"Don't believe the hype"-Public Enemy
Johnny Mnemonic, a film based on a futuristic William Gibson short story, turns on the plight of its title character who has a brain implant, enabling him to be a cybercourier of 160 Gigabytes of data. Trouble is, in Hong Kong, they uploaded 320 Gigabytes and this info glut will kill Johnny if he can't download within 24 hours. Mnemonic's dilemma is one with which we can all identify: it is a synecdoche for the information overload of daily life in the late 20th century.
Two recent books, acknowledging the irony of appearing as books, analyze the relationship of the proliferation of information and information technology. Nicholas Negroponte's Being Digital might best be described as taking the utopian perspective and Clifford Stoll's Silicon Snake Oil as taking the dystopian view on the matter. Stoll's book is, not to put too fine a point on it, a diatribe against the Internet, which will come as a surprise to readers of his earlier bestseller The Cuckoo's Egg (1990). That book-part autobiography, part spy story, part eloquent plea for continuing the openness of the Net-revealed a writer passionate about the opportunities that information technology provides. Silicon Snake Oil, as its name implies, is a 180-degree turn for Stoll-and a poorly argued book at that. In a review of several new information technology books in April, The New York Times dubbed Stoll "a born-again nerd" and summarized the message of Silicon Snake Oil as "Don't get online, get a life."
By contrast, the NYT calls Negroponte a "high-tech visionary with credentials" and describes the thesis of his book as "The new technology changes everything, and for the better." Negroponte, the founding director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Lab, begins his book by talking about the paradox of writing a book. He distributed his ideas in this form, he says, because there are just not enough digital media in the hands of those he wished to reach-executives, politicians and parents. Secondly, he wished to repurpose his well-regarded columns for the journal Wired. Finally, in contrast to multimedia, the written word, claims Negroponte, "sparks images and evokes metaphors that get much of their meaning from the reader's imagination."
Like Gaul, Being Digital is divided into three parts: "Bits are Bits," "Interface," and "Digital Life." In the first section, Negroponte explains the intended significance of his title. Atoms have for centuries been the carriers of information-stone tablets, books, newspapers. Now, the process of information transferral is becoming digital: "The information superhighway is about the global movement of weightless bits at the speed of light." As an example of the changes that are imminent, Negroponte cites the videocassette-currently atoms which we must ferry back and forth to the video store, about to become bits delivered to us by cable. Negroponte also challenges us to rethink the television and the computer as one box which will operate in a largely asynchronous (except possibly for coverage of politics and sports) mode and one which is highly personal, attuned to the viewer's individual preferences: "Today's TV set lets you control brightness, volume and channel. Tomorrow's will allow you to vary sex, violence, and political leaning."
"Commingled Bits: Repurposing the Material Girl" is a particularly luminous chapter, full of the crackling possibilities of multimedia: "It's both about new content and about looking at old content in different ways. It's about intrinsically interactive media, made possible by the digital lingua franca of bits," claims Negroponte. Reminding us that "repurposing goes hand in hand with the birth of any new medium," Negroponte emphasizes the most important characteristic of multimedia: it is interactive. The frisson of the media not only creates new meaning, but the interactivity creates new teaching and learning processes. Whither multimedia? Negroponte predicts: "Multimedia will become more book-like, something with which you can curl up in bed and either have a conversation or be told a story. Multimedia will someday be as subtle and rich as the feel of paper and the smell of leather."
The middle section of Negroponte's book answers the question: "Why is Being Digital so hard?" Answer: because the human-computer interface is still very clunky. Negroponte urges us to ponder the other possibilities-primarily screen-touching, voice recognition and the use of the eyes. "It is time," he proclaims, "to make computers see and hear."
Negroponte's predictions in the third section of his book are provocative; we are now entering the post-information age, the age beyond mass media when the audience is often an audience of one-you. Whereas today's media "push" information at the audience, tomorrow's media will allow you to "pull" out of the morass just the "bits" in which you are specifically interested, perhaps with the help of what Negroponte calls an electronic "agent," which has been meticulously briefed about your information needs. This section deals with much else that is relatively new to our vocabulary: e-mail, MUDs, MOOs, faxes (of which he is highly critical, favoring electronic communication), and netiquette.
Having read this book, the reader will not be surprised by Negroponte's declaration in the Epilogue: "I am an optimist by nature." Negroponte's utopian vision traces for us a solution to Johnny Mnemonic's dilemma-how information technology will itself cope with the glut of information confronting us. He concludes: "Like a force of nature, the digital age cannot be denied or stopped. It has four very powerful qualities that will result in its ultimate triumph: decentralizing, globalizing, harmonizing, and empowering."
Negroponte's notion of bits controlled by "header" bits which will be presorted and personalized for each of us has already been realized digitally, on a small scale, by some enterprising college students, as recently reported in The Chronicle of Higher Education. Clifford Stoll, by contrast, has stuffed his book full of dire predictions of all the things that will go wrong with the Internet and information technology. While Negroponte gives us supple prose and enticing ideas, Stoll reads like a fuddy-duddy, always saying why things won't work and what an insurmountable problem this or that is. Ironically, some of the problems identified by Stoll are already being tackled and solved. For example, he complains bitterly about the "chaos" of the Internet, making it impossible to find sought-after information. He sees us as being forever burdened with the Mnemonic overload. Yet, groups of librarians are organizing to create effective indexing tools, one of the things librarians are eminently trained to do.
It's as if Stoll is throwing up his virtual hands, saying we can evolve no further. Stoll, a physicist who by his own admission has spent untold hours on the Net, who has seen it grow exponentially, seems suddenly incapable of envisioning further improvements. He often seems trapped in an either/or mentality, viz.: "Few aspects of daily life require computers, digital networks, or massive connectivity. They're irrelevant to cooking, driving, visiting, negotiating, eating, hiking, dancing, and gossiping. You don't need a keyboard to bake bread, play touch football, piece a quilt, build a stone wall, recite a poem, or say a prayer. . . . During[time] you spend online, you could have planted a tomato garden, volunteered at a hospital, spoken to your child's teacher, and taught the kid down the block how to shag fly balls." Cliff, the reader desperately wants to respond, why are you posing this as a Solomonesque choice? WE CAN DO BOTH.
Perhaps the most extreme example of his bifurcated thinking is the passage in which Stoll disses e-mail: "I'm starting to think that e-mail destroys reflection at both ends of the communication channel . . . I have sent off plenty of e-mail that I later regretted. Written letters, however, give me time to pause: I reread the note, address an envelope, and find the right stamp. I have time to reconsider." WHAT??? I want to inquire, none too politely. What about the fact that when my daughter spent her first year in Europe, the year the Berlin wall came down, we experienced a three-week communication gap while my snail mail reached her and she responded in kind. This past year, when she was again there and we both had access to e-mail, we sometimes serendipitously found ourselves having synchronous communication electronically, and both felt a little less lonely for that instantaneous conversation.
At times, I felt that perhaps Cliff Stoll had just discovered quilting and baking chocolate chip cookies and licking stamps, having been too long inside the Net. Did that account for his valorizing all these tactile activities and suggesting, diabolically, that no one could have both? I can't resist a few more examples: "I have never figured out what's meant by those buzzwords, interactive multimedia . . . Isn't a football game interactive? . . . Even the term multimedia is wrong, since there's only one medium employed: the computer." Or how about: "Consider the equipment you need [to play computer games] . . . compare this to a two-dollar pack of cards . . . If you get frustrated, throw the pack out the window. Try that with your Pentium." And then there are Stoll's nostalgic remarks about card catalogues . . . and then there is his prose style, which reads as if he has written far too many of those e-mails on which he never reflected.
But, while we may well ignore the specific caveats delivered by Stoll, we would be well served to heed the existence of this book. Either (and this is a cynical interpretation) Stoll and his marketing moguls thought there would be a public appetite for such a dystopian view-or, worse, the book is sincerely meant and may therefore signal the beginning of a serious backlash. If such an IT advocate as Stoll was, just five short years ago, can produce such a negative, whining book, what does that bode? Be prepared. If at your next budget committee meeting or social gathering, someone quotes from Stoll, to wit: "Perhaps our networked world isn't a universal doorway to freedom. Might it be a distraction from reality? . . . computer networks . . . isolate us from one another and cheapen the meaning of actual experience. They work against literacy and creativity. They will undercut our schools and libraries," tell them about Being Digital instead.
Elizabeth R. Baer is vice president for academic affairs and a professor of English at Gustavus Adolphus College in Minnesota. [email protected]