http://www.deutsche-bank.de/db/ahg/noamtxt.htm (Einblicke ins Internet, 10/1995)
Response: fight new information media
Response: multimedia technology
Response: Using economics as a screen
Introduction
Exposed as we are to a torrent of victory bulletins from the front
lines of R & D labs and marketers, it is easy to believe that
the information revolution is being won. Computers get faster,
smaller, and cheaper. Telecommunications have more capacity, diversity,
and mobility. Television becomes sharper, smarter and more global.
Fax, VCRs, PCs and CD-ROMs reach distant cottages. Thus, humankind
appears to be on the verge of achieving mastery over information,
turning a scarce resource, knowledge, into an abundant one.
But sometimes
the worst that can happen is to get what one wants. And perhaps
this is happening to us with the revolution in information and
communications. While this revolution is progressing quite successfully,
success, just as failure, has a way of creating its own problems.
We live
in the information age, work in the information economy, and are
surrounded by an information technology of astonishing performance
and price. And yet -- why is it that with all these technological
marvels we feel less than ever on top of information, a resource
that does not exist (outside of DNA) except by our own creation?
Why do we feel, as individuals and organizations, less in control,
and always behind of what we should know?
The reason
may be called the Paradox of Information Technology: the more
information technology we have and the more knowledge we produce,
the further behind we are in coping with information. We invent
and build new technologies to help us, but they set us back still
more. Today's new model, multimedia technology, is another such
effort to catch up with information and to manage it. As with
previous technological solutions, this effort will not be successful
in gaining mastery over information flows.
Why do
we have such a problem? The reason is that we have created a systemic
imbalance in the information environment that leads to new bottlenecks.
A communications process, to simplify considerably, consists of
three major stages: the production of information, its distribution,
and its absorption. These three elements have to exist in some
relation to each other. Let us define information as "raw
data subjected to organization"; i.e. data enhanced by the
application of some selectivity and logical connections. As a
refinement of new data, information does not occur by itself,
but needs to be produced, distributed and used, just like an axe
or a meal. In recent decades, technology has made giant strides
in the distribution end of information.
We are
near the point, historically speaking, when the cost of information
distribution becomes both negligible and distance-insensitive.
Distribution has contributed, in an interrelated fashion, to the
production of information, which has been spurred by the evolution
of advanced economies to services and knowledge-based manufacturing.
One of the characteristics of postindustrial society is the systematic
acquisition of and application of information which has replaced
labor and capital as the source of value, productivity, and profits.
The weak link in the chain is the processing of the produced and
distributed information.
These bottlenecks
are both human and organizational - the limited ability of individuals
and their collectives to mentally process, evaluate, and use information.
The real issue for future technology therefore does not appear
to be production of information, and certainly not transmission,
but rather processing. Almost anybody can add information. The
difficult question is how to reduce it.
There is
a reinforcing relationship between the stages of information:
production, distribution, processing. If I produce a piece of
information, it will stimulate distribution and use. Similarly,
distribution increase stimulates information production and processing.
And information production creates demand for still more such
production. The relationship between the stages of information
with each other and themselves can be summarized in an input-output
matrix, in the same way as has been done in past for the interaction
of industrial production such as for steel, coal, electricity,
etc. Where bottlenecks in growth occur, they are likely to have
ripple effects throughout the other stages and beyond.
In the
past, the three stages of information grew slowly and more or
less in tandem. Information institutions started about 5,000-8,000
years ago when at different places around the world specialized
preservers and producers of information emerged in the form of
priests. Recording methods emerged. When production was low, such
as in Europe during the Dark Ages, distribution was also fairly
rudimentary. Processing was under little pressure.
When printing
and later the Industrial Revolution increased distribution technologies,
information production grew and processing increased in parallel.
Literacy rose dramatically. Organizational structures were formed
to handle the increased information load, and they grew rapidly.
By sometime
following World War II, the parallel trends diverged, and things
have never been the same. The driving technologies were advanced
by that war - computers (from code-breaking efforts); microwave
transmission (from radar technology); satellites (from missile
development); and television (from superior electronics) The production
of information in the U.S. economy increases at rate of about
6%, and the growth rate is itself increasing. The distribution
rate is increasing even faster, by an estimated 10% and more.
The rate
of increase in processing capacity needs to keep up with that.
To reach a similar growth rate is very hard, and is not being
achieved. It is hard, because of the limited capacity of processing
channels of individuals and organizations, and the difficulty
of increasing it.
This has
serious implications. Virtually all aspects of society are changing
due to that imbalance, and in the ensuing attempts to adjust the
individual and social processing rates of information to the demands
that growth in the other stages have put on them.
We all know that the quantity of information and of information
producers has grown prodigiously. It has been said that 90 percent
of all scientists who ever lived live today. The same holds for
other information professions such as lawyers, journalists, or
engineers. The number of scientists and engineers in the U.S.
grew from 557,000 in 1950 to 4,372,000 in 1986, an increase of
nearly 800%. By the late 1980s, their numbers roughly equaled
the entire information workforce of 1900.
Most branches
of science show an exponential growth of about 4-8 percent annually,
with a doubling period of 10-15 years. To get a sense of the trend:
Chemical Abstracts took 32 years (1907 to 1938) to reach one million
abstracts. The second million took 18 years; the third, 8; the
fourth, 4 years 8 months; and the fifth, 3 years and 4 months.
If we assume that before 1907 a full million of chemistry articles
had not been produced, this means that in the past 2-3 years more
articles on chemistry have been published than in humankind's
entire history before the 20th century.
A weekday
edition of The New York Times contains more information than the
average seventeenth-century Englishman came across in a lifetime.
The Sunday edition far exceeds that. Some indicators: (For the
US, unless otherwise noted)
Number
of e-mail messages, 1995: 793.6 million Average annual household
1991 expenditures for entertainment (all forms): $1,447. Number
of color TV sets, 1992: 150 million Number of VCR's, 1992: 67
million Blinking
12:00 as current time: 51 million Number of CD audio players,
1992: 34 million Number of video camcorders, 1992: 16 million
Number of companies using mail order catalogs: 10,059 Telephone
lines per 100 people - U.S.: 48.9; Japan: 42.2; Europe: 42.3 Percentage
of all households with cable TV - U.S.: 55.4%; Japan: 13.3%; Europe:
14.5% Personal
computers per 100 people - U.S.: 28.1; Japan: 7.8; Europe: 9.6;
home PCs purchased in 1993: 5.85 million Households with PCs:
32 million (one third of total households in 1993); expected households
with PCs in 1998: 60 million year sales of computers surpassed
those of color televisions: 1993 Year sales
of encyclopedias in CD-ROM surpassed those on paper: 1993 Size of
U.S. defense budget: $270 billion; value of computer hardware
and software sold in the U.S.: $500 billion Number
of Japanese per computer: 12; number of Americans per computer:
4 Increase,
since 1987, in number of fax machines in offices and homes: 10
million. Reduction,
since 1987, in number of secretaries: 521,000 Motion
pictures produced in 1991 (not counting TV productions) - 575
(175 in 1979). For all
the talk about "paperless" offices due to electronics,
the per capita paper consumption in the United States has increased
from two hundred pounds in 1940 to six hundred pounds in 1980.
Ten years later, per capita paper consumption had tripled again.
In 1991,
Congress received more than 300 million pieces of mail, up from
15 million in 1970. In 1980,
5 billion catalogs were mailed in the United States, 50 catalogs
for every person. By 1990, the number was 12 billion. In the 1980s,
growth of third-class bulk mail (junk mail) was thirteen times
faster than population growth. An average upper business manager
received more than 225 pieces of junk mail a month. The number
of satellite-delivered channels increased from 4 in 1976, 43 in
1983, to 99 in 1994. This trend continues unabated. In 1992, 20
new program channels were offered to cable operators, and in the
first half of 1994 alone, over 70. The growth
of mobile communications provides much wider and convenient reach
in terms of time and place. In the past, one could be reached
by phone only near a wireline, which covered in geographic terms
only about 2% of land area of US. Now, radio- based communication
ends most white spots on the map of communications ubiquity. The quantity
of information is most pronounced in big cities. One estimate
is that in a metropolitan area like San Francisco, people receive
(about 100,000,000 bits per capita per year) 100 times as much
as in a place like Addis Ababa (with less literacy) where the
load is about 1,000,000 bits. The "symbol economy" makes
the physical economy look puny. In New York City, communications
networks process $1.5 trillion financial transactions per day.
In London, in foreign exchange transactions exceed $100 billion
a day. A single day's trading in London is about to exceed the
annual GNP of the United Kingdom.
A critical
point is that information is always accompanied by 'noise.' In
technical terms, noise is the interference, in a channel, with
the primary signal. Noise also includes unwanted information that
must be filtered out. The more information we produce, the more
noise we produce, too. Conversely, as noise increases (including
unwanted information), the filtering must increase, as the information
signal must gain in strength. Both activities require substantial
resources. Thus, the creation of noise by information affects
information, and thus is a serious matter, because information
is itself one of the ways to counter entropy.
Shannon
and Weaver (1949), pioneers of information theory, identified
the noise in communication, that is, opposed to information in
signals with entropy. This obscure mathematical point gave noise
a central role in social analysis. Entropy is the essence of the
second law of thermodynamics. It is deeply pessimistic in that
law sees the world eventually and irreversibly losing its energy
potential and becoming, in Boulding's words, a "lukewarm
pea soup." Accordingly, the world would not go out in a bang
but in a whimper.
Entropy
uses up the potential of energy and of life. But life's ability
to create information and organize itself can counter entropy.
Thus, information is perhaps the one major counterforce to entropy.
Society's inability to manage its information resources therefore
means that noise increases more rapidly than information, and
this has many individual, organizational, and social implications.
There are
a variety of social responses to the problem of noise and inadequate
processing. They will now be discussed.
Response: fight new information media
One classic line of response to an expansion of information is
to blame the new information medium that creates the expansion.
Complaints against new media have been with us forever. In the
city of Mainz, where Western printing was invented in 1456, already
had a censorship decree was issued already in 1485. Berthold von
Henneberg, archbishop of Mainz, otherwise a reformer, argued against
the misuse made by printers, due to their greed in seeking money
and glory.
In the
16th century, Erasmus wrote "Printers fill the world with
useless, stupid, calumnious, libellous, violent, impious and seditious
books, thwarting also the good effects of good books."
When movies
were invented, they did not show Shakespeare's plays, but instead
exhibited vaudeville dancers and even bare ankles. Traditionalists
were outraged and sought a ban. Later, when sound was introduced
into motion pictures, musicians' unions agitated that "sound
movies are economic and cultural murder." When the radio
arrived, researchers noted that "Parents have become aware
of a puzzling change in the behavior of their children ..."
The telephone was no exception to the dismissal of a new medium.
Soon after its introduction, it was accused by a noted psychiatrist
of driving people permanently insane.
When television
emerged in the late '40s, it affected the dominant media negatively,
and tried to suppress it, using a variety of arguments on behalf
of creativity. Hollywood went to war against TV. It's us or them,
they said. Ronald Reagan went to work for TV and never made a
Hollywood movie again. He had to look for another line of work.
In addition, print, the dominant medium of intellectual culture,
went to war against video, as its hold over culture slipped. The
proponent of print culture have long attacked TV as a medium,
not just its particular programs, channels, or industry structure.
To their audience, being anti-TV is a self-identification as a
cultured person.
Later,
when cable TV emerged, it was the same story. The TV broadcasters,
now the new media establishment, fought cable TV tooth and nail.
The new arguments were the loss of national cohesion, and the
absence of public interest standards. Broadcasters in the U.S.
enlisted the government, as others have traditionally done, to
try to control the new medium.
Today,
with computer media in ascendance, the question is how they are
treated. This is important, because multimedia are fundamentally
the convergence of video technology - yesterday's villain - with
computer processing, storage, and routing.
In the
1950s and 1960s, many believed that computers would surely create
a 1984-like state, and computers had a negative image. Data protection
laws, based on that "Big Brother" image of the technology,
were passed just as computers became "distributed" rather
than mainframe. When the real 1984 rolled around, the fear had
become that 14-year-olds would use computers to start a nuclear
war on their own.
In 1960,
there were about 9,000 computers in the entire world, of which
55 percent were in the United States, 20 percent in Western Europe,
and 1 percent in Latin America. By the mid 80s, there were about
50 million computers, and the irrelative distribution remained
roughly the same. In 1995, the number of computers had increased
to about 110 million.
Today,
when computer usage is becoming democratic and when computers
are becoming a communications device, the Cassandra industry is
in full force, and an avalanche of neo-luddite literature is rolling
in. Today's fears are the usual suspects in new garb:
Impressionable children. Sex. Violence. Crime. Games.
Idleness. Bad manners. Alienation. Anti-authority. Bad grammar.
Extremist potential. Isolation. Information poverty.
Commercialization.
Poor countries.
This is not to belittle these concerns, or to give credence to
the Polyannas of the computer industry, but rather to observe
that it seems that the new media kid on the block seems to be
held responsible for the social sins of his elder media, often
in inconsistent ways.
Where once
too much elite control was decried for television, now there seems
to be too little of it over anti-social tendencies on the net.
Where once lowest common denominator programming was decried,
we now mourn the loss of the national dialogue and common hearth.
Where once youngsters did not communicate enough, they now communicate
excessively, obsessively, and sloppily. Where once the old series
were ridiculed as chewing gum for the eye, the same programs are
now romanticized as golden oldies, and bathed in nostalgia.
Response: increased heat
More information, more noise, and more clutter lead to a need
to amplify and/or repeat a signal message. This can be seen best
in advertising. Between 1930 and 1990, advertising expenditures
per capita in the U.S. increased by over 2,200%, whereas the population
increase was 200%. A quarter century ago, the average American
was targeted by at least 560 daily advertising messages, of which
only 76 were noticed. In 1991, the average American received 3000
daily marketing messages.
Viewer
retention (part of processing) of television commercials dropped.
In 1986, 64% of those surveyed could name a TV commercial they
had seen in the previous four weeks. But six years later, in 1990,
only 48% could. This leads to an increase in the "heat"
of messages, whether in advertising, politics, or the general
culture. It also affects media programs, which also must be more
intense. It favors visual themes, simple stories, and pseudo-facts.
In politics, it has led to the emergence of the pseudo-event and
the 15-second sound bite.
Increasing
heat and frequency, however, do not solve the problem of the processing
bottleneck, because everyone resorts to the same methods of amplification.
Thus, like the onlookers to a parade that are all standing on
their toes, we end up less comfortable, with more noise, and with
even less processing relative to information. Response: closing
and specialization
One way
people protect their processing channel is to shield it from too
much information by selective attention, stereotype, even prejudice.
People tend to notice communications favorable to their dispositions.
Voters do not want information but confirmation (Lazarfeld, 1944,
Kriesberg, 1949). Leon Festinger introduced the concept of cognitive
dissonance coping mechanism.
John Locke
in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding wrote: "Where
in the mind does these three things: first, it chooses a certain
number (of specific ideas); secondly, it gives them connexion,
and makes them into one idea; thirdly, it ties them together by
a name." This is done "... for the convenience of communication."
Another
form of closing is specialization. As the volume of information
rises relative to any individual's ability to handle it, specialization
takes place. There is nothing new about this.
Tasks were
divided from the earliest days. Long before Adam Smith wrote his
famous description of the needle factory, the sons of the original
Adam specialized already, the Bible tells us. As the body of knowledge
grew, the evolution of fields of expertise continued into ever-narrower
slices. German has an apt term, the "Fachidiot" (Specialty-moron).
Nietzsche
mocked it century ago. "A scientist was examining the leeches
in a marsh when Zarathustra, the prophet approached him and asked
if he was a specialist in the ways of the leech. O, Zarathustra,
... that would be something immense; how could I presume to do
so! ... That, however, of which I am master and knower, is the
brain of the leech; that is my world! ... For the sake of this
did I cast everything else aside, for the sake of this did everything
else become indifferent to me ..."
The result:
The inexorable specialization of scholars means that universities
cannot maintain a coverage of all subject areas in the face of
the expanding universe of knowledge, unless their research staff
grows more or less at the same rate as scholarly output, about
4-8 percent a year. This is not sustainable economically. The
result is that universities do not cover anymore the range of
scholarship. They might still have most academic disciplines represented
-- whatever that means - but only a limited set of the numerous
subspecialities.
Many specialized
scholars find fewer similarly specialized colleagues on their
own campus for purposes of complementarity of work. In other words,
the collaborative advantages of physical proximity in universities
decline. Instead, scholarly interaction increasingly takes place
with similarly interested but distant specialists of similar specialists,
i.e., in the professional rather than the physical realm.
This is
not new, of course. Diana Crane's classic Invisible Colleges (1972)
traced the interaction among distant scientists. But the information-induced
pressures of specialization have increased, as did the means to
make the invisible college the main affiliation. Air transport
established the jet-setting professoriate. Even more so, electronic
communications are creating new scholarly communities which respond
to the elementary need for intellectual collaboration, through
electronic dialogues, computer conferencing, and (soon) video
calls, strengthened by the occasional beer at a conference for
human bonding. Thus, while more information should help our understanding,
it also narrows our focus, breaks up established patterns, and
increases transaction cost.
Response: reorganization
An organization transforms inputs - resources, messages - into
outputs. Groups, like individuals, have channel processing capacity
and points of overload. James G. Miller (1960, 1971) studied group
information overload experimentally. Overload is the point at
which additional information does not increase performance but
rather involves a leveling or falling off of performance. At over-capacity,
the system needs to take mostly care of the exceptional circumstances
(crises).
Even without
cogestion, more information is not necessarily better for decision-making
purposes. According to studies, when people recognize the absence
of relevant information, they tend to less extreme evaluations.
(c f., Yates, Jagacinski & Faber 1978). Judgements are adjusted
to compensate for the uncertainty due to incomplete information,
and this means more moderate positions. (Cialdini, Levy, Herman
& Evenbeck, 1973; Jaccard & Wood, 1988). Their laboratory
studies show that decision makers seek more information than they
can effectively use (O'Reilly, 1980).
Management
studies show (Raymond, 1962) that the typical executive can receive
and absorb only 1/100 to 1/1000 of the available information that
is relevant to his or her decisions. Additional information may
actually reduce performance, it increases the decision maker's
confidence (Oskamp, 1965).
There were
hardly any middle managers in the United States before the mid-nineteenth
century. But by 1940, managers and clerks accounted for almost
17 percent of the U.S. work force. From 1900 to 1910 the number
of clerks accounted for almost 17 percent of the U.S. work force.
Their number grew by 45% alone between 1900 and 1910, far outpacing
the growth in the general work force. In the same decade alone,
the number of stenographers, typists, and secretaries, the staff
workers for middle management, increased by 189 percent (Beninger,
1986). The function of these employees was essencially to carry
information up to decision makers and implement their decisions
back down.
One way
for organizations to increase information processing capacity
is simply to grow. As information increases, control mechanisms
require still more information, leading to excess load and even
potentially to general breakdown.
An organization's
response to informational complexity is usually to increase organizational
complexity - management layers, procedures, and controls. The
result are organizational pathologies, such as tensions between
the field and the center; depersonalized leadership; fragmented
understanding; take-over of rigid procedures.
Just as
individuals, a group also has upper limits for information processing.
The larger the group, the more specialization and task-sharing
can be accomplished, but the greater internal information flows
become. For Peter Drucker, the First Law of information theory
is that: "every relay doubles the noise and cuts the message
in half." As the group grows, reciprocal relations become
impossible to maintain. Once the number of nodes in a group grows
beyond six, small group structure break down (Davis, 1969)."
One alleged
new tool to enhance productivity in organizing is "groupware,"
such as Lotus Notes, which permits many people to communicate
among themselves, both within and among companies. IBM just paid
3.6 billion dollars for Lotus, largely based on the potential
of Notes software. Yet one does such technology improve performance?
One study (J.G. Miller, 1960) found that teams of four participants
had actually a lower channel capacity than single individuals
at the same task.
In these
experiments four people were required to cooperate in coordinating
information that appeared on a screen. The performance of two
teams leveled off at about three bits of input per second, showing
the point at which overload occurred. The channel capacity was
found to be between 2 and 2.5 bits of output per second whereas
it was for individuals. With overload, group behavior patterns
included: (1) dropping information, (2) processing erroneous information,
(3) queuing - dealying action with the hope to catch during rush
periods to catch up during a lull, (4) filtering -selecting some
types of information and ignoring others, (5) creating multiple
channels by decentralization.
Various
network patterns different channel capacities; for example, a
"wheel" has a better capacity than a "chain",
but studies also show that strain increases on the central hub
in a "wheel" when information increases., i.e., when
the executive suffers overload.(Gilchrist, 1955)
Furthermore,
as one introduces new technology, ceteris do not remain paribus.
Naturally the workplace would be transformed in time. In the past,
jobs and work arranged in a way that assures physical access to
the physical object of work and to the necessary information.
Within an organization that had meant substantial stationariness.
But, now, the need for physical presence declines, because information
distribution becomes cheap and powerful. In consequence, offices
and even companies themself become "virtual" organizations,
i.e. a network relationship.
Indeed,
one may work for multiple such virtual organizations at the same
time, and the classic employer-employee relationship will be supersede
by freelance type arrangements, in which the organization bids
at any time for particular skills it needs at that moment. This
means that much of the information processing capacity of the
organoization are outside of it.
Indeed,
a major form of information processing is to delegate it to professionals.
Society is full of institutions and professions whose major function
is to select important information out of the babble. Examples
are:
jounalists
and editors, for whose selection judgment readers pay. Professors
and teachers, who select and present valuable information in a
field. Accountants,
who summarize a large volume of transaction information. Financial
analysts, who extract and analyze firm and industry data. Novelists,
who select from the vastness of human experience.
Editing
creates a tight, condensed, and less redundant information. On
an individual level, it leads to a substitution of direct experience
for "edited" reality. People go less to sports events,
lectures, or political events. Instead of eyewitnessing raw data,
they get the executive summary.
As one
recent President proved, one can boil down any issue under the
sun onto one index card. It helps, of course, to have three million
people working for you. What is likely is that there will be increasing
formal and informal rules (social norms) on keeping memos short,
and executive summaries will become the main event. Briefs may
be brief again.
Response: automatization
Information screening is the key technological challenge for the
information sector. The super pipe requires the super screen.
But as everyone who has used a data base can tell, the tricky
part of any existing search system is how to suppress repetitive
or unimportant information. That is, one needs a screening by
quality. Expert systems and artificial intelligence applications
will be useful here, but the technology is not even close at hand,
if it can ever be achieved.
Some such
systems are "intelligent agents," autonomous and adaptive
computer programs within software environments such as operating
systems, databases or computer networks. Typical tasks performed
by intelligent agents could include filtering electronic mail,
scheduling appointments, locating information, alerting to investment
opportunities and making travel arrangements. A learning agent
acquires its competence by continuously watching the users performance
and examples, by direct and indirect user feedback, and by asking
for advice from other agents that assist other users with the
same task.
One example
of an intelligent agent is Telescript, General Magic's communications-oriented
programming language. TeleScript messages know what to do and
where to go. They can navigate wide-area networks on their own.
But all agent technology is rudimentary. The so-called intelligent
agents are mainly mail filters. Technology can do only the most
formalistic information selection. Humans can infer concepts from
the words of a document.
Computers
are bad at that task. They have great difficulties determining
what is important. Contextual analysis will have to advance to
the point that machines can comprehend the context of information
and its meaning. Technological screening is, at present, quite
high in its ratio of hype to reality.
Response: multimedia technology
Today's technological effort at managing information are multimedia.
Of course, multimedia has been around since the dances of cavemen.
What we call, vaguely and imprecisely, "multimedia"
is a collection of attributes based on the convergence of technologies.
These attributes are:
Two-way
Interactivity Multitracking
Storage
and Retrieval
Interactivity
and return channels permit the establishment of user control in
the way that a reader has who can flip, scan and select different
books. Selectivity, in turn, permits a customization of product,
i.e., it leads to individualization.
For television
consumption, for example, it is tempting to believe that, as the
trend in TV continues, we will move from multi-channel to mega-channel
television. But this would be an incorrect extrapolation. Actually,
the opposite will happen: We will move into distributed television.
The key technologies here are video servers, broadband switching,
and navigational agents. Fiber lines are important but not essential.
Video servers are large computer-like storage devices, storing
thousands of films, documentaries, and other kinds of programs.
Many companies
will operate these video servers, charging a varying mix of usage
fees, subscription charges, transaction fees, advertising charges,
and sales commissions. There will be customized ads, based on
customer demographics and on customer transaction data. These
servers will be interconnected through phone and cable in the
way that the Internet today links computers and their databases.
This means
an extraordinary choice of program options. When given an abundance
of choices, how do people react? They seek simplification and
convenience. In the U.S., for example, few people go through the
trouble of ordering films by pay-per-view.
In the
future, they will simplify the selection task by "navigators"
and personalized menus. In that world, channels will disappear,
or rather become "virtual" channels. This leads to the
emergence of an individualized "me-TV" ("canal
moi", "Kanal Ich") based on a viewer's expressed
interest, his past viewing habits, recommendations from critics
he trusts, of delegated selection agents, a bit of built-in randomness.
This is
why the future will not be one of 50, 500 or 5000 channels, the
TV-critics' nightmare. Much worse. It will be a future of only
one channel, a personalized channel for each individual. The simultaneous
mass medium experience will be replaced by individualized experience.
This is not just narrow-casting. It is custom-casting.
In telecommunications,
similarly, the evolution of networks leads to customization. As
networks proliferate, a new class of 'systems integrators' is
about to emerge, whose role is to provide the end user with access
to a variety of services, in a one-stop fashion.
Today,
systems integrators exist for large customers. But tomorrow things
may be quite different. The additional step will be for systems
integrators to emerge that put together individualized networks
for personal use, or personal networks, providing a whole range
of communications and content options.
With rising
information inflows, two coping strategies exist to increase processing
rates: either raise the channel capacity by technology and organization,
or use channels in a parallel fashion. Electronic information
systems can increase channel capacity, especially in transmission.
But biological and social systems of humans cannot increase their
channel flow equally dramatically. This suggests the multi-channelling
of information.
Media have
different rates of display and absorption, for different types
of information and different senses. One strategy information
processing therefore is to affect the way information gets presented.
Eyes can get visual information at a broadband megabit rate. In
fact, if the TV action is too slow, one gets bored. On the other
hand, written information gets absorbed at the much slower rate
of about 300 words/min., or 200 bits per second. Ears are even
slower about 200 words/min. or about 150 bits per second. And
the tactile sense can handle up to perhaps 20 words/min., or about
15 bps, using Braille.
Thus, visual
information is by far and away the fastest. Print takes up only
a tiny fraction of our absorptive capacity. We are using hopelessly
outmoded Phoenician and Latin communications protocols. But we
are stuck with them. The form of written language has hardly changed
in centuries, and we have a big social investment in this particular
form of standardization.
Society
needs compatibility, of infrastructure exchange symbols, and the
social and cultural fabric revolves around it. Therefore, even
streamlining the needlessly complicated spelling of the English
language would be a culturally traumatic event, and unlikely to
happen outside a tiny circle of professionally eccentric poets.
So instead of junking the Latin alphabet and traditional forms
of written language, what is more likely to happen is a shift
to a multimedia form of communications with more visual and symbolic
information, each carrying the type of information that can get
processed most effectively on that particular channel.
Visiuals
are good for conveying emotions. Print is better for abstract
facts. This means the simultaneous attention to several information
streams. Multimedia thus moulds several inflows, such as vision,
hearing, and smell.
Children
already engage in informational multitasking. One psychological
study concluded that children, while watching TV, fight, flip
baseball cards, play jacks, play with pets, look after brothers
and sisters, play board games, make and build things, play with
toys, jump and dance, read, do homework, fight and talk.
Television
advertisements are a simple example for multiple information streams.
They pack a lot into 30 seconds of picture, voice, music, and
written language, all superimposed on each other and very tightly
edited. Another example are sales presentations with their increasingly
elaborate audiovisual aids.
This multi-channel
communications will lead to new forms of communications language.
Many more symbols will be used, because this can speed up the
processing, and combines abstraction of written language with
the speed of visual message. Even the sense of smell can, in theory,
be used as a channel. Artificial smells are becoming production
items. There are now "corporate identity" smells offered,
and no doubt smells can be reproduced over distance. Touch and
feel communication are also in development, first for sex applications.
"Virtual
reality" technology is today's most sophisticated multitracking
medium, filling up much of the user's sensory capacity by creating
a simulation that permits the user to "enter" three-dimensional
space and interact in it.
In Don
Quixote, I, Ch. 20, Sancho Panza tells stories discursively. Don
Quixote, "If that is the way you tell your tale, Sancho,
repeating everything you are going to say twice, you will not
finish it in two days. Go straight on with it, and tell it like
a reasonable man, or else say nothing." Don Quixote is the
archetypical man of letters. He wants Sancho Panza to conform
to written style, linear and clear. But Sancho Panza retorts indignantly,
"Tales are always told in my part of the country in the very
way I am telling this, and I cannot tell it in any other, nor
is it right of your worship to ask me to adopt new customs."
Will video
push print out to a secondary role? Not really. Print works well
for abstractions, whereas for images, video is superior. According
to Nobel laureate Herbert Simon, the "least cost-efficient
thing you can do" is to read daily newspapers. He recommends
instead reading The World Almanac once a year.
Thus, each
information stream and presentation has some advantages. For me,
the medium of the future is the comic strip. Or rather, the 'hyper'
comic strip: panels of text with still pictures, some of them
moving like film when you touch the screen. There will be sound,
and even smell. The text will go into deeper details and connect
with other text, like hypertext. One can skim this hyper comic
strip or navigate in it. This will be on flat and light display
panels one holds like a book, and one could write notes on it,
store, and send it to other locations.
Storage
and Retrieval
Multimedia is often primarily a storage and retrieve technology.
This saves one of the major responses to information overload--
a substitution of storage for processing, with retrieval the key
link. Instead of "learning" and "knowing,"
we develop skills and technologies of "finding."
Response: Using economics as a screen
To an economist, the main problem is the absence of economic mechanisms
in allocating processing capacity. If our individual and organizational
attention is a limited resource, it should be allocated as other
scarce commodities. At least that is the question. An example:
we are being inundated by junk e-mail, each piece imposing some
time cost on us. Prices are an excellent form of information about
information. They provide relative values.
This could
be applied to an e-mail, voice-mail, or fax system, with the sender
assessing the content's value by attaching "urgent,"
"standard" or "junk" levels of "electronic
postage" on an outgoing message. The postage would be charged
against the sender's budget and credited by the recipient. This
will cut excessive group lists and junk mail.
Telemarketing
information is a similar case, because access is of value, exchange
transactions would create rational markets instead of the present
disruptive calls followed by hang-ups.
How could
this happen? Telecommunications equipment and service providers
are likely to offer the capability for customers to select among
their incoming calls electronically only those calls they want,
and to assess an access charge for those calls they don't normally
want to accept. Such a service might be described as Personal-900
Service, analogous to 900-service in which the caller pays a fee
to the called party. Such a service would, for example, block
incoming telephone calls to a consumer with an electronic message
and a series of options. The caller would be informed that the
customer "charges" telemarketers for the privilege of
speaking to them.
Individual
customers could set different price schedules for themselves based
on their privacy value, and even the time of day. They would establish
a "personal access charge" account with their phone
or an enhanced services provider, or a credit card company. By
proceeding, the telemarketer enters into a contractual agreement.
The billing service provider would then automatically credit and
debit the accounts in question. Thus, markets in information access
will develop.
For example,
consumers will adjust the payment they demand in response to the
number of telemarketer calls competing for their limited attention
span. If a consumer charges more than telemarketers are willing
to pay, he can either lower access or will not be called anymore.
For example,
why is our time a free good for anyone who wants to access our
mailbox or telephone receiver? Let them pay for access. In the
upper reaches of power and prestige, access was always paid for
indirectly.
In advertising,
marketers will increasingly pay consumers rewards for attention.
Now some follow an ad by a little quiz, viewers would get a free
on demand movie, or a merchandise coupon as a reward. These payments
can also be indirect, through a premium in price for watching
a program without further advertising interruptions.
Conclusion
Information technology and its present expression as multimedia
technology, will not rectify the imbalance between information
production and distribution, on the one hand, and processing on
the other. It will not solve the problem of limited processing
and of noisy channels.
We may
be talking about emerging information technology as if it is just
about getting entertainment and study help into the home and stock
market data into the office. But it is naive to think that it
will stop there, and not affect us much more deeply. When the
automobile was introduced, it was thought of a horseless carriage.
But it did not stop there. Now, as cities, our houses, our family
structures, our work, our neighbors are changed. Why should a
revolution in information transport not have a similar impact
that the earlier revolution in physical form had?
Eli M. Noam