on black. No sound, no graphics. No bells, no whistles.
I am not a computer programmer, a technician, or an engineer. Instead, I’m a writer who’s paid to teach college students to write stories, novels, poems, and other similarly impractical things. I am a skeptic by nature, and I pride myself on knowing simple deceit, or pure embellishment, when I see it.
When I run across a new technology, I want that technology to improve my life, make it more efficient. What I specifically don’t want is any technology, no matter how new or how clever, that makes an easy task five times more complex, or that leaves me feeling like some Jed Clampett hillbilly in a dizzying, digital, difficult high-tech Beverly Hills.
In researching this book, I hoped to learn exactly how the coming Information Superhighway might affect people like myself: the technologically innocent, the everyday souls who use a phone, perhaps a computer, maybe even a fax machine at work, but don’t particularly care how those machines are assembled, who builds them, or how many gigabytes of data can fit on the head of a pin.
Crystal balls are fun but not accurate. Instead of hopeful predictions, in lieu of wild speculation, I focused on the so-called Information Superhighway as it exists in early 1995, with at least its preliminary roadways in place. If 35 million users are already hooked into computer networks such as the Internet, what are they doing there, what interesting uses have they found, and are any of these interesting uses actually useful?
The writer Henry David Thoreau once tried to make sense of a rapidly changing world by venturing into the Massachusetts woods near Walden Pond and living there awhile. “I wanted to… drive life into a corner,” he wrote, “and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it.” He did this, he said, because he saw that most men were “in a strange uncertainty,” that they were unsure whether life itself was “of the devil or of God.”
Instead of retreating from a changing world, I retreated into it, venturing onto the new digital footpath, immersing myself for a full year in the electronic woods. My reasons were much the same as Thoreau’s—I wanted to reduce this new world to something understandable, to learn if the new electronic culture was mean or sublime, of the devil or of God.
Thoreau prized simplicity, and I tried to keep my questions simple as well. Who was using it? What were they using it for? Were they using it for anything useful?
I tried, too, to keep the answers simple, though that was no easy task. The woods I traveled were as full of jargon as Thoreau’s woods were full of old, dry leaves. Still, I attempted to rake the jargon into a pile whenever possible, and to set the pile aflame, to translate the strange language of computer networks into a language all of us can understand. If it doesn’t make sense in simple language, I told myself, don’t trust it.
At the Smithsonian that day, printed on the wall behind the telegraph, I saw a quote from Samuel F. B. Morse. “I see no reason,” he predicted in 1832, “why intelligence might not be instantaneously transmitted by electricity to any distance.”
Well, almost everyone knows by now that all sorts of information can be instantaneously transmitted on this highway of computers. Words, yes. Pictures, surely. Dirty pictures? We’ll cover that in a later chapter.
But what about “intelligence,” as Morse promises? Is intelligence being instantaneously transmitted, or just meaningless drivel? Is there, in fact, any intelligent life in cyberspace?
That was my quest, to follow that star, no matter how hopeless, no matter how many hours of Internet access time I logged onto my credit card. I ventured deep into the electronic woods with little more than the clothes on my back and my cranky, outdated, embarrassingly sluggish home computer, and I chronicled what I found, who I met, and the amazing and/or ridiculous things they were doing; and, yes, I came out alive, relatively intact, and with my own perspective on the Big Question:
Is the electronic culture revolutionary, transformational, dazzling, and will it change our lives? Is it the Next Big Thing?
Or is it just the Emperor’s New Clothes?