What do we know and what don't we know about what will happen
in information technology in the next few years?
We know, it seems to me, that before this decade ends,
technology will be able to deliver unlimited choices at the click of a
remote control. We know that consumers will want more choice and
convenience--witness how cable television has exploded over the last
12 years, or how credit cards and bank cash machines and catalogs
have become more ubiquitous. We know consumers will want
information and will seek information and programs and be
relatively less interested in technology, because they see technology
as a means to an end, and that end is content. And we know that
viewers will reject technology if it is as user-unfriendly, say, as the
early VCR was, or as hard to access as the Internet is today.
What we don't know is what consumers want, and what they will
actually pay for. Nor whether a simple navigational system can be
perfected that will lead us through this maze of choices. And we
don't know how to fill the largest pothole of all on the information
superhighway--the pothole left by government, the 800-pound
gorilla. Will government, for instance, require subsidies, so that the
information superhighway will be connected, cheaply, to our schools
and libraries? Will government permit a studio to acquire a
network? Will it press antitrust actions against John Malone or
Microsoft? Will it let the telephone companies enter the cable
business? Or AT&T and other long-distance providers enter the local
telephone business? It is tempting, when you think of government,
to think of this gorilla as an unthinking animal, but government has
legitimate concerns: to protect privacy, to ensure open access, to
advance the education of all citizens, to promote fairness.
We know what we would like to do. In his 1992 State of the
Union Address President Clinton called upon industry to connect
every classroom and library to the information highway. And there
were sound reasons for this. Or as Bill Gates told Educom Review last
January, "few industries are as dependent on the specialized skills of
people as ours is." Among the wonders technology can bring, few top
what it can do to enhance education; it can, as Gates said, allow
college students and faculty to tap the world's archives as they do
their campus library. It can make it possible to share a great teacher
with students on every campus, so that our poorer citizens can have
access to our best teachers. Students can tap into edutainment
databases that make math or science come alive in games or CD-ROM,
students can travel to distant places on their video screens, can ask
questions and not just passively receive information. The disabled
can be taught at home, as can working parents.
The science we know. The great imponderable about the future
is the effect of the human factors. We know that technology will one
day allow viewers to watch anything they want whenever they want
it, but what we don't know is whether the customers will really want
it, or whether they will actually be able to afford it.
Proponents of video-on-demand make three basic assumptions:
they assume first that customers will pay for the privilege of
programming for themselves; second, that people will want to
program for themselves; and third, that customers will pay as little
attention to the cost of programming for themselves as they now do
to their video store bill. Build it (they believe) and customers will
come. But if any of these assumptions is wrong, the economics are
off. We know that viewers might by-pass the video store if they can
summon any movie and not have to worry that it's out of stock in the
store and not have to worry about returning it. But we don't know
whether this $14 billion video store business alone can justify the
extra expense of building a superhighway, or whether the video
stores will adapt, as movie theaters have, with cineplexes and
cappuccino machines, making themselves more enticing.
Nor do we know the social consequences of much of this. What will
happen to the have-nots? What about the 90 percent of classrooms,
kindergarten through grade 12, that don't even have access to a
telephone? Whereas over 50 percent of high-income kids have
computers, only an estimated 5 percent of low-income students have
access. What about those who can't afford pay-per-view or the 40
percent of Americans who don't have cable today? Will more
Americans shut themselves indoors to watch, or sit before their
computer screens, thus avoiding social intercourse? Will we read
even less than we do today?
One part of my brain whispers: Don't be a Luddite; remember
how Galileo was attacked for saying that the sun, not the earth, was
the center of the universe. Yet the other part of my brain whispers:
Video-on-demand is a fad, this year's version of cabbage patch dolls.
People don't want to work hard to program their TV set; they want
to collapse in front of it. They don't even have time for it; it takes 43
minutes just to scroll through 500 channels.
So what is the realistic forecast for the future of interactive
information technology? Is it a fad, like the cabbage patch doll? Or is
it something as life-transforming (at least for people like me) as a
laptop computer? Will children be transfixed by their TV screens, or
as George Gilder believes, will they be transformed by their
computer screens? Is Gilder right, that our separate instruments--the
TV, the computer, the telephone, the fax machine, the CD--will all
merge into a single instrument? Which of the seven giant
communications industries will war, or mate, and which will win or
lose? Well, there's no way in truth to know the answer to these
questions. When it comes to answering questions like these most of
us are jumping off a cliff. And the worst part is we don't know
whether our bungee cords are attached.
Ken Auletta writes "Annals of Communications" for New Yorker
magazine