INTERVIEW:
Question 1
The title of your book, "Being Digital", has become a slogan. Why have you
written a book if you consider it an obsolete medium?
Answer
I don't think we'll have books in 30 or 40 years the way we have them today, with all due
respect to my publisher. I learned about a year and a half ago that children 12 years old
to 15 years old were subscribing to "Wired" magazine for a Christmas present for
their parents. Now, "Wired" magazine is a computer, life style magazine that
they were giving their parents basically to say, Mom and Dad, this is me. And if you get
this subscription, you'll know more about me. That touched me very much because I decided
that maybe one has to write a book for Mom and Dad. And that was the reason I used the
book because Mom and Dad don't have another display medium available to them. But another
thing happened, which I think is also quite important and that is that about a year and
half ago I was invited to give a presentation at a small university. And when I was picked
up at the airport the young girl said to me that she had persuaded her school to let her
come and pick me up because she wanted to thank me. And I said, Thank me for what? She
said, I want to thank you for my husband. I participate in the Media Moo 3 hours each
night. Now you probably don't even know what a Moo is, but a Moo is a modern version of
what used to be called a MUD, and a MUD is a multi-user dungeon, which is like a sort of
interactive bulletin board but you go into rooms and spaces and you meet people in
cyberspace. And she met and fell in love with a man from Dallas, Texas. And so unannounced
she flew to Texas, knocked on the door, unexpected, and he turned out not to be the man
she liked. So she flew back to New York, logged back into the Media Moo for 3 hours a
night for the next few months. And you should know that the Media Moo is a computer in the
basement of the Media Laboratory. I didn't even know we had it up and running. And she met
another man whom she fell in love with, but he was from Frankfurt, Germany. This is a
determined lady because she flew to Frankfurt, Germany, unexpected, and I wouldn't be
telling you this story because when she knocked on the door it was the love of her life.
And she met the parents and the parents loved her. He came to the United States. And then
they decided they would get married on the Media Moo. Now, the Media Moo is a computer in
the basement, and this is a very hard issue now because legally where was she married in
cyberspace? Where is the marriage? So she had to find a judge willing to perform this
marriage in cyberspace. She had to find a priest. All the best men were in Germany, all
the best women were in the United States, the ceremony was happening in a machine in
Massachusetts. As I was driving along I said to myself, If I don't know these things are
happening, who does? Because I've got 300 young researchers whose average age is about 23,
and it is changing so fast and it totally generational: people 20 years old and younger
understand everything. And people 30 years and older understand nothing. That there is
right now an absolute generational divide between who is digital and who isn't. And in
fact what I call the "digital homeless" are very intelligent, very smart,
usually affluent people 30 years old and up, and the reason is not because they're stupid,
but because they arrived on the planet too soon. So what will happen over the next 5 years
is that those people including you will learn from their kids. OK. So the kids will teach
parents, the kids will teach grandparents, the kids will teach teachers. It is a total
inversion because teachers don't know anything about this. And we're going through a
period right now where the generational divide is much stronger than anything else. When
that irons out, then there will be an economic divide.
Question 2
Why when you speak of our epoch do you talk about bits and atoms?
Answer
So when I started the book I came across the difference between bits and atoms as the
simplest way to describe the change. And the world of atoms, things, people, stuff is one
we understand very, very well. And in fact all of our laws are built around atoms, like
copyright law is built around atoms. The world of bits is very interesting - the 1s and 0s
that make up the world of bits - because bits don't have any weight, they don't have any
size, they don't have any color, they travel at the speed of light. But as humans we
cannot experience a bit. The bits have to be turned back into atoms, and the atoms have to
be turned back into bits. And so if you look at what it means to be digital you can look
at in terms completely of bits and atoms. Let me give you a specific example. A public
library is something that everybody agrees is good. It's good for the culture, it's good
for society. The reason a public library works is because it's based on atoms: you have to
bring your atoms to the library. Some of us have a few too many atoms. Then you borrow the
book. It's not only another atom but it's something that is so obvious we never think
about it that when you borrow an atom there are no atoms left. There's empty space. You
take the book home, you read it, let's say it takes one week, you bring it back. Magically
somebody borrows it again, brings it back in a week. So 52 people have read the book in 1
year. Now I'm going to make the public library digital. It's all I'm changing, I'm just
changing the atoms into bits. I don't have to move my atoms to the library. And something
that's so obvious it's never, ever told in school, and that is when you borrow a bit,
there's always a bit left. So now 20 million people can borrow that book simultaneously,
without moving, just hitting some keys, and we've violated copyright law. So if you think
in terms of bits and atoms what that judge was saying was that it was legal to cut down
trees to make pulp, to put ink on paper, even to use children to deliver these things and
throw them over your transom into your house. But to make an ecologically sound, no
deposit, no return bit that represents the same information and transmit at the speed of
light into someone's home is breaking the law. It's very, very interesting if you look at
some of the events in terms of bits and atoms and it really changes your perspective on
sort of what the digital world is all about.
Question 3
If you had to date the beginning of the digital revolution, when would it be?
Answer
In my opinion we will probably look back on 1995 as the most interesting year in the
history of telecommunications and the reason comes from 3 events none of which alone would
explain it. I'm going to use my numbers from the United States because those are the ones
I know by heart. It turns out that 70 % of all personal computers at the end of 1994 went
into the home. Now that's a very big number. The number comes from 2 sources: one is that
50 % of all purchased computers went into the home and 20 % of all corporate computers
that were replaced went into the home. So you have a rate of change where right now 40 %
or more--and people don't know how to count--of homes have personal computers, but more
important the number of... at any rate the number of households with children that have
computers is so high that you now find the statistics of who looks at television are
almost completely irrelevant. Even though if you read statistics, don't believe them
because it turns out that the penetration of computers in homes with kids is so large
right now and growing so fast that you almost have, not quite, but you almost have 100 %
of all teenagers in the United States with access to a personal computer. So you end up
with an extraordinary situation where the real computing power is in the home, not in the
office, not in the school. And this is very important because it's a complete change--it's
1 of the 3--it's a complete change in what people predicted. A year or two ago they'd
never predicted this. The "official numbers" was that 5 % of computers in the
homes had modems, and today the official estimate is 65 %. Where did the 60 % come from so
quickly? The truth is they didn't know how to count the first time. The second event that
makes it very interesting is the enormous number of people who are on-line in commercial
systems. America On-line had 500,000 people last July and will have over 3 million people
this year. And then the really important event that has changed everything, the Internet.
Question 4
How was the Internet born?
Answer
Most people don't really understand how it was born, and the way it got started has
determined its current state and its future, It started as a military telecommunications
system for transmitting messages during war such that the message would get from me to
you. So it was a fail-safe message passing system. And the way it worked was that it
invented so to speak the idea of packets. Packets, little packages. So if I was going to
send you a paragraph I would break it up into little packages of let's say 10 letters
each. And I'd take these packets, and I'd put your name and address and a number, the
sequence, and I would send them off in different directions. I'd send 1 packet to Chicago.
Let's say I'm in Boston, you're in San Francisco, we're sending the packets, one would go
via Chicago, another would go via Dallas, another one would go via Washington, D.C. and
they would go in all these different directions and then they get back together in San
Francisco. And in San Francisco they would line up, and they'd look at each other, and
they'd discover that packet 6 was missing. What happened to packet 6? Well, packet 6
unfortunately - remember this is 1969 so people thought in terms of first strike and
nuclear war, the whole thing - poor packet number 6 went through Minneapolis at the
instant that a nuclear bomb hit Minneapolis. And forgetting what happened to the poor
people, packet number 6 was literally blown up. Now, the packets that arrived safely in
San Francisco said, Call back to Boston and say that packet number 6 didn't make it, send
it again, but don't send it through Minneapolis. So packet 6 comes another way, they all
line up and you get the message. Now you have to understand this because the only way to
destroy that message passing system is to literally blow up every city because in the
system I just described even if 10 packets didn't arrive we can send back a message to
Boston and they'll find a way. In 1970 some of us were asked to use the system and
experiment with it and we did research and the numbers were very small. And then it grew.
In 1974 the National Science Foundation took it over and it grew bigger and bigger, and
then NATO countries had it but always with this notion that it was a fail-safe messaging
system. Today some people think that they can control the Internet, that they can make
policy; and they can't. It's a very interesting, unstoppable phenomenon which has no
central authority. To me I think it's very, very important to understand because I liken
it to ducks flying south. Some people think the front duck is leading. And the front duck
isn't leading. In fact if you shoot ducks and you shoot the front duck another duck
becomes the front duck but that's not the Vice President duck that just became the
President duck. Each duck is behaving autonomously. And as humans, as systems we're not
used to decentralized structures. All our companies are very hierarchical, our countries
are hierarchical, we grow up in a society that is hierarchical, with parental things and
so on. Everything we're used to gets its order from a hierarchy, but if you don't have a
hierarchy and you have something like the Internet it doesn't mean that you have disorder.
It doesn't mean that you have chaos. But it does mean you have something that nobody can
control. And that third event is what's making this point in time so interesting because
we're growing. The rate of growth is absolutely enormous. The rate of growth is such that
we will have 1 billion people on the Internet by the year 2000. And when you have 1
billion people that are sharing a network that is by definition global, you have a very
big change. People just won't be looking at television. I mean the television viewing
audience will plummet when you have that kind of network.
Question 5
What problems can we expect from this digital revolution?
Answer
In cyberspace there are no borders, bits don't stop at customs. And this is going to cause
a lot of wonderful things to happen, it'll be global for education, the kinds of things
that will happen in the next few years. But it will also cause a great deal of problems
for governments. Governments are going to be very concerned about digital cash, about
pornography, about encryption. I didn't participate, but when I heard and then later saw
the minutes of the meeting that took place in Brussels at the end of February on the
global information infrastructure I was actually quite amused because first of all it
reminded me of a lot of monks and nuns meeting to discuss sex. These are people who had
never been on the Internet, they didn't even know what it was, their kids should have been
there. In other words, the people who are really running the net at the moment are 23
years old. I mean it's a really different society. And it's an extraordinary difference,
one that in the United States I think people are getting a feeling for but in it is not
accepted as easily that the young people have that much to offer. So I think that the next
two or three years are going to be a certain turmoil because local governments and
international governments are going to have a hard time with things like the economy of
bits, but when that irons itself out you're going to find I think that the world will be
simultaneously more local and more global, and that in some sense the nation-state will
become relatively irrelevant.
Question 6
Will being digital change our status as subjects?
Answer
Some people believe that as children spend more time in the virtual world they will become
less part of the real world, thus less imaginative because they will have less real
experiences. And is that the gist of your question, is that sort of the spirit? So I think
that what people haven't realized is that first of all when I hear people say, My son is
spending 6 hours on the computer each day. Isn't that terrible? But it's interesting that
the same parent, if their son was spending 6 hours a day reading books would say that's
wonderful. There's a real cultural ignorance about what the child is doing in the virtual
world. And what we are finding is that as kids now spend time on something like the
Internet they gain a worldliness and an experience that is in fact one that makes them
better operators in the real world. It makes their social experiences richer;... what used
to happen when you traveled. Typically, if you were an American child at a certain age,
you traveled to Europe and then you came back home bigger and wiser. Now kids can do that
at 3 and 4 years old and even in some of the most controversial areas. I'm going to give
you a very controversial example. Some people say they don't like the Internet for their
children because they're going to meet people who aren't what they say they are. That they
are literally paedophiles. Now think of that for a second. If you have a 7-year old
daughter, wouldn't it be much better for the 7-year old daughter to meet pedophiles in the
virtual world, get the experience to tell them to go away versus trying it in the real
world? So even some of the worst examples that I can think of benefit both imagination and
education by doing it in the virtual world.
Question 7
Don't you think that digital revolution will reduce our communication to purely virtual
contacts, given that shaking hands via the Internet is impossible?
Answer
Well, first of all it's not clear that it's so difficult to shake hands by Internet. I
think that the contact people make in the virtual world gives them more confidence in the
real world and thus the relationships they have in the real world are stronger. I found
recently a case of an autistic child who couldn't have any, but has perfect communication
with people over the Internet, and from that gained enough confidence to go back into the
world and start to have communication which he had never had with people.
Question 8
Is the scenario of "Being Digital" parallel to the vision of a writer like
Gibson: the same technological mutations, the same behavioural changes ? Your version is
totally optimistic while the cyberpunk vision of Gibson is completely pessimistic -
progessive dehmanisation, an amorality which passes from the machine to man, the birth of
media corporations able to condition public opinion and politics. Why should we find your
version more convincing?
Answer
First of all Gibson, who's excellent, is a fiction writer, so I wouldn't look at the
fiction for your evidence but there is a school of thought most recently published in book
called "Silicon Snakeoil" by an American author who unlike Gibson is in fact a
very scientific person and a real old-time hacker named Cliff Stoll. Cliff's book is the
pessimistic side of the equation; he feels that people will lose the quality of life. They
will become more segregated, they will do the sort of things you've just listed. I think
Cliff and the Gibson story you mentioned are just plain wrong for some very simple
reasons. First of all, you have a network that corporations can't take control of, so you
for the first time have a system that is for the benefit of the individual and it really
benefits the small person. The reason it does that is that you can be global for example.
So some of the people who are going to compete with Rupert Murdock in two years are going
to be one and two-person companies that find a global market who have an interesting
product that they can delivery even though they're not a multinational company. I find
that very optimistic. I find the ability that harmonizes people over the Internet very
optimistic. I see the network as an empowering, harmonizing tool of the sort we've never
seen before. But I'll also tell you in all honesty I'm a very optimistic person and it has
served me very well; without it, there would be no Media Lab, there would not be many
things which people told me were stupid. And it was only because of self-confidence that I
said, I don't care what you think. And a lot of children are getting a great deal of
self-confidence through the medium of networks, so yes, I am very optimistic. And I think
I'm not suspending judgment on things like network break-ins and illegal use of the
network, but on the other hand look at any organization, be it a city or a company that
grows at 10 % per month and you're bound to find a certain percentage of ugliness and
misuse and misconduct and so on. I think given the size and given the scale the Internet
has grown better than any organism I know historically and is scaled quite well given the
rate of growth.
|
 |
