WEEK FOUR COMMENTS

Vannevar Bush was certainly a forward-thinking guy. I am a backward-thinking guy, so I drew this cartoon, showing how cell phones might have looked if they were introduced in the early 1900s. Even in their slickest forms today, cell phones make me giggle, especially when they are so small as to be nearly invisible and people talk into them loudly, making facial expressions and gestures as if standing face to face with the person on the other end of the line. And every time I hear a groovy ring tone I want to do start doing a Pee Wee Herman dance.

Roger Fidler brought up some fascinating stuff in “Mediamorphosis.” It makes perfect sense that computers descended from the weaving trade. A piece of cloth is literally a net-work, and when you look at a big loom or think about what goes into making a Persian carpet, it is clear that a great deal of logic, calculation and, well, programming are involved in bringing a bunch of colored threads together to make a pattern. After thousands of years of weaving technology, Jacquard came along and streamlined it with wooden punch cards. Then Babbage figured out how to turn Jacquard’s punch cards in a whole new direction: how to weave a new kind of cloth from numbers and ideas.

It is amusing to read how often in the history of communications people got things wrong or backwards. For example, Bell and Watson thought the most promising application for the telephone was broadcasting of concerts and lectures, while the “hams” saw radio’s future in two-way communication. And oh how wrong was everyone involved in the early development of television. They thought it would be easy and just take a few years, but it turned out to be a much tougher nut to crack than, say, the telephone, radio or the light bulb. I have been working in video for many years and I can tell you that we are still trying to get it right. HDTV is a big step forward, but video remains a flawed and frustrating medium.

Thoreau was massively wrong when he predicted that Texas and Maine, once connected by telegraph, might not have anything to say to each other. Time has shown that Texas and Maine and practically every other place have a heck of a lot to say to each other all the time. I suppose the real question Thoreau posed was: once we have these fantastic mediums for communication, how much of real value will we communicate? This is a valid question.

When I started teaching high school classes a few years ago I noticed students busily typing away on their computers during class. Sometimes I peeked at their screens and saw that they were sending messages to each other across the room, having conversations like:

“Wasup?”

“Jus chillin”

“Me 2. Wasup with Jose?”

“He chillin 2.”

When I was in high school, kids used to pass stupid notes back and forth when they were bored. Now, thanks to an incredible international network of computers, servers, fiber-optic cables, microwave towers and satellites, kids can still pass stupid notes in class, only now they can attach bouncing pink elephants or rude sound effects to their notes, and all the while look like they are doing something really important.

Don’t get me wrong. I love my computer and I love the Internet. I just think we have to be careful not to get so caught up in communication technology that we forget how to communicate with each other. We should not forget how to spell our language correctly; we should not forget the important differences between written and spoken language; we should remember that a flesh-and-blood person beside us deserves a little more consideration than a distant, virtual person on the other end of a cell phone, instead of the other way around; we must remember that there is no “undo” command in real life; we should remember how to use our natural senses and instincts, rather than relying on data and credit reports, etc. to judge the world and our fellows; we should learn to value what we have, rather than always waiting for the next big thing; we should take care of our physical world and remember one very important thing about cyberspace: it’s a nice place to visit, but you can’t live there.

Marshall McLuhan was deeply prophetic when he said that in a world of instant communication “trends and rumors” become the ‘real world.’ All you have to do is stand in a supermarket line, scanning the magazine displays, to see that McLuhan’s world is here now. “Is Jen pregnant?” “New lo-carb diet trims abs fast!” Etc. etc. And then there is TV news: horror after horror, scandal after scandal, all fascinating for a day or a week, all to be forgotten as the next big story - the next trend - comes along. Call Rove and his pals in the Republican Party understand this all too well. The “fact-based” world can always be trumped by a juicy rumor; a good man or woman can always be tarnished by ugly innuendo; an inconvenient truth can always be pushed aside by a big new story inserted at the proper point in the news cycle. They understand the dark side of the communications revolution and are harnessing it to make sure that the global peace and understanding imagined by the pioneers of this revolution in the last two centuries will not come to pass.

What would Vannevar Bush be predicting today? One would have to be as prophetic as Bush himself to tell you that. I like to think that he would not have unqualified enthusiasm for unlimited extension of all the technologies we are developing today. I like to think he would be calling for technology to help us make sense of the information we have, rather than to create, gather, share and store more and more information all the time.

Bush envisioned a heroic new generation of pioneers, helping us find new and valuable paths through seas of data. This vision is somewhat different from what I see today. I see kids talking passionately about the killing power of weapons in the newest computer game, using words like “cool” and “sweet” to describe virtual horrors. I see business people floating obliviously along the sidewalk, their glassy eyes fixed on numbers in their minds and distant people talking inside their heads. I see people gradually turning into robots as devices grow out of their ears, with blue lights flashing like jet planes cruising through the lonely night sky. Soon these devices may grow out over their eyes, so they can see stock prices and email messages superimposed on the real world before them. Eventually these devices may bore into their brains so that data can enter directly into their thoughts. I am frightened enough by these people today, as I try to greet them as human beings in the restaurant where I work. I hate to think of how distant and difficult to understand they could become in the future.

Let’s develop technologies that help us live life richly, not technologies that turn us into machines. Speaking of which, I have been sitting here at my computer far too long. I am going to turn it off now and play with my cat.