Much of human progress has come about because someone invented a better and more powerful tool. Physical tools speed up work and rescue people from hard labor. The plow and the wheel, the crane and the bulldozer, amplify the physical abilities of those using them.
Informational tools are symbolic mediators that amplify the intellect rather than the muscle of their users. You’re having a mediated experience as you read this book: We’re not actually in the same room, but you are still able to find out what’s on my mind. A great deal of work now involves decision making and knowledge, so information tools have become, and will continue increasingly to be, the focus of inventors. Just as any text could be represented with an arrangement of letters, these tools allow information of all types to be represented in digital form, in a pattern of electrical pulses that is easy for computers to deal with. The world today has more than 100 million computers whose purpose is to manipulate information. They are helping us now by making it much easier to store and transmit information that is already in digital form, but in the near future they will allow us access to almost any information in the world.
In the United States, the connecting of all these computers has been compared to another massive project: the gridding of the country with interstate highways, which began during the Eisenhower era. This is why the new network was dubbed the “information superhighway.” The term was popularized by then-senator Al Gore, whose father sponsored the 1956 Federal Aid Highway Act.
The highway metaphor isn’t quite right though. The phrase suggests landscape and geography, a distance between points, and embodies the implication that you have to travel to get from one place to another. In fact, one of the most remarkable aspects of this new communications technology is that it will eliminate distance. It won’t matter if someone you’re contacting is in the next room or on another continent, because this highly mediated network will be unconstrained by miles and kilometers.
The term “highway” also suggests that everyone is driving and following the same route. This network is more like a lot of country lanes where everyone can look at or do whatever his individual interests suggest. Another implication is that perhaps it should be built by the government, which I think would be a major mistake in most countries. But the real problem is that the metaphor emphasizes the infrastructure of the endeavor rather than its applications. At Microsoft we talk about “Information At Your Fingertips,” which spotlights a benefit rather than the network itself. A different metaphor that I think comes closer to describing a lot of the activities that will take place is that of the ultimate market. Markets from trading floors to malls are fundamental to human society, and I believe this new one will eventually be the world’s central department store. It will be where we social animals will sell, trade, invest, haggle, pick stuff up, argue, meet new people, and hang out. When you hear the phrase “information highway,” rather than seeing a road, imagine a marketplace or an exchange. Think of the hustle and bustle of the New York Stock Exchange or a farmers’ market or of a bookstore full of people looking for fascinating stories and information. All manner of human activity takes place, from billion-dollar deals to flirtations. Many transactions will involve money, tendered in digital form rather than currency. Digital information of all kinds, not just as money, will be the new medium of exchange in this market.
The global information market will be huge and will combine all the various ways human goods, services, and ideas are exchanged. On a practical level, this will give you broader choices about most things, including how you earn and invest, what you buy and how much you pay for it, who your friends are and how you spend your time with them, and where and how securely you and your family live. Your workplace and your idea of what it means to be “educated” will be transformed, perhaps almost beyond recognition. Your sense of identity, of who you are and where you belong, may open up considerably. In short, just about everything will be done differently. I can hardly wait for this tomorrow, and I’m doing what I can to help make it happen.
You aren’t sure you believe this? Or want to believe it? Perhaps you’ll decline to participate. People commonly make this vow when some new technology threatens to change what they’re familiar and comfortable with. At first, the bicycle was a silly contraption; the automobile, a noisy intruder; the pocket calculator, a threat to the study of mathematics; and the radio, the end of literacy.
But then something happens. Over time, these machines find a place in our everyday lives because they not only offer convenience and save labor, they can also inspire us to new creative heights. We warm to them. They assume a trusted place beside our other tools. A new generation grows up with them, changing and humanizing them. In short, playing with them.
The telephone was a major advance in two-way communication. But at first, even it was denounced as nothing more than a nuisance. People were made uncomfortable and awkward by this mechanical invader in their homes. Eventually, though, men and women realized they were not just getting a new machine, they were learning a new kind of communication. A chat on the telephone wasn’t as long or as formal as a face-to-face conversation. There was an unfamiliar and, for many, an off-putting efficiency to it. Before the phone, any good talk entailed a visit and probably a meal, and one could expect to spend a full afternoon or evening. Once most businesses and households had telephones, users created ways to take advantage of the unique characteristics of this means of communicating. As it flourished, its own special expressions, tricks, etiquette, and culture developed. Alexander Graham Bell certainly wouldn’t have anticipated the silly executive game of “Have My Secretary Get Him Onto the Line Before Me.” As I write, a newer form of communication—electronic mail, or e-mail—is undergoing the same sort of process: establishing its own rules and habits.
“Little by little, the machine will become a part of humanity,” the French aviator and author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry wrote in his 1939 memoir, Wind, Sand, and Stars. He was writing about the way people tend to react to new technology and using the slow embrace of the railroad in the nineteenth century as an example. He described the way the smoke-belching, demonically loud engines of the primitive locomotives were decried at first as iron monsters. Then as more tracks were laid, towns built train stations. Goods and services flowed. Interesting new jobs became available. A culture grew up around this novel form of transportation, and disdain became acceptance, even approval. What had once been the iron monster became the mighty bearer of life’s best products. Again, the change in our perception was reflected in the language we used. We began calling it “the iron horse.” “What is it today for the villager except a humble friend who calls every evening at six?” Saint-Exupéry asked.
The only other single shift that has had as great an effect on the history of communication took place in about 1450, when Johann Gutenberg, a goldsmith from Mainz, Germany, invented movable type and introduced the first printing press to Europe (China and Korea already had presses). That event changed Western culture forever. It took Gutenberg two years to compose the type for his first Bible, but once that was done, he could print multiple copies. Before Gutenberg, all books were copied by hand. Monks, who usually did the copying, seldom managed more than one text a year. Gutenberg’s press was a high-speed laser printer by comparison.
The printing press did more than just give the West a faster way to reproduce a book. Until that time, despite the passing generations, life had been communal and nearly unchanging. Most people knew only about what they had seen themselves or been told. Few strayed far from their villages, in part because without reliable maps it was often nearly impossible to find the way home. As James Burke, a favorite author of mine, put it: “In this world all experience was personaclass="underline" horizons were small, the community was inward-looking. What existed in the outside world was a matter of hearsay.”