Information please - electronic superhighway

Reason, March, 1994 by Martin Morse Wooster

Fear of the electronic superhighway does not compute.

TO CONSIDER THE ENORMOUS changes that have affected communication in the last decade, think back to 1980. Only a few wealthy Americans owned VCRs. Only big businesses used faxes. Only a few homes received cable television; the rest of us were limited to the three networks, public television, and whatever old movies were on the independent station. Computers were large, punch-card-fed, and frightening.

What futurologist could have predicted today's world, with affordable faxes, personal computers with power unimaginable to a James Bond villain, and cheap videocassettes sold over the counter at McDonald's? And the information world of 2008 is as unforeseeable to us as today's information highway was in 1980. Will we watch television on our computers or run software on our TV sets? Will we still buy books--or go to a movie theater or a library?

Conventional wisdom holds that the large number of choices will result in our brains' bursting with "information overload." Every time I hear this phrase, I imagine it to be the mental equivalent of sticking your finger in an electrical socket. We'll be so burdened with knowledge that our brains will bulge and our hair will look like the bride of Frankenstein's.

Philip Elmer-DeWitt expresses these standard fears in the October 25 Time. In a bad piece of science fiction, Elmer- DeWitt predicts a future in which everyone will spend evenings slouching in front of "teleputers," agonizing over which one of the 500 channels to choose from. Will Americans in the 21 st century spend their evenings watching interactive soap operas? How about "laser-print coupon clubs"? Or electronic classifieds? Or video dating services?

"The only people who weren't plugged in were those pointy headed people who never owned a TV set in the first place," Elmer-DeWitt writes. "I saw one of them the other day, walking outside, making a fuss over the flowers. Hey, I'm no lowbrow. I used to go to the movies!"

Whatever the future holds, two things are clear: There will never be exactly 500 channels to choose from, and no one will ever need to read Time. (Since no one needs to read Time now. of course, the second prediction is not particularly daring.) Moreover, the possibility of hundreds of different things to do on your television set does not mean that people will become TV zombies. No one reads all the magazines on a newsstand or tries to watch every show on cable TV. Given more choices, people will probably watch the shows they like and skip the ones they don't. People won't spend more time in front of their televisions in the future--they'll just be more selective.

THE MAGAZINE WIRED PROVIDES A MORE plausible view of the future of information. This bimonthly is a general-interest magazine about the future of information that combines meditations on the future with reports about current technological advances. Once I got past the exceedingly loud graphics (the page numbers are fluorescent and illegible), I found it quite informative. The September issue, for example, reports that Singapore is trying to become the world's first "information island" and gives a list of new words that future technophiles ought to know. (To "cut steel," reports Gareth Branwyn, is to build a mold for a new product. A "knowbot" will be a software program that will act as a reference librarian helping users find the information they need.)

The most interesting thing about Wired is that it hires science-fiction writers to provide reports: The editors sent William Gibson to Singapore and Rudy Rucker to the set of Jurassic Park. Michael Crichton also spends several of Wired's pages discussing the future of information. But the best article is by Bruce Sterling, discussing what the "information superhighway" of the future might be like.

Sterling describes "Bob Smith," testifying before a congressional committee in 2015, a year in which, Sterling says, "living without the Net would be like living without electricity." The Net, Sterling says half-jokingly, will foster individual liberty. He predicts that "one of the most feared political organizations in the world is the multi-national anarchist libertarian group called the Students for an Utterly Free Society."

In Sterling's scenario, encryption will be commonplace, enabling programmers to thwart police and government agents. He portrays an FBI raid on an information node in South Dakota used by Iranians. After decryption, the Feds find that 80 percent of the files are pornography, 15 percent pirated videos and films, and 5 percent "text files in the Farsi language describing how to build, deliver, and park truck bombs in major urban areas."

Other "information entrepreneurs" won't even need homes, says Sterling. He describes how police in "North Zulch, Texas" arrest a scruffy biker and destroy a cigarette-pack-sized device which turns out to be the node for a bulletin board with 15,000 users, some of whom are wealthy moguls. The enraged users go to North Zulch, buy the town, pulverize it, and donate the land to the Nature Conservancy.