A Wired World

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• PAUL SOLMAN:

  Let's begin with a look at some estimates of Internet use and how it's been exploding in the past year. Our numbers come from a variety of sources. About 80% of Americans now have personal computers.

  About 100 million people are online and at last count the Net was adding 38 new users every second. Some 55 million Americans log on to the Internet, in a typical day. About 40% of them check their e-mail every day. About 30% check several times a day.

  In 1998, the U.S. Postal Service delivered 101 billion pieces of paper or snail mail. The number of e-mail messages transmitted in 1998 is estimated to have been around 4 trillion. 60% of regular Internet users report watching less television; 34% spend less time shopping in stores; 13% attend fewer social events; more than 25% say they now have friends they've never met in person; and– our favorite– 48% of regular Internet users, according to a UCLA study, say they now deny their children on-line access as a punishment tool. In short, the Internet is becoming a given of the American and global landscape, whether we like it or not.

  For a discussion of what that may mean we turn to four experts, Jaron Lanier is a computer scientist, composer and author who joins us from San Francisco as does Katie Hafner, consumer technology reporter for the "New York Times;" Paul Kedrosky is a Professor of Commerce, who teaches information technology and strategy at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, and with me here in Boston is Mary Fran Johnson, editor of Computer World Magazine. Welcome to you all.

  Katie Hafner, are people using the Internet and particularly in the last year in ways you were predicting or would have predicted?

• KATIE HAFNER, New York Times:

  Well, i think it's interesting sort of to go back to the roots of the Internet, which we actually seldom stop to do. If you look back, oh, you know, 30 years when it– or even farther than that, 40 years when J.C. R. Lichreiter – who was a scientist at M.I.T. he was sort of the intellectual, he planted the intellectual seeds for the net. He foresaw this sort of Macluhanesque global village that ate — what he called an inter-galactic network was going to bring.

• PAUL SOLMAN:

  MacLuhan, Marshall MacLuhan, the media –

• KATIE HAFNER:

  Exactly.

• PAUL SOLMAN:

  The futurologist of the '50s and '60S.

• KATIE HAFNER:

  Right. What's interesting is that i think we're actually beginning to see that. It's taken all these years but there are so many ways in which the world is, in fact, shrinking, and what we're seeing this year with sort of the dot-com shakeout is that the e-commerce part of is almost receding, if you will, and i would posit that the social uses of the net are beginning to come into more prominence than ever.

• PAUL SOLMAN:

  Paul Kedrosky, is the world shrinking? You are after all there in Vancouver, those people are in San Francisco. But this is TV technology. This has been around for a while.

• PAUL KEDROSKY:

  We've been able to pull this trick off for a little while. It is shrinking. The point Katie makes is a good one. This is something that is useful to keep in mind with all technologies and the Internet in particular is that it's taken a long, long time to get the Internet to the point where it feels like it's been an overnight success. It's really been sort of a 30-year ride. Suddenly it's reached this point of kind of ubiquity where everyone you know is swapping e-mail addresses and telling you how to get ahold of them and disappointed when you don't get email them at Christmas or New Year's or whenever. That's taken them a long, long time to reach the mass penetration. And that's when things really get, I think, interesting. At the same time though in the same way that our sort of expectations 30 years ago of how quickly that would happen were really out of sync with reality, i think our expectations about how quickly we'd be able to profit from it and the expectations that drove this euphoric rise of Internet stock prices over the last 36 months were equally out of sync with how realistic it would happen in the near term.

• PAUL SOLMAN:

  Are you surprised about that? Are you surprised that the Internet stock collapsed?

• PAUL KEDROSKY:

  Not at all. I have to confess i was very skeptical from the get-go.

• PAUL SOLMAN:

  You were shorting the NASDAQ, were you?

• PAUL KEDROSKY:

  If only i were so smart. I mean, these kind of — technology seems to breed this phenomenon, for want of a better word, call it a mania where suddenly we put all of our fondest hopes and wishes on the back of some poor, old belabored technology. In the 20's it was sort of refrigerators and televisions. And today it's personal computers and the Internet. We load them up with all of our hopes, dreams and let them fly. You know, the poor things can't manage under all the load.

• PAUL SOLMAN:

  Mary Fran Johnson with me here in Boston — you were nodding when Paul Kedrosky was talking. We do freight these new technologies with more than they can bear?MARYFRAN JOHNSON, ComputerWorld: Well, and I was thinking that technology changes very quickly but human beings change rather slowly. And I think some of the uses that we see today of the Internet are not some of the things that we may have anticipated two or even three years ago. I think especially as we move forward there will be more services delivered over the Internet that we really hadn't thought were going to be coming.

• PAUL SOLMAN:

  Like what?

• MARYFRAN JOHNSON:

  Well, communication with all the different companies that you get services from, like with your car dealership, that expectation that i think Katie mentioned that everyone has an e-mail. It's like I think the question has become instead of just are you on the Internet, i think in the future and even now the question is what kind of access do you have? Is it a very fast Internet connection? Are you going to be ordering a book from Amazon.Com through your Internet-enabled cell phone? The questions I think become different as people adapt to the different ways that they can use the Internet in their daily lives.

• PAUL SOLMAN:

  Jaron Lanier, is it as you predicted? What's different about how the Internet looks today than, say, a year ago that you– I don't know– are surprised by or that you had right on the nose?

• JARON LANIER, Computer Scientist/Author:

  Well, i thought the market was going to crash a lot sooner than it did. I was amazed at how long the madness lasted. I think part of the reason the madness lasted so long is that for some reason we just all adore obsessively talking and thinking about this technology — I think in a way that we haven't ever obsessed about other technologies, even the old televisions and refrigerators. And I think the reason we obsess about it so much is because it's really all about us. It doesn't do anything by itself. It's just a pipe that runs between us. In a way it's our own vanity that is driving this market. As far as what surprises me, I'll tell you the happiest surprise is the rise of Internet use among the elderly. We've always known that the Internet was a medium of the young. We've always thought of youth as being the primary entrance card. It's really nice to see this demographic effect where we see the Internet also serving as a sort of a response against the separations that our mobile society creates in families so that's the happiest surprise. The market collapse is absolutely no surprise at all.

• PAUL SOLMAN:

  Katie Hafner, what's your happiest surprise?

• KATIE HAFNER:

  Well, actually, i hate to keep jumping in here as sort of the resident historian, but if you go back and you look at e- mail and how e-mail has evolved — what Mary said earlier about how humans are so slow to change, what's interesting is that's so true, because when the Net was first around and first growing among university researchers, the killer very, very early was e- mail. What's interesting is that that pretty much is still is. I find that fascinating, and also one thing when i was mentioning earlier about the social uses of the Net, one thing that i find very interesting is how these sort of self-organizing web sites that are sort of just beginning to crop up, where sort of the best stuff bubbles to the surface….

• PAUL SOLMAN:

  What do you mean?

• KATIE HAFNER:

  Things like e-opinions.

• PAUL SOLMAN:

  E-opinions.

• KATIE HAFNER:

  E-opinions where the users who are on the site actually rate what other people on the site… you see this in crude form by the way on Amazon where sort of you rate the reviews. Then it gets….

• PAUL SOLMAN:

  You rate the books.

• KATIE HAFNER:

  You rate the books, right, exactly, and the other things that are on Amazon. And then in e-opinions there are these sort of reviews where everyone is sort of rating everybody's review and there's this sort of complicated for algorithm as how the best stuff bubbles to the surface. And this is truly something that could not have happened anywhere else but on the Net.

• PAUL SOLMAN:

  Mary Fran, you've got– Johnson– you've got this in your workplace, right? There was the "am i hot or am i not" site? Kind of what Katie Hafner was talking about.

• MARYFRAN JOHNSON:

  Right. I was thinking about that. The way the Internet and various web sites allow us to connect with each other and react to each other in whole new ways is actually a social phenomenon that I don't think anyone really anticipated a year, even two years ago. I wandered by one of the cubicles at Computer World where some of the editors and designers were having a fun time and laughing it up. I went over to see what they were doing. They were on that site: Am i hot or not.Com. You can send in a picture and basically people will tell you if you're not hot or not.

• PAUL SOLMAN:

  Hot meaning good looking.

• MARYFRAN JOHNSON:

  Good looking, yes. It was pretty funny.

• PAUL SOLMAN:

  That's pretty terrifying. Paul, how come it still takes me so long to find what I'm looking for when i look for a piece of information? When Dave Barry was running his mock Presidential campaign, his one campaign promise was he would come up with a search engine where you could actually find what you wanted without having to wade for hours through what you don't want.

• PAUL KEDROSKY:

  If only we had a good answer. I think — there's a couple of different way to go at it – one answer is that like so much technology it was created by technologists and then only later on sort of retrofitted for the great unwashed who didn't happen to enjoy tinkering with technology for much of their today.

• PAUL SOLMAN:

  And according to Jaron Lanier perhaps narcissistic technologists.

• PAUL KEDROSKY:

  Sure – I mean, I think that's part of the answer, and the other answer for better or for worse is the Internet is truly– and i mean this in sort of a small "d" sense of the word disorganized– is a truly disorganized system where there isn't a lot of top-down structure or any real top-down structure imposed on it. And so it's kind of like an exploded library with card catalogues strewn all over the place. And so piecing all of that back together would be one thing that was a static creation that wasn't growing as quickly as it is. But with it growing so quickly you're trying to assemble a really loose fast changing picture of something that's changing as quickly as what you're trying to put together. And you put those two things together– this fast changing thing and the technologist– and it's a nightmare trying to find anything at you will. PAUL SOLMAN: Jaron Lanier, is the Internet, do you think, a more positive or negative development – net/net — at this point in time?

• JARON LANIER:

  No pun intended.

• PAUL SOLMAN:

  I mean at the bottom line.

• JARON LANIER:

  I will be better behaved than our host here. I think the Internet is overall a positive technology for the simple reason that it's a human technology that connects people together. It doesn't move mountains in and of itself. It's not something that creates power. It doesn't… It's not a form of action. It's a form of communication. And so if you believe that there's a little bit more good and evil in human nature, then you've got to like the Internet. That's where i come down on it. It's definitely true that the Internet has exposed some of our evil nature. But the good thing about that is it's a little bit like living in a society where everybody's window shades are up and you can see all of the people who are dangerous, and the nice thing is that there are actually fewer of them than we used to think there were. I don't like seeing fascists, child molesters and so forth but i'm happier seeing them knowing how many there are and knowing that they're out there in limited numbers than being terrified in not having any concrete sense of them. I think we're better off than we used to be in that regard.

• PAUL KEDROSKY:

  I think just to add to Jaron's point –

• PAUL SOLMAN:

  Sure. Paul Kedrosky.

• PAUL KEDROSKY:

  — the direction this is going, i mean, the metaphor I like to use to describe it to people sort of the future of where I see a lot of this going is that the Internet is a kind of communications utility in a lot of ways analogous to an electrical utility where we sort of take alternating current for granted. We don't really get excited when we plug something in and it works unless maybe you live in northern California these days. But in general i think that's the direction that you're going to see this information utility called the Internet go, where it becomes so widespread, so ubiquitous, so tied into to so many parts of our lives that we actually forget it's there. It becomes this ubiquitous thing that's almost therefore transparent. It's just this grid that happens to run information not electricity but in the same way it recedes into the background and our children and grandchildren will look back at us – at what's happening today — and think we all went nuts.

• PAUL SOLMAN:

  Very quickly, just a few concerns. Katie Hafner, privacy concerns.

• KATIE HAFNER:

  I was just going to say privacy is obviously huge especially with mobile devices and these location-based mobile devices where the marketers are saying isn't it great that everyone will know where you are? Well, is it so great that everyone will know you're cruising the aisle of the supermarket and then the Net will download to you exactly what's on sale right there in the aisle and another sort of bit of cold water on this is sort of that the d-d word, the digital divide word. Where you talk about a ubiquitous utility but how ubiquitous can it really be if there are so many people that really aren't on it or last year or this year still in 2000, President Clinton, you know, the Clinton administration made sort of a big deal, this digital divide although not a whole lot happened. It will be very interesting to see what the bush administration decides to do about it.

• PAUL SOLMAN:

  Let's just very quickly what's going to happen looking out ahead? If we had this discussion four years ago it's similar to this discussion we had tonight.

• MARYFRAN JOHNSON:

  I agree with some of what Jaron and others were saying, the idea of the ubiquitous Internet where access to it comes at you in various devices from various different points – maybe, as Katie said, where you're in the supermarket as was said. The other thing to keep in mind is the balance that everyone has to be watching between the security of their information and their privacy. In some ways you have to trade off something to get the other. Like if you want the access anywhere, say, to 911, so you can tap that in on your Internet enabled cell phone and they will… anyone would know where you are without any further information that actually trades off the fact that anyone can find you. So if you were for instance in a town and you were going to perform some sort of crime, those records could be checked. Your phone essentially becomes a location device.

• PAUL SOLMAN:

  Jaron Lanier, last word to you. Briefly, what do you see five years from now when we have this same discussion right before New Year's?

• JARON LANIER:

  Oh, I've been building the thing that we'll see in five years. It's called teleemersion. It's extending the Internet to create the illusion that you're actually in the same place. It will bring people together without having to get on planes. That's what we'll see in five years, and that's really a delicious experience. It just started to work this year.

• PAUL SOLMAN:

  You mean the virtual reality?

• JIM LEHRER:

  No, virtual reality is putting you in an imaginary place. This is bringing people from real places together as if they were in the same room. I call it sometimes a cross between the holodeck and a transporter beam. It creates the illusion that you are three dimensionally with the other person as they are. It's really quite a lovely thing. So that's five years from now. I actually know the answer this time.

• PAUL SOLMAN:

  Five years we'll check back in and see if it worked. Happy holidays to you all and thanks very much.