There's an old expression for the rough-and-tumble of politics: "Politics ain't beanbag." Well, technology ain't beanbag, either, as is evident from the fact that today's technology leaders seem to be reading their lines from the same scripts that were used to make the old gangster movies.
Thus, the chief executive of one of the companies promoting the so-called "network computer" boasts that the NC will make it possible "to kill Microsoft" - which is "the top priority for all of us." Kill? You mean, like murder? Oh dear.
As I say, technology ain't beanbag anymore.
But was it ever? Was there ever a kinder, gentler age - perhaps back in the days of, let's say, the singing telegram?
Maybe so - at least for a short period of time.
In the 1930s, George P. Oslin came up with the idea of the singing telegram when, as public relations director for Western Union, he needed to convince a post-World War I generation that telegrams - still associated in people's minds with news of battlefield deaths of loved ones - could be fun. According to Oslin's book The Story of Telecommunications (Mercer, 1992), the first singing telegram, sung to the crooner Rudy Vallee on his birthday on July 28, 1933 by a Western Union operator named Lucille Lipps, "started America on a zany musical binge." Western Union made millions from the idea, until the decreasing number of telegraph offices led the company to discontinue its vocalizing service in 1974.
But singing telegrams will soon be back - en masse and courtesy of the Internet - in the form of sung e-mail greetings for any and all occasions. And so, as you open your e-mail inbox you will be transported into the orchestra pit just before the opera starts; then, as you download your mail, you'll be bombarded by one musical missive after another. Your mail will sound like it was sent by Pavarotti or Madonna or Conway Twitty or Elton John or Muzak (depending on your friends and acquaintances) . . . or maybe it will make you feel like you're being serenaded by a gaggle of those relentlessly cute little children on public TV who dance around in circles holding hands with that giant ugly purple-thingee. What a horrible future lies ahead for all of us!
Yet things will get even worse: We will be barraged with large quantities of singing junk mail.
How do I know that things will get worse?
Because things always get worse - an inevitability that flows as a corollary from the one great idea possessed by our Species, which is that "If you can do it, just do it." This idea applies not only to bizarre developments in genetic engineering but also to such mundane activities as desktop publishing ("Use every font ever designed, so that your church newsletter will be thrilling to behold!"), as well as to Web page design ("Use all the color, sound and full-motion video you can summon up and provide links to all the sites in the world, to help us understand that all human thought is deeply relevant to whatever happens to be on your mind!").
Yes, my confident prediction is that, once we've crossed the bridge into the 21st century, all mail will be sung to us - as will all lessons in physics, geometry, citizenship and everything else.
Of course, that's not conceptually different from having lessons in arithmetic sung, as they have been doing on Sesame Street for a whole generation or two. So what's the harm?
Probably none (except for music lovers). However, I must confess to the same skepticism asserted by author and Yale computer scientist David Gelerntner, who says it's ludicrous to suppose that Internet access will fix or even address the main problems of education: "Everyone knows what you do with the Web: You surf, sliding from site to site at the click of a mouse button. Exactly which problem will Web-surfing attack? Our children's insufficient shallowness? Excessive attention spans? Unhealthy fixation on in-depth analysis? Stubborn unwillingness to push on to the next topic until they mastered the last? We need less surfing in the schools, not more. The Web is a great source of pictures - are we trying to cure our children of excessive interest in the written word? Depraved indifference to glitz and snazzy graphics?"
Gelerntner's rhetorical questions are equivalent to the following direct one: What is the purpose of the World Wide Web?
Unfortunately, I've seen some pretty depressing answers to that question. For example, a parody site that mocks Michael Kinsley's online magazine Slate sneers at Kinsley for urging his readers to print out articles of interest - thereby "defeating the purpose of the Web." How's that again? The purpose of the World Wide Web is to save paper? No, I don't think so. That's a feature, not a purpose. Surely we can figure out a grander purpose than that for an invention with such a great design. Surely the purpose is intellectual discovery.
In this regard, we need to remind ourselves that surfing is not a typical mode of travel used by discoverers - unless of course they are hoping to discover Hawaii or Malibu. Surfing is therefore a terrible metaphor for intellectual detective work. Anything at all would be better - even scuba diving (though I admit that "diving into the Web" summons up to me unwelcome memories of being told as a child to stop playing and go "dive into your homework"). Yet, emotional associations placed aside, "diving" words rather than "surfing" words suggest the real purpose of the Web, which should be used not for skimming surfaces but for exploring depths.
But how did we all get so water-logged? After all, the World of the Web is not Waterworld; furthermore, the Wide World is not a "World" at all, but a giant memory - a memory to be explored using such tools as archaeology, anthropology, history, statistics and all the other "disciplines" (collections of tricks) used by mind-detectives. Which brings us back to the idea that technology ain't beanbag. Mind-detectives have to be as tough as Sam Spade, whether or not they're ready to "kill" anybody. The "fun & games" Web sites effusively praised by Webheads for being "way cool" usually turn out to be TV Wannabe sites - sites created by the same kind of people who, let's be honest, would rather watch television than read books. They are people who enthuse over interactive media not because they're reminded of Socrates but because they're reminded of drive-time (or drive-by) Talk Radio.
It would certainly be nice if the same kind of invigorating tough-mindedness shown by technology leaders who fight over hardware and software choices could be applied as well to content choices. Far too many of the "way cool" sites some of them praise are as vacuous as TV advertising.
The digerati are always insisting that television is "The Past" and the computer (whether PC or NC) is "The Future" (because of the new digital possibilities for interaction, democratization, and so on). Good point. But in the same way that TV was a wonderful invention that has been (most of the time) grotesquely trivialized, the same know-it-all know-nothing forces that wasted the potential of television are rising to the new challenge of turning the Web into a giant pinball machine.
It would be nice to think that the digital "culture" will replace the television "culture," but it would be even nicer not to have to fear that they're both converging into one and the same thing: intellectual bubble gum.
It doesn't have to be that way. Information technology ain't a game of beanbag unless that's all that we choose to make of it.
We are all saddened by the untimely death of Paul Evan Peters, from complications of asthma. A frequent contributor to Educom Review, Paul was Executive Director of the Coalition for Networked Information. He will be remembered and missed for his wisdom, charm and sweet nature.
John Gehl is editor and publisher of Educom Review. [email protected]