"Future Perfect" - читать интересную книгу автора (Williams Robyn)

1. The Future of Communication – Beyond Babel?

It is 2027. You are coming back from one of your occasional days in the ‘office’ and want to catch up with the world. Your home media console has assembled a few programs, sound and vision, that it knows you like, just as Nicholas Negroponte and Bill Gates promised it would in the 1990s. It has also listed a few it feels (yes, this shining gear seems to have feelings and insights, though you know it can’t be so)… feels you might challenge yourself with-they have received star ratings from those you would regard as cognoscenti. So you have, potentially, a full evening to sample what’s going on worldwide.

Messages are spam- and call-centre free. Besides, you have filtered them during the day on your Hypertel. What you really fancy is spending a half hour on the BabelFish facility, where you are delving into ABC and CBC archives to assemble your own sound feature. You could have made a video one, but you prefer ‘radio’ and it’s quicker. You will end up with voices from the past forming an hour of reflections on how very young children learn-last month you assembled a similar feature on men as sole parents-and you’ll zip the result to a few friends and colleagues with an active interest in the topic. A transcript comes with it automatically. The material can be popped into the Hypertel (much like a combined MP3, phone, BlackBerry and smart card) and listened to or read wherever you happen to be.

Some of your efforts have worked so well you have offered them to the national broadcaster and they’ve gone global.

At home you are not being scanned by CCTV. Not that this worries you, but everywhere else is monitored. In 2007 in Britain, you could expect to be on camera and recorded 300 times a day. In 2027 the process is constant. Security has improved as a result. But do people fully appreciate the social costs?

Now for a pee. You are worried about both blood sugar and cholesterol. You hit the switch for ‘connect’ and the lavatory is now linked to the medical line. After a swift slash, your electrolytes and salts are registered at a clinic’s monitor 300 kilometres away. No alarm sounds. You do this with a tiny blood sample once a month, too. So far, so good.

In 2027, you are really connected.

Something revealing happened to me towards the end of 2006.

I had been commissioned by The Australian newspaper to write a feature on the year 2026 for its extensive series of supplements about the future. Part of the deal was that I appear, with three others, in a live discussion on Fox TV, chaired by journalist Matt Price.

I agreed on the basis that it is a good thing to keep in practice with all forms of media to prevent rust. On the night I was disconcerted to be asked to arrive at 7 p.m., a full two and a half hours before airtime. An entire evening was gone. I was also a little worried about going on so late, as I get up at 5.30 a.m., a habit fixed by a diabetic cat demanding a dawn breakfast and by the need to catch the early, gridlock-free bus.

On we went, after make-up and rehearsal, and I was fairly brisk in the beginning, saying I expected John Howard still to be prime minister in 2026 and the ABC to be gone. Then, towards 9.50 p.m., with ten minutes to go, I began to fade. I found myself looking dreamily at a rather adorable young woman in row two of the audience and drifting into flights of wishful imagination.

Suddenly, Matt Price was asking me a question. ‘So what d’you think of that, Robyn? Yes or no?’

I had no idea what he was talking about. So I took a punt and blurted, ‘YES!’ Everyone exploded in laughter. I then gleaned that the topic was health care and that Matt’s question had been along the lines of ‘As a pre-baby boomer, do you think it right that the younger population of twenty years from now should have to support the massive medical needs of all you oldies?’ To which I’d given the affirmative answer. Emphatically!

So, as a true, if somnolent, professional, I decided to escape the hole I’d dug myself into by following my cavalier reply with an even more cavalier elaboration.

‘By then, of course, our bodies will be maintained by both nanobots-minuscule robots repairing and maintaining our insides-and by transplanted organs grown artificially in ear, nose, kidney, lung and heart factories. So the costs won’t be as crippling as they are in the present-day blunderbuss system.’

The panel nodded, somewhat perplexed at my inventiveness, and moved on to the next topic (Beyond Viagra or whatever).

So far, so plausible. Matt Price wrapped the segment and we repaired to the green room and drinks. My eye suddenly caught the TV monitor that continued to carry the ‘live’ Fox transmission. And there I was, pontificating about nanos and organs. But how come? The session had finished. Then it dawned on me: this was the news, and there was I making it.

A fanciful eruption, a frolic of desperation, was off and running. The next day it featured on page five of The Australian. Then I was called by Radio 2UE for extended comment, and then by a Toowoomba station and the Channel 10 morning show. I passed on Channel Seven’s Today Tonight because I was too busy.

So this was ‘news’ in commercial broadcasting land. For decades I had constructed carefully sourced stories for the ABC science programs, often of momentous import (world poverty, plagues, cures for most things, brain transplants), and the take-up was vanishingly small. Now I had manufactured a totally unoriginal whimsy on Fox TV off the top of my head and the world stampeded.

After 35 years of broadcasting, I still get dumbfounded.

My point is that there is so much factoidal material sloshing around out there that what we need is a means to focus it, rather than simply more stuff. Little discussion on communication these days is about content, very much about distribution.

So how do we get-as writer Brenda Maddox once asked in her book Beyond Babel-beyond the cacophony of too many messages?

To answer that question about the future we need to delve into the past.

In human history there have been two basic kinds of message. One is ‘Here come the Huns, let’s scarper!’ The other is ‘Darren’s looking smug, I think he’s done it with Sonya.’ One is fact, knowledge raising the alarm. The other is gossip, feeding the mill. We need both.

We need gossip, as Professor Robin Dunbar, professor of evolutionary psychology at the University of Liverpool has pointed out in Grooming, Gossip and the Evolution of Language, because it is the glue of social groupings. When our forebears left the shelter of forests, he surmises, and could no longer sit grooming each other, looking for nits and sharing tickles, because the exposure of the plains made us too conspicuous, we had to go in for virtual grooming instead: gossip. Words replaced soothing fingers.

Hence pulp fiction, TV soaps, Hello magazine, text messages on mobile phones and Paris Hilton (she had to get into this at some stage, she’s like a walking computer virus). Should we fret? Well, perhaps not. As the late Douglas Adams pointed out, we don’t condemn the telephone of old simply because Aunty Freida was fond of chatting on it. Phones can still be used to convey the election results or the coming of peace. The technology is neutral.

But what if the noise of chattering becomes so intrusive that it becomes difficult to find-to hear-that other component of communication in a civil society: information and ideas? How come my blathering about nanobots on Fox seemed to give me more exposure than countless science reports on ABC Radio? The answer may be in recognising where we are in this present communications revolution and seeing whether we can steer it to a more coherent (and less noisy) future.

So where do these ‘revolutions’ come from? Ten years ago, in a book on media (Normal Service Won’t Be Resumed), I quoted geographer Dr Peter Hall, who sees media being pushed by innovations in transport, each on a roughly 50-year spurt. Thus, 150 years ago, with the triumph of the railways, came the electric telegraph (to advise when trains would arrive), primitive phones, the penny post, Pitman’s shorthand and photography. The next revolution, 100 years ago-coinciding with the arrival of cars and planes-brought the typewriter, the phonograph, duplicating machines, linotype, the cinema and radio.

Fifty years ago, with the start of the jet age, we had, network television, photocopying and the programmable computer (ENIAC in the USA, SILLIAC in Australia), multimedia and convergent information technology. The fax, as ever, is an anomaly, having been invented long ago but finding its heyday only in the 1980s. My own office fax was turned off a year ago, as its load of junk paper came to kilos a day and threatened to choke the building.

If Dr Hall is right, what do we make of the present transition and where might it lead? If we follow his formulation and look at links between media and transport, what we find is gridlock and chaos. Trains, first used for primitive transport two centuries ago, are trundling embarrassments, at least in Britain and most of Australia. Jet planes have ‘liberated the masses’, as cars did before, and are a cheap if temporary bonanza. (There is heated debate about the greenhouse cost of passenger planes and much sneering about ‘stag party excursions to Noosa’ by hoi polloi, but less sniping about executives flying to yet more meetings.) We move too much and are beginning to think about the benefits of staying still.

And much the same is true of communication. It is fast, global, overwhelming-billions of people shifting masses of stuff. Yet, at the same time, creativity is in stasis. The Australian movie industry has rarely looked weaker; theatre is struggling; the bulk of television is reality/soap shows plus unlimited cops. Leading thespians tell me they now train corporate executives in public speaking because acting roles have dried up. If the technology of production is so cheap and flexible, why isn’t everyone and his best mate making drama, shooting documentaries, being creative?

But it’s all there on YouTube.com, comes the reply. Instead of elite hand-me-downs, you have programs for the people from the people. The same with bloggers. Newspapers and TV may face a collapsing audience but the Internet offers millions of independent sources. Get modern! But does this amount to much more than home movies on the world stage, rant in lieu of journalism?

Is this present messy revolution, then, really a shakedown of powerful owners and snobby public vehicles (ABC, CBC, BBC) in favour of a decentralised, freewheeling new media? Is it, as Malcolm Long (former CEO of SBS and of the Australian Film, TV amp; Radio School) asserts, as important as Gutenberg’s printing press and as significant as the first industrial revolution? Perhaps. It depends on what happens next, on how we choose the communications future.

It is certainly true that the speed of service can be staggering. Bill Dutton, the first ever professor of Internet studies, who is based at Balliol College, Oxford, told me of his sudden realisation that it was quicker to look up a fact on his computer than to cross the room and pick a book off his shelf. But it helps to know what you are looking for.

Two gaps persist. One is for those who don’t know what they are looking for, because they have never heard of it. This brings up the supposedly elitist Reithian big idea that the noble ambition of public broadcasting is to offer the populace something they don’t yet realise they want. If you are convinced you are very much a consumer-even of life-and not much a citizen, then, living on Planet Selfwill not encourage you to explore beyond your self-defined universe.

For example: I was once asked to address second-year biomedical students at the University of New South Wales, where I am a visiting professor. I based my talk on two premises: that none of them had ever heard any of my programs (true); and that they all had some topical awareness and would therefore be interested in the science-related news stories of the previous week (false).

Those seven days had been a bonanza of science news items (speed-of-light controversy, space-shuttle worries, new drugs), yet no one knew about them. None of those twentysomething students, supposedly the brightest of the bright, read newspapers or watched the television news (let alone knew where on the dial to find ABC Radio National). In a world with too many choices, you settle for what you know.

The second gap consists of the dispossessed and impoverished. Seventy per cent of the world’s population has never heard a dial tone, let alone handled a computer. This is where the first opportunity for the future comes up. What many of the world’s poor are doing is trying to jump the first 150 years of Peter Hall’s communications revolutions and go straight to the next one: elaborate mobile phones (cum texters, cum cameras, cum libraries). One superphone shared by a developing-world family could make a vast difference to their lives without the infrastructural clutter the rest of the world has had to put up with.

There is also the environmental question. Each laptop requires ten times its weight in carbon to manufacture. Many machines are used for only a fraction of their possible lifetimes (fashion again). As long as they haven’t been used much to play games, which burns up cooling systems, they can easily be exported to developing countries for free distribution and a valuable second life. The European Union is legislating to make this happen.

The new technology could, indeed, be a means for bringing education and enlightenment to those so far deprived. But it is a big challenge and needs effective policy to make it happen.

On the creative side the challenge is trickier. Until now it has been assumed that being in the communications business is a bit like becoming a rock star-muck about in the garage long enough, do enough gigs and, with luck, you’ll make it. There are plenty of media courses around and thousands of students enrolled, but I come across few who have a solid preparation for broadcast program production or for journalism. They can juggle gadgetry like wunderkinder, but don’t ask them to write a program script.

Which brings me to the technology itself.

Each new step in communication is invariably greeted with fear and loathing. Gutenberg’s books were resisted by the Church because they threatened to diminish the power of the clergy. Offering the Bible in English instead of only Latin was also a risky business as both Wycliffe and Tyndale discovered. Typewriters (as Ted Hughes records below) seemed threatening; computers (‘word processors’) much worse. Fleet Street resisted the Murdoch move from hot metal to desktop publishing. Video promised to kill the radio star.

We are all still here-newspapers, radio, books. More or less. But the style has changed. This is what the late Ted Hughes, former British poet laureate and widower of Sylvia Plath, wrote about his own experience. When young, he used to make summaries of plays or novels for a film company. Then, at 25, he turned from the fountain pen directly to the typewriter. ‘I realized instantly that my sentences became three times as long, much longer. My subordinate clauses flowered and multiplied and ramified away down the length of the page…’

So much for typewriters, then came the e-revolution. Ted Hughes had been a judge on a children’s writing competition for over three decades. Entries used to be no more than a page or two. ‘But in the early eighties we suddenly began to get seventy- and eighty-page works. These were usually space fiction, always very inventive and always extraordinarily fluent-a definite impression of a command of words and prose, but without exception strangely boring. It was almost impossible to read them through.’ Word processors had arrived!

Now, it happens that I still use a mechanical typewriter to prepare all my radio scripts. This forces me to be precise and make only minor alterations when we get to studio. I do this for a number of reasons.

First, it frees the computer on which the recorded interviews are played. Second, I use recycled paper. All the thousands of uncollected print-outs, chucked press releases, failed photocopies, provide a colossal mountain of wasted paper. I turn the pages over and type. My paper bill over 35 years has been nil. Third, I know my using a typewriter infuriates the neophiliacs. All the chaps who have spent two decades banging on about processing systems and slim-line gadgets perceive my rejection of their obsessions as an attack on their manhood. In all this time NOT ONE PERSON has mentioned, as Ted Hughes did, writing style and content.

Meanwhile, of course, -while no one’s looking, I write books and articles on computers. You have to. Editors refuse to accept actual pages and, frankly, sending whole books down the phone lines is almost magically impressive. But the question of style remains unexplored. I suspect the problems have been solved in professional publishing, where the efficiencies of receiving movable electronic print make up for the extra pains great writers may formerly have taken with their prose. The writing of private people and managers has become both bland and terrifyingly prolix. It looks so good on screen or in print: neat paragraphs, marching vertically forever, no corrections visible-as finished as an Act of Parliament. (For a comparison of the poetry of the King James Bible version of the 23rd Psalm with what it might look like sent as a text message, see the end of this chapter.)

Is style also affected by the torrent of e-messages? I now spend an extra two hours every day answering this stuff in terse non-sentences. Am I, are you, now writing more like R2D2 than like Milton? And what of those of us, young and old, who spend much of our days glued to screens? The brain scientist Professor Susan Greenfield is worried that we will become so isolated, our communications so chopped up in electronic bits, that we shall be altered as human beings. She asks in Tomorrow’s People:

Will those who live in a century from now be socially inept, by the standards of today? If virtual friends replace flesh-and-blood ones, we shall not need to learn social skills, nor think about the unwanted and unpredictable reactions of others. So within this collective consciousness there need be no interaction, no action or response but rather, should we choose it, a passivity in which we are shielded from any disagreement or disharmony.

The key word there is ‘choose’.

In these ways our lives have been consumed by the e-revolution. Will the future make it all simpler? Well, the possibilities are staggering.

Ten years ago, in Normal Service, I conjured the scenario of a person (P) on a Very Fast Train (dream on!) wanting a book. In P’s briefcase is a book with blank pages made of a plastic material that both feels and smells like high-quality paper. P takes out what I then called a Hypertel, but which now is more likely to be a multifunction mobile phone. The phone’s screen presents an Amazon.com-like range of available titles, P chooses one, and the required work now infuses the blank pages: pictures, colour, print, everything. P then settles down to read, making the odd note on selected pages that later can be printed off. When the book is finished, another button is pressed and the volume goes blank again, ready for the next infusion.

The result of this kind of technology could be the elimination of 95 per cent of routine publications. Only collectors’ items, sentimental choices and rarities need fill your shelves. In future your library will be in your pocket.

But will it? A decade on I still see walls of books in shops, and warehouses crammed with backlists. The technological possibilities are, however, much closer. In 2006, at James Cook University in Townsville, I met Mohan Jacob, an engineer from India who is trying to use new materials-ceramics and superconductors-to improve reception and transmission of mobile phones. He also showed me a polymer sheet. It represents, he tells me with huge enthusiasm, the next stage on from Gutenberg. The material can receive electronic signals that alter the configuration of its molecules. The result is print, changeable print.

Imagine now your newspaper of the future. Instead of buying your bulky set of large paper pages, many of which you immediately shed, especially on weekends when half of the paper is ditched unexamined, you will one day take one or two pages, click your paper of choice into them, add whichever sections you fancy, ignoring the others, and be charged according to your selection. No more printing lorry loads, carting paper to every town and outlet in the land; no more tonnes of unread returns, no more landfill.

So why not stick to screens only? Because people won’t. Newspapers and magazines on your computer have been available for ages, but folk still trudge to the shop and pick up newsprint. In future they will get their newsprint, but without the trudge. And that newspaper will be updated to the minute.

Books and newspapers: two examples of hundreds that the communications revolution might offer. On what basis should our future technological choices be made? My criteria are 1. environmental impact 2. efficiency and convenience 3. public demand 4. overall economy.

Earlier I noted that the two main functions of communication are to exchange useful information and to gossip. I have assumed that gossip will look after itself. The only constraint on my generation’s phone chatter 30 years ago was the cost of a call. Let teens chat on-if they can afford it. In the process they will redefine ‘appointment’, ‘conversation’ and even time. Meetings and interaction will become almost continuous. We shall watch the social results with interest.

The way forward for communications, in future, is streamlining and focus. Can we possibly cart yet more instruments (than phones, laptops, organisers)? Obviously not and, as we know, the move is well underway to give us something like my ‘Hypertel’, a computer/phone/camera/diary in one device.

What about focus? The greatest frustration for most of us mired in this present e-revolution is the way information is fragmented. The TV in your American hotel with 240 channels and nothing to watch. The Googled reference with a dozen spellings of the name you want to check. A thousand possible sources offered when you want only one. What to do?

Project BabelFish

Do you remember the fish in Douglas Adams’s book The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy?

‘You’ll need to have this fish in your ear.’

‘I beg your pardon?’ asked Arthur [Dent].

Ford was holding up a small glass jar which quite clearly had a small yellow fish wriggling around in it… [Arthur] gasped in terror at what sounded like a man trying to gargle while fighting off a pack of wolves.

Once he had the Babel Fish in his ear, Arthur understood perfectly. The Babel Fish lives on brainwave radiation from every source but its host. It then excretes energy in the form of exactly the correct brainwaves needed by its host to understand what was just said.

The Babel Fish reverses the problem defined by its namesake; the original Tower of Babel (according to the Bible) inspired the Deity to confuse human beings by making them unable to understand each other.

The Babel Fish made me think. What if we took all the thousands of hours of science programs my colleagues and I have broadcast over the decades and mined them for specials on any named topic? Suppose you wanted to know about AIDS and fancied hearing the pioneers who first identified HIV, Montaigner and Gallo, then find out about the tracking of transmission, attempts to find treatments, and the search for a vaccine-the whole story told by those who were involved, in a format you could listen to anywhere. If a discovery were made next week of a proven vaccine or a cure, we would add that to the recording and you would be up to date. Transcript included, of course. Pick any other topic: nuclear power, GM crops, cyber sex, asteroids, black holes, Einstein, omega 3 fatty acids, trees, carbon trading, deep sea vents, the kakapo bird, windmills, Shere Hite, photovoltaic cells, slime moulds, cosmology, warts, piles, Neptune, NASA, pus, a history of the penis, Kropotkin, hippos, meditation, schizophrenia, global wanning, knees-we have recordings of the world’s experts saying everything imaginable on all these subjects, from the oldest recording of Florence Nightingale in 1890 to Stephen Hawking talking through his voice-generator machine.

Each one-hour offering in our version of BabelFish would be a scripted story using these voices to give the essential, definitive briefing on the topic chosen. You would select it off the Web, download it as a podcast, and stick it in your ear to listen to it on a digital music player as you jog, stroll or clean out the shed.

The plan is to set up a team within the ABC led by seasoned producers. We would then use slave (student) labour and mine our archives (now rotting in cupboards) as source material. The students’ expertise with the technology would meet our experience with production and selection. They would learn journalism and broadcasting techniques; we would build a source of reference material for the world.

But isn’t it the case that most Australians can hardly identify a scientist beyond Einstein? In fact New Scientist magazine revealed in 2006 that 78 per cent of British people it polled couldn’t name a single living scientist. Of those who could, most named Stephen Hawking. But so what if they had never heard of Rutherford, Dirac, Bragg, Crowfoot Hodgkin, Goodall, Chandrasekhar, Venter, Dawkins, Burnet or Perutz? Is that a reason to give up and consign these names to oblivion? They are (or were) giants in their fields and compelling speakers. Their words on the nature of the world could move as well as edify.

Who would use such a resource? Well, given our stunning experience with podcasting over the last two years-with ABC programs being downloaded across the planet as if they were free banknotes-I suspect demand would be impressive. But imagine the new science students in China and India (400,000 engineers graduated in China last year, together with one million scientists) with their keenness to become fluent in English. Even a fraction of their growing number could amount to millions.

And BabelFish would grow. Once a one-hour topic was up, it would stay. Soon there would be a comprehensive list to tempt anyone. Say you wanted to get up to speed on the disposal of nuclear waste. Voices ranging from Robert Oppenheimer to Helen Caldicott and John Holdren could give background, followed by Ted Ringwood on the development of Synroc, followed by the latest assessments of hazards versus advantages. Within an hour (or less if you chose) you’d be in the loop.

I took the idea to colleagues around the world. They were universally enthusiastic. As broadcasters they felt it would give new life to their archives. Most science programs or reports begin in much the same way, explaining what a quark, a synchrotron or a guppy might be. Then comes the argument, then the payoff. If we combined our global storehouse of recordings, we could have a G8 of reliable, listenable, edifying e-science. The BBC agreed; so did CBC, PBS (USA), Scientific American, Radio NZ and a few others.

If BabelFish comes off, one day (communications, like science, deals with split seconds but moves managerially like continental drift) it will be but one example of how the future of media might be managed. It will offer you clear choices instead of an incomprehensible maze of options; interaction producing something more satisfyingly complex than what you started with; more democracy instead of simply more noise; decentralisation in place of mega-baronies; stillness where once there was turmoil.

In this way the next communications revolution will indeed be in step with transport, as Professor Hall has it. In future we shall be sitting smug in our village (or village-like suburb), in touch by remote control. At least, that’s the theory Isn’t it?

In 1993 science fiction writer Samuel Delany decided to see what the 23rd Psalm would look like in 2093 based on trends forced by electronic communication habits. How would the pithy, almost anorexic word use of our hasty times change the florid language of the past? The result is shown below.

2093

I have a supervisor

I need nothing more.

My sleeping, my eating, my drinking

Is observed and controlled.

Even if threatened by death,

I need not fear.

I need not think.

Controls and aids are all around me.

I am fed.

My enemies starve while they watch me eat.

My head is rubbed like a pet!!

My water dish is full to overflowing.

My whole life I will frisk about the palace!!

So much for the abruptness of the late 21st century. Compare the King James Bible version:

The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.

He maketh me to lie down in green pastures:

He leadeth me beside the still waters.

He restoreth my soul: He leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for His name’s sake.

Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death I will fear no evil:

For thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.

Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies: thou anointest my

head with oil; my cup runneth over.

Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life: and I will dwell in the

house of the Lord for ever.

Sublime.

The Hunches of Nostradamus

2008 James Packer marries Elizabeth Murdoch (by arrangement through their brokers) to create the greatest media/gambling market at this end of the galaxy.

2009 Big Brother ‘final’ season adds spice by having one contestant with AIDS, one with Hepatitis A, B, and C and one with the gene for serial killing.

2010 ABC, in crisis, closes down Radio National, merges with SBS and restructures to add five extra layers of senior management.

2011 New technology allows viewers to bypass TV transmission and watch selected shows on the inside of eyelids. Over 400,000 episodes of The Bill and CSI made available.

2012 Device worn inside the nostril can receive phone calls, radio and stock options; to be stored in lower spinal cord, bypassing the brain.

2013 ITV in UK in controversy over The Bill showing non-simulated sex scenes and toilet close-ups while ignoring crime.

2014 Channel 9 sold to James Bond.

2015 Paris Hilton cloned.

2016 ABC closed.

2017 John Howard celebrates twenty years as PM by launching Cricket Channel.

2018 James Bazalgette, who saved London in the nineteenth century by inventing modern sewers, comes back from the dead to condemn his great-great-great (etc) grandson, who produced media sewage (Big Brother).

2019 New iPod is chip implanted in a baby’s brain. Wearer selects (limited) channels by twitching nose.

2020 Natasha Stott-Despoja becomes Australian PM. ABC reopened.