My description of public-key encryption oversimplifies the technical details of the system. For one thing, because it is relatively slow, it will not be the only form of encipherment used on the highway. But public-key encryption will be the way that documents are signed, authenticity is established, and the keys to other kinds of encryption are distributed securely.
The major benefit of the PC revolution has been the way it has empowered people. The highway’s low-cost communications will empower in an even more fundamental way. The beneficiaries won’t just be technology-oriented individuals. As more and more computers are connected to high-bandwidth networks, and as software platforms provide a foundation for great applications, everyone will have access to most of the world’s information.
6
THE CONTENT REVOLUTION
For more than 500 years, the bulk of human knowledge and information has been stored as paper documents. You’ve got one in your hands right now (unless you’re reading this from the CD-ROM or a future on-line edition). Paper will be with us indefinitely, but its importance as a means of finding, preserving, and distributing information is already diminishing.
When you think of a “document” you probably visualize pieces of paper with something printed on them, but that is a narrow definition. A document can be any body of information. A newspaper article is a document, but the broadest definition also includes a television show, a song, or an interactive video game. Because all information can be stored in a digital form, documents will be easy to find, store, and send on the highway. Paper is harder to transmit and very limiting if the contents are more than text with drawings and images. Future digitally stored documents will include pictures, audio, programming instructions for interactivity, and animation, or a combination of these and other elements.
On the information highway, rich electronic documents will be able to do things no piece of paper can. The highway’s powerful database technology will allow them to be indexed and retrieved using interactive exploration. It will be extremely cheap and easy to distribute them. In short, these new digital documents will replace many printed paper ones because they will be able to help us in new ways.
But not for quite some time. The paper-based book, magazine, or newspaper still has a lot of advantages over its digital counterpart. To read a digital document you need an information appliance such as a personal computer. A book is small, lightweight, high-resolution, and inexpensive compared to the cost of a computer. For at least a decade it won’t be as convenient to read a long, sequential document on a computer screen as on paper. The first digital documents to achieve widespread use will do so by offering new functionality rather than simply duplicating the older medium. A television set is also larger, more expensive, more cumbersome, and lower resolution than a book or magazine, but that hasn’t limited its popularity. Television brought video entertainment into our homes, and it was so compelling that television sets found their place alongside books and magazines.
Ultimately, incremental improvements in computer and screen technology will give us a lightweight, universal electronic book, or “e-book,” which will approximate today’s paper book. Inside a case roughly the same size and weight as today’s hardcover or paperback book, you’ll have a display that can show high-resolution text, pictures, and video. You’ll be able to flip pages with your finger or use voice commands to search for the passages you want. Any document on the network will be accessible from such a device.
The real point of electronic documents is not simply that we will read them on hardware devices. Going from paper book to e-book is just the final stage of a process already well under way. The exciting aspect of digital documentation is the redefinition of the document itself.
This will cause dramatic repercussions. We will have to rethink not only what is meant by the term “document,” but also by “author,” “publisher,” “office,” “classroom,” and “textbook.”
Today, if two companies are negotiating a contract, the first draft is probably typed into a computer, then printed on paper. Chances are it is then faxed to the other party, who edits, amends, and alters it by writing on the paper or by reentering the changed document into another computer, from which it is printed. He then faxes it back; the changes are incorporated; a new paper document is printed and faxed back again; and the editing process is repeated. During this transaction it is hard to tell who made which changes. Coordinating all the alterations and transmittals introduces a lot of overhead. Electronic documents can simplify this process by allowing a version of the contract to be passed back and forth with corrections and annotations and indications who made them and when printed alongside the original text.
Within a few years the digital document, complete with authenticatable digital signatures, will be the original, and paper printouts will be secondary. Already many businesses are advancing beyond paper and fax machines and exchanging editable documents, computer to computer, through electronic mail. This book would have been much harder to write without e-mail. Readers whose opinions I was soliciting were sent drafts electronically, and it was helpful to be able to look at the suggested revisions and see who had made them and when.
By the end of the decade a significant percentage of documents, even in offices, won’t even be fully printable on paper. They will be like a movie or a song is today. You will still be able to print a two-dimensional view of its content, but it will be like reading a musical score instead of experiencing an audio recording.
Some documents are so superior in digital form that the paper version is rarely used. Boeing decided to design its new 777 jetliner using a gigantic electronic document to hold all the engineering information. To coordinate collaboration among the design teams, manufacturing groups and outside contractors during development of previous airplanes, Boeing had used blueprints and constructed an expensive full-scale mock-up of the airplane. The mock-up had been necessary to make sure that parts of the airplane, designed by different engineers, actually fit together properly. During development of the 777, Boeing did away with blueprints and the mock-up and from the start used an electronic document that contained digital 3-D models of all the parts and how they fit together. Engineers at computer terminals were able to look at the design and see different views of the content. They could track the progress in any area, search for interesting test results, annotate with cost information, and change any part of the design in ways that would be impossible on paper. Each person, working with the same data, was able to look for what specifically concerned him. Every change could be shared, and everyone could see who made any change, when it was made, and why. Boeing was able to save hundreds of thousands of pieces of paper and many person-years of drafting and copying by using digital documents.
Digital documents can also be faster to work with than paper. You can transmit information instantly and retrieve it almost as quickly. Those using digital documents are already discovering how much simpler it is to search and navigate through them quickly, because their content can be restructured so easily.
The organizational structure of a reservation book at a restaurant is by date and time. A 9:00 P.M. reservation is written farther down the page than an 8:00 P.M. reservation. Saturday-night dinner reservations follow those for Saturday lunch. A mâitre d’ or anyone else can rapidly find out who has a reservation on any date for any time because the book’s information is ordered that way. But if, for whatever reason, someone wants to extract information in another way, the simple chronology is useless.