The Medium and the Message, or, After the Internet, the Deluge ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- You may distribute the text of this article freely, but I would appreciate knowing about anything interesting that you do with them. Tom Maddox tmaddox@well.sf.ca.us ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Reports from the Electronic Frontier: The Medium and the Message, Or, After the Internet, the Deluge Tom Maddox Consider the information that flows into and out of your home. Television and radio, transmitted by broadcast or cable; telephone signals, generally carried over copper wires; newspapers, magazines; a variety of printed media (including letters from your mutant uncle, appeals to contribute to the Anti-Death league or the new Consenting Lunatics Christmas Catalogue) delivered by hand; and even, should you be one of those rare folks who still read them, books. In short, domestic information flow here in the last decade of the milennium can be complicated and dense. A variety of projects currently underway will almost certainly change the nature of that flow, upping the traffic density until you will have just about as much information as you can want or imagine and restructuring the flow in fundamental ways--most likely abolishing simple, powerful distinctions that we take for granted, such as those that separate radio, television, and newspaper. Imagine a pipe into your home that can carry all the information sources I cite above: tv, radio, newspapers, &c. You get what you ask for when you ask for it and in whatever form you prefer. Perhaps you see only those parts of the New York Times that interest you; perhaps you don't even see the Times; instead you see an amalgam of "articles" combining voice, moving and still pictures, and print. And of course for entertainment you see the programs you wish when you wish them. Now, the question is, what is your role in all this? Are you merely a technologically-optimized couch potato, an exquisitely-tuned perceiving subject with an increasingly irrelevant body that might atrophy or balloon with disuse? Do the gigabytes of information come in one direction only, at you? Or can information flow both ways, from you as well as at you? Well, to understand what might about, you have to look at a thorny and technical set issues, often presented in the form of unpleasant acronyms such as NREN, NII, NSFNet, ATT, TCI, ISDN, POTS, RPOG, DSP, LSMFT (just kidding--I wanted to see if you were paying attention). I've been reluctant to stick a spoon into this particular alphabet soup, but I've decided I must because the issues signified by these letters are too important to duck. And even a quick look at the floating letters tells me that, as often, Humpty Dumpty's sardonic reply to Alice sums up the situation: the question is not what the words mean but who is to be the master. The current surge of planning the future of digital communications seems to have been kicked off by plans for NREN, the National Research and Education Network. NREN is the U. S. Government's vision of what comes next. Originally conceived as a way of providing extremely high-speed connections among supercomputers, it has evolved into a very complicated entity indeed. Gordon Cook, editor and publisher of the COOK Report on Internet -> NREN, makes clear how important he believes the evolution of NREN to be: The NREN is a planned nation wide computer data network that is also expected to have voice and video capability. By the end of the decade the NREN may become, on a national level, the most powerful tool ever created for finding,manipulating and disseminating information. Its existence is unknown and unimagined by most Americans. Yet, to the extent that information is power, the network's existence will shape their lives. How it does this depends on whom the NREN will serve. The choices are stark: all Americans on the basis of universally available and affordable telephone service, or comparatively few--those who at our wealthiest universities and richest corporations can afford the access costs of a system created to serve elites? However, I believe that the questions posed by Cook apply on a much broader basis than the NREN, which is merely one possible vision among many of what the future of digital communications will be. A multitude of corporate organizations and government agencies are trying to write that future, and distinguishing among them is a job for full-time observers. A major Bell company acquires a major cable provider, or a new telecommunications company in the Midwest has the future of NREN placed in its hands; events such as these are taking place now, and the motives and viability of specific players remain very much in doubt. Mike Godwin, special legal counsel to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, comments that "we have a Jurassic Park situation, where we're watching dinosaurs battle each other." To Godwin, organizations such as EFF can serve to influence the outcome of these reptilian battles. It won't matter so much to us mammals which dinosaurs win which battles if we can set some important rules for the winners. And in fact, the real stakes here concern not NREN but NII, the National Information Infrastructure. Unlike NREN, which has specific technical goals and was conceived as a benefit to the research and education communities, NII is a more general vision of the emerging net. The Clinton-Gore Administration has just lately embraced NII in the following starry-eyed language: We are committed to working with business, labor, academia, public interest groups, Congress, and state and local government to ensure the development of a national information infrastructure (NII) that enables all Americans to access information and communicate with each other using voice, data, image or video at anytime, anywhere. By encouraging private sector investment in the NII's development, and through government programs to improve access to essential services, we will promote U.S. competitiveness, job creation and solutions to pressing social problems. Well, maybe. The NII could represent a transformation of information access as deep and unpredictable as the invention of the printed page; it could also give us 500 channels with nothing on, or in Mike Godwin's phrase, "a vaster wasteland." The NII is likely to occur at the social, technical,and corporate junction of cable and telephone networks. The current advantage of telephone communications is that they are switchable, which means that you call when you want and are called when someone wants you in particular. The disadvantage is the relatively narrow channel, which means that you can talk to and hear someone in a low-fidelity way but cannot simultaneously see them or exchange documents, films, music, and so on with them. Cable television, on the other hand, provides relatively high bandwidth--used by all those colorful moving pictures and high-fidelity sounds--but is not switched: you turn it on and pick among what is available, but your choices are limited by what is offered at that moment, and unless like Elvis you shoot out your tv sets, you can't really answer back. The recent acquistion of a major cable provider, TCI, by Bell Atlantic is widely seen as a harbinger of a process whereby the distinctions between phone companies and cable companies will change radically and in significant ways even disappear. This is seen by some as a very bad thing. Nicholas Johnson, former FCC Commissioner, says, The single most important issue in telecommunications policy right now is the issue of the extent to which telephone companies, those who provide the conduits for communication, should be permitted to also provide the content that flows along those conduits. . . . I think it's going to be very difficult, once the telephone company gets in the information business, to try to get the Supreme Court to understand and support the notion that although newspapers can censor and radio stations can censor and television stations can censor and cable television stations can censor and utility envelopes can be censored, that somehow the telephone company can't censor. . . . So I think it's just incredibly dangerous and it will mean the absolute end of free speech in America--for citizens. When Mike Godwin and I discussed these issues during a phone interview, he pointed out that Johnson's understanding of the issues comes from an experience of television, not from an experience of the Internet, where free speech has burgeoned in extraordinary ways. We agreed, however, that keeping the NII open to unhindered, two-way traffic is one of the central questions concerning NII. The Electronic Frontier Foundation addresses just these issues. In a recently released document, "OPEN PLATFORM CAMPAIGN: Public Policy For The Information Age" (available by ftp at ftp.eff.org), they say: To achieve the democratic potential of the growing information superhighway we need a new social contract, updating the one cast in the 1934 Communications Act. We must organize a broad-based, public-private political coalition to revise the Communications Act according to the following principles: Diversity of Information Sources: Promote a fully interactive infrastructure in which the First Amendment flourishes . . . Universal Service: Ensure a minimumu level of affordable information and communication service for all Americans: Free Speech and Common Carriage: Guarantee infrastructure access regardless of the content of the message that the user is sending; Privacy: Protect the security and privacy of all communications . . . Development of Public Interest Applications and Services: Ensure that public interest applications and services which are not produced by the commercial market are widely available and affordable. These are, at least so far as I am concerned, admirable goals, and I concur in them without reservation. However, I do wonder in more cynical moments whether the represent the sheeps' call for universal vegetarianism. Godwin speaks of dinosaurs; I would keep in mind that in the usual order of things, we provide their food. Nonetheless, there is hope. We have what might be called an existence proof that a democratic, open NII might come into existence, and that is the Internet. The EFF document points out, "the Internet, with its non-hierarchical, peer-to- peer network architecture stands as a shining example of how to increase the diversity of information sources." In fact, as Godwin and I discussed, the Internet stands as a powerful metaphor for what the NII might become. It began as a government project (specifically, as a government and military network that could survive atomic attack) and evolved into a rich field used by commercial providers, education, and interested individuals. Furthermore, it has virtually no censorship, and it provides a ground for effective one-to-one (e-mail) or one-to-many (newsgroups and mailing lists) communication. Finally, it demonstrates something that is hard to understand unless one has seen the Internet in action: because of the free and open nature of the Internet, virtual communities spring up there in entirely unanticipated ways to serve fundamental human needs. E-mail, newsgroups, mailing lists, IRCs, MUDs, MOOs, and similar entities: all have served their participants in novel and unexpected ways. This is a topic of emerging interest among social scientists and journalists, and the subject of a recent book by Howard Rheingold, Virtual Communities, that I will discuss at some length in a later column. However, here I want simply to point out that the evolution of the Internet can show us what to watch for in the evolution of the NII, and what to plan for. In this context, the EFF's "Open Platform" proposal makes more sense, and Johnson's alarms about loss of free speech seem somewhat quaint. Once a network is created that allows unfettered communication among individuals, they will use it in interesting and important ways in the exercise of free speech, and the Internet shows that this can happen. Given McLuhan's dictum that the medium is the message, let me tell you about how this article got written. I had decided I wanted to write a piece on NREN, and so I began poking into places on the Internet where I figured I'd find information: EFF's ftp site, also the one run by Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility. Fairly quickly I had over a megabyte of text, from the Congressional bill creating NREN to recent position papers by a number of people. I began skimming the pile and in the process discovered that something called the NII, the National Information Infrastructure, had become part of the Federal Government's plans and the debate in general; also that EFF had something called the "Open Platform." Eek I said at some point, as I paged through all this, my mind aswim with acronyms. I needed help, I figured, so I sent e-mail to Mike Godwin, whom I became acquainted with on the net, and asked him for a quick overview. He sent e-mail back saying that the discussion was too complex for an easy answer in mail and that we should have a phone conversation. I replied by e- mail saying sure, call me up, and so he did. We had a long conversation in which he outlined what he sees as the terms of the debate about the post-Internet world--in the process adding some more acronyms--and explained EFF's position on the issues. He also recommended that I read the discussion on the WELL concerning the Bell Atlantic's merger with TCI. So I logged on to the WELL and downloaded a 350k chunk of text and skimmed it. Out of it I ended up using the Nicholas Johnson quotes, which in fact came from a radio series, "Hell's Bells: A Radio History of the Telephone," portions of which were transcribed and posted on the WELL. As part of that same discussion, I also found a comment by Dave Hughes, which summarizes for me what is most important and interesting with regard to all these topics. He says: [T]hey think they are selling 'information' and I think they are selling 'electronic experiences,' the novel introduction to which alters the users, i.e. experiences which are profound enough to change people. That in the broadest sense, the introduction of new human 'communications' technologies touches on one of the most profound things which makes us human--our higher levels of 'communications-- and when you change the way we can/will/do communicate, you are altering human experience, and we react in ways that surprise ourselves. That is my experience of the net, and I imagine it will be my and millions of others' experience of what comes next. ======================================================================= This document is from the WELL gopher server: gopher://gopher.well.com Questions and comments to: gopher@well.com .