Second Thoughts on the Information Highway

Cliff Stoll

Surely you've heard the predictions of our future digital age: "Multimedia will revolutionize the classroom," "Interactive electronic information will make books obsolete," "Businesses will flock to the computer networks for instant, low cost information." Visionaries see a future of telecommuting office workers, interactive libraries, and multimedia classrooms. They speak of electronic town meetings and virtual communities. Commerce and business will shift from offices and malls to networks and modems. Electronic mail will replace slow and inefficient snail mail. And thanks to the freedom of electronic networks, government will become profoundly democratic and efficient.

Such claims are utterly bogus. These glowing predictions of a digital nirvana make me wonder if some lemming-like madness has cursed our technologists. Do our computer pundits lack all common sense? I'm astonished at the wide gulf between their Utopian dreams and the dreary reality that pours into my modem.

The truth is that no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher, and no computer network will change the way government works. Work has never been easy; learning isn't painless, and bureaucracies have never been quick to change. The computer ain't gonna do it for you.

Consider toady's online world. The Usenet, a worldwide bulletin board, allows anyone to post messages across the globe. Your word gets out, leapfrogging editors and publishers. Every voice can be heard cheaply and instantly. The result is that every voice is heard. The resultant cacophony more closely resembles Citizen Band Radio, complete with handles, harassment, and anonymous threats. When most everyone shouts, few listen.

How about electronic publishing? Try reading a book on your monitor. At best, it's an unpleasant chore: the myopic glow of a clunky computer replaces the friendly pages of a book. And you can't tote that laptop to the beach or leave it in your car—it'll get stolen. Yet Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Center, predicts that we'll soon buy books straight over the Internet. Uh, sure.

What the Internet hucksters won't tell you is that the World Wide Web is an ocean of unedited data, without any pretense of completeness. Lacking editors, reporters, reviewers, or critics, the Internet has become a wasteland of unreviewed, unedited, unflltered data. You don't know what to ignore and what's worth reading.

Logged onto the World Wide Web, I hunt for the date of the battle of Trafalgar. Hundreds of files show up, including Napoleon.txt, Trafalg.zip, and J41N32.gif. It takes fifteen minutes to unravel them—one's a biography written by an 8th grader, the second is a computer game that doesn't work, and the third is an image of a London monument. None answer my question, and my search is periodically interrupted by messages like, "Too many connections, try again later." This searching is a great way to waste time but hardly an efficient research tool.

Won't the Internet be useful in governing? Internet addicts clamor for government reports to be uploaded to the networks. But when Andy Speno ran for County Executive in Westchester County, NY, he put every press release and position paper onto a bulletin board. In that affluent county, with plenty of computer companies, how many voters logged in? Fewer than thirty did. This is hardly a good omen for the electronic democracy.

The strongest hype comes from those who are forcing computers into schools. We're told that multimedia and interactive video systems will make learning easy and schoolwork fun. Students will happily learn from animated characters while being taught by expertly tailored software. Teachers won't be as essential when we have computer aided education.

Bah. These expensive toys are difficult to use in classrooms, require extensive teacher preparation, and waste what few dollars trickle into schools. Sure, kids love to play video games—but think of your own experience: Can you recall even one educational filmstrip of decades past? I'll bet you remember the two or three great teachers who made a difference in your life.

Cyberbusiness? We're promised instant catalog shopping—just point and click for great deals. We'll order airline tickets over the network, make restaurant reservations, and negotiate sales contracts. Stores will become obsolete. So how come my local mall does more business in an afternoon than the entire Internet handles in a month? Even if there were a trustworthy way to send money over the network—which there isn't—the networks are missing a most essential ingredient of capitalism: salespeople. Without the personal and human interactions of good salesfolk, the Internet can't blossom into an electronic shopping mall.

What's missing from this electronic wonderland? Human contact. Discount the fawning technoburble about virtual communities—computers and networks isolate us from each other. A network chat line is a limp substitute for meeting friends over coffee. No interactive multimedia display comes close to the excitement of a live concert. And who'd prefer cybersex to the real thing?

Is it likely that you can enjoy a rich online world and a plentiful personal life? Nope. Every hour that you spend linked through your modem is sixty minutes that you're not visiting with your friends or shagging fly balls with the kid down the block. While the Internet beckons brightly, seductively flashing an icon of knowledge-as-power, this non-place lures us to surrender our time on Earth. A poor substitute it is, this virtual reality where frustration is legion and where—in the holy names of Education and Progress—important aspects of human interactions are relentlessly devalued.

From Between the Worlds (2nd Edition), ed. Susan Bachmann and Melinda Barth, Longman, 1998.