When the Viking lander sent the first pictures from the surface of Mars, I watched with my neighbor, a video ham, as the Martian desert painted itself slowly down his monitor in narrow bands.
That desert was compelling. I burned to go to Mars, and even imagined that I might. So I was deeply disappointed when space exploration went onto the back burner.
Yet, only twenty years later, the exploration of near-earth space by tele-robotic sensory extensions of ourselves is happening at every level of the electromagnetic spectrum. Human beings will certainly follow.
The exploration of what Europeans called the “New World” excited plenty of interest too. Then things died down. Europe went about its business as usual, but beneath the surface, the structure of the world had indeed shifted. After a lull, Europeans poured onto the continent.
I write this column in Wisconsin. It’s only been a few hundred years, but the landscape I see from my window is a design that reflects the rectangles and planes of the male European mind.
After any breakthrough, we fall back into our comfort zone. Growth for individuals as for civilizations moves in waves.
I remember this as I read an article by Gary Chapman in the Los Angeles Times, “The Internet May Be the Latest Media Darling, but It’s No Baywatch.” Chapman is disappointed by the gap between the hype about the Internet and the reality. He debunks “myths” about the Internet’s impact on society.
I don’t think he can see the forest for the digital trees.
Myth 1: Everyone will be online.
Chapman: Use of the Internet is limited. “An astonishing 1.6 billion people, worldwide, tune into Baywatch every week. The entire global Internet-using population is 4% of the Baywatch audience.”
Bigger picture:
(1) The Internet, only a few years old in its current incarnation, is being adopted faster than any previous technology. People weren’t watching Baywatch when television was four years old; they weren’t watching anything.
(2) “Internet” is the current name for the network of networked computers. The realities behind the name are evolving into new forms, many hidden in the infrastructure itself. Just as automobiles are becoming electronic devices riding on mechanical platforms, we live increasingly inside an electronic infrastructure. The Internet is not just email or the World Wide Web. It is the entire matrix of electronic connectivity.
Myth 2: There will be a huge increase in the varieties of opinion expressed in society because of the ease of online publishing.
Chapman: “There is an almost limitless variety of opinion to be found on the World Wide Web and in online forums,” but “the dynamic range of opinion in mainstream America appears to be narrowing, not expanding.”
Bigger picture:
Chapman is still looking to the “space” defined by the mainstream media to see what’s “real.” Multiple sources of influence ARE evolving on-line but they’re butterflies that can’t be caught in that net. Their very transitoriness and fluidity makes them difficult to define.
Myth 3: There will be lots of cool jobs for creative people who will work in cyberspace.
Chapman: The hope that the World Wide Web would foster a renaissance in writing and art appears to have died. Writers who flocked to the “new media” are disillusioned.
Chapman again: Nobody makes money from the new media. Most information-rich sites lose money like crazy, or, at best, break even. If you want to get wealthy, he says, write a screenplay, a mystery novel or a computer game.
Bigger picture:
(1) Every transformation of the technology of the Word — writing, the printing press, electronic media — magnifies rather than eliminates the media that came before. There are more books and magazines than ever, but that shouldn’t be a surprise. Writing did not eliminate speech; the printing press did not end writing.
The inability to quickly predict which creative jobs will be viable in cyberspace does not mean that they aren’t emerging. We always try to port forms of the old technologies into the new media. That never works. The new media teach us over time how to use them. The dynamic marketplace incubates the forms that are viable.
(2) Some sites are making lots of money, e.g. sex sites. It’s no coincidence Chapman cites Baywatch as an example. The cutting-edge work to make streaming video and audio easy and seamless is being done at sex sites because people are willing to pay for it. This was true too of VCRs, first used for x-rated films. Mass markets for Hollywood movies and educational videos followed.
(3) The Internet will not REPLACE anything. It redefines the relationship of symbolic content (text, images, sounds) to itself and to the human symbol-user. The Internet, as McLuhan said of the electric light, is pure information, an example of context as content. The Internet is redefining how we use other media.
Myth 4: Government will fade in significance, perhaps into irrelevance.
Chapman: Government, at all levels, is actually becoming bigger and more powerful.
Bigger picture:
Shortly before the French Revolution, had you suggested that the monarchy, the aristocracy, the church — everything — would come down all at once, you would have been thought crazy. The sudden reorganization of everything at a higher level of complexity is called hierarchical restructuring. Because the changes leading to it are exponential, happening everywhere at once, it is invisible until it happens. The Berlin Wall. The Soviet Union.
Governments will evolve into forms appropriate to the economic and social structures generated by the technological transformation of our planet, just as nation states emerged in the past few centuries.
Chapman was probably once as excited as he is now disappointed. Gary, just you wait.
In the short term, predictions are always exaggerated; in the long term, they’re always short-sighted. As Alan Kay said, perspective is worth fifty points of IQ.
It IS all happening, but we don’t know yet what IT is. Emergent realities must wait for the language with which we can discuss them and the seers and prophets who give them names.
