INTERVIEW:
Question 1
Let’s begin by talking about communications and media convergence. What is the future
of mass media, and what are the implications for us? What about books and newspapers? Will
everyone publish their own news on the Net? How will the new media affect social life and
ordinary people.
Answer
I think in order to answer that question one must have a better understanding of the
nature of today’s communications. I argue that the biggest contribution of digital
networks, of the bytes and bits in the computer technology, has been to improve the
quality and increase the capacity of communications, so that today there’s
essentially no limit to the amount of communications one can have. As a technician, I
would say we have unlimited bandwidth. The capacity for communications has grown
dramatically. We can have hundreds of television channels if the TV is digitised. We can
have hundreds of audio channels if you digitise audio networks. And of course we do have
multiple channels for data communications, since these networks, to begin with, may or my
not be digitised but they will in time be digitised. And that means that there is more
opportunity to communicate. Therefore, it is of course feasible that everybody can be his
own broadcaster. But it is unlikely. In fact, one of the negative aspects of the increased
availability of, for example, television channels is that there will be more channels than
we can produce quality program for. Today, cable television has quadrupled, quintupled,
has changed the number of TV channels available to a household from the traditional five
to forty, fifty, sixty to a hundred television channels. But if you look at what is on
those channels you find a tremendous amount of repetition and rather dull programs or
repeat programs, because the production of television is expensive. Therefore, it is not
likely that we’ll have the capacity to program those channels creatively enough. In
effect, I think that there won’t be much change in the quality of television. CNN
will continue, because most people are not going to make their own news networks. And CNN
has a certain quality. I think that the Internet is a side issue, really. Even in this
country today less than 40 percent of the people have personal computes at home. And of
that 40 percent, I think the number is under 20 percent of people that are on the network,
that are on-line, that can access Internet. And frankly, in order to access Internet
properly you have to know what you’re looking for. And that brings us back to the
difficult issue of people having enough education to understand what information they
need. I think the mass media will continue to be just what it is. Because even if you have
a hundred channels, there will be four or five or six network channels that will have the
money and the capacity and the ability to provide good quality information and news. And I
think that the implications for us is that it isn’t going to change that much. On the
other hand, newspapers have been suffering for years, not because they’re not high
quality but people don’t read. People depend on television for their news, so
conceivably, having more television channels that provide news could be of value. But
there’s always the question that televised news programs are chopped up into
five-minute segments, three-minute segments. You don’t really get information in
depth. It’s like the newspaper in America called USA Today. USA Today is a printed
television channel; you just get the highlights. We will always have books and newspapers.
There is a wonderful feeling in holding a book in your hand which you’re not going to
get watching a television program. We have had the new media for the last ten to fifteen
years but I don’t know what effect they have had on society. It hasn’t improved
our political activities. It’s perhaps made people interested solely in themselves
rather than in the community. When you say new media, I’m not quite sure what people
mean. But I guess it includes the increased numbers of television channels, the
availability of the Internet. I have the Internet and I sometimes wonder what it is I am
looking for. It is not that interesting. And if you look at what people publish on the
Internet, it is really not very interesting nor is it very good. So I think you’re
going to see a fusion only in terms of an increased number of channels. But what is going
to be on them, since we don’t have the capacity, the talent, or the money to produce
- unless of course you just advertise, and that’s what’s been happening more and
more. You see more and more advertising on television. In a half-hour television program,
eighteen minutes are devoted to the program itself and twelve minutes to the ads. Ads
provide the money, so we listen to the ads. It’s not a very positive outlook for the
future.
Question 2
What about the v-chip and censorship on the Internet and making software that locks some
types of broadcasts on TV and on the Internet? The question is censoring or controlling,
and who controls the controllers?
Answer
That’s a difficult question, especially in America where the First Amendment
prohibits government interference with information. The First Amendment is the freedom of
information, freedom of religion. Who is the controller? In the final analysis, it’s
got to be the parents when it comes to children. In the final analysis, the parents have
to accept the responsibility of limiting television viewing or at least controlling what
children watch. Unfortunately, we become dependent on technical tricks which often
don’t work too well. Even if you have the V-chip, there are still a great many
decisions parents have to make as to whether the information from the V-.chip says the
program is sexually offensive, has violence, etcetera. That’s always a question the
parent will have to decide. Unfortunately, today’s society and today’s economics
require both parents to work in many cases. So the children come home from school and turn
on the TV set- - hat wonderful baby-sitter - and they watch whatever they want. Then of
course it’s the responsibility of the broadcasters to limit or at least to control
the offensive programs that they put out during the hours when children are most likely to
be awake, but they don’t want to do that because the parents are watching. And the
parents spend the money and you have to attract the audience. So I am not very optimistic
that V-chips or censoring or controlling is going to help, even though we might be able to
develop a variety of different mechanisms for eliminating or controlling this system: what
people see or what people want to see. As an adult, if you don’t want to see, you
turn it off. But even that’s not fair. I think responsibility does fall upon the
parents of the children, the individual and the programmers to understand the necessity
for making certain that certain kinds of programs are not readily available between 6, 7,
8 o’clock at night. Even that doesn’t work. When we did the studies of
children’s television hours we said programs could become freer and opener after 8
o’clock or 9 o’clock, we discovered that there were millions of children awake
at 10, 11 and at midnight. It didn’t seem to work there. It is a very difficult thing
to do, and in our society it is much more difficult because we have the First Amendment,
and you cannot let the government become a controller. It is the sense of responsibility
and I think in our society - it may not be true in Europe - but in the United States a
sense of reasonability seems to have disappeared. Or am I being pessimistic?
Question 3
I'd like to talk about your own field, digital theory and so on. How is the technology
developing and what will the future be for us?
Answer
Some people forget that the telegraph was almost a digital instrument. You have a dot and
a dash, two signals. OK, you have the space in-between, but if you overlook the space, you
end up having a digital signal. Now, the interesting question is, we were already almost
at the point where we could have digital transmission, why didn’t we go ahead? Well,
for one thing, we couldn’t move those things fast enough; the technology wasn’t
there to send a signal rapidly enough so that you could get all the information you want
in that signal. How do digital signals work? You take an analogue signal, which is what
the voice looks like. If you were to put the voice or any audio signal on a screen, you
would see a constant up and down flickering of waves. And in order to reproduce that you
have to reproduce every one separately, every piece of that wave separately. We are able
to do that pretty readily in radio and in television. It was difficult. It required a
tremendous amount of equipment, and there had to be some very good engineering in order to
understand and make certain that you are transmitting the signal you want to transmit. If
you digitise that, what you do is you sample that signal. You take little photographs, if
you will, of almost every point in that signal. And every little bit, every little sample
that you take has a certain value in voltage, let’s say, and then you get rid of the
signal and what you are left with is a lot of digital points, dots, each with a different
code. You code it in a binary system: 01010110. So first of all, your entire technology is
much simpler because you are not dealing with continuous waves, but with just two
impulses, a yes or a no, a one or a zero. And that makes life a lot more interesting and a
lot less difficult, because that one and zero could represent an audio signal, a voice, it
could represent data, it could represent print information, it could represent a video
signal. And this is where you see the real fusion take place, because the digital signal
can be transfixed or can be transformed into any media that you want to transmit, and that
gives a tremendous amount of flexibility to the transmission system. You can interlace the
information, that is, what we call multiplex the signals: I send one message at this
period of time, and in-between that message I send another message, and another, and I
identify these messages, this information at the other end. On a single channel I could
send 1000 different pieces of information, which is very, very valuable because it lowers
the cost. Transmission is already a very low cost item. It could even be lower. Several
years ago some of us got together and did an analysis that showed that the cost of
transmission is essentially zero. The economists didn’t like that because they
didn’t know how to handle it. But it is essentially zero. What’s important is
the processing of the information that you’re putting onto the network. Now, I use
the word network. What’s a network? Well, we live in networks all the time. There are
social networks. If you’re a member of a church, there’s a network there of
interconnection to people. Why do people use their little portable phones when
they’re walking in the street. I sometimes think it’s very silly to see these
people walking with these phones. I often wonder what they’re talking about. And when
I overhear some of the conversations, I realise they’re not talking about anything
important at all. But they have networked with somebody they have connected, just like the
English writer E.M. Forster says, “only connect”. If people connect, they can
resolve problems. And this is how his novels are based on the notion that people who
disconnect are the ones who are in trouble. So these people walking around with their
phones, they’re connecting with their networks, they’re buying security. When we
did our study of the social uses of the telephone, we found that 35--40 percent of most
telephone conversations were clearly used strictly for social reasons: How are you? How do
you feel? What’s new? How are the children? These sorts of things. And of the other
60 percent, a good half of those, even the business conversations, a good portion of them
were for personal behavioural satisfaction. Communicating is a very important phenomenon
in our behaviour, and I think that with the new techniques that we have, it’s so easy
to communicate. Now in technical terms, the telephone system may be the world’s
largest network. It interconnects terminals, phones, facsimiles, computers all over the
world. The telephone system is also the biggest computer system in the world, which people
seem to forget. And it works very well most of the time. I haven’t had too many
problems with the telephone since they broke up AT&T. I just had to remember a lot
more numbers. But the telephone network is an interconnection of people. An
interconnection of terminals, of computers or telephones or facsimiles, or TV sets -
that’s the network.
Question 4
So a network is basically a connection.
Answer
It is a connection. And we live with networks. You talk to young people and they say:
"I networked last night with some friends." Networked. Well, that means that
they have been together and they have talked. And after that they go home and get on the
telephone and talk some more.
Question 5
What is the network going to be like in the future?
Answer
The same thing. It is going to be larger and more and more networks are going to be
available. Conceivably, this should help in building communities. I think a community is a
reflection of a person’s need to connect. The networks are also terribly important
when it comes to business. And one of the things that the digital world has created,
especially with this modern communications, is to allow firms to become much bigger. In a
business, the cost of organising, the cost of managing, is an extraordinarily high cost.
There is a point you reach where if you lose control, you have lost control of the
business. If it weren’t for these networks, how else would firms have an office in
New York, a plant in Indiana, another office in Chicago, scattered all over the world? Now
we have firms that are global. They exist only because you can network with them and you
can increase the efficiency of communications. And when you improve the efficiency of
communications, you are improving organisational capability, transactional capability. The
cost of transaction has dropped very low. So these computer communications networks are
absolutely necessary in the global economy.
Question 6
I would like your opinion of the work of McLuhan and especially the concept of the medium.
Is the medium the message, or is the message the medium?
Answer
McLuhan was a wonderful salesman. He was a PR man, par excellence. Absolutely excellent.
"The medium is the message." Well, you know there is something to be said for
the fact that if you look at the way people write, the medium controls how they say
things. The language of electronic mail is a lot different than the language of a letter.
Although some of us who have used electronic mail a great deal become literary whether we
want to or not. Technology does control to a great extent the message. The medium does
influence the message. Television programs, soap operas, they are all standard. The medium
has controlled the structure of those things. The medium has controlled the structure of
the shows you see at nine in the evening, you know, "Seinfeld" and who knows
what else is. There is something to be said for the medium not being the message but the
medium having a great impact on the nature of the message. Certainly in the format and the
structure of the message. I have read McLuhan a couple of times and he leaves me hanging.
I’m not sure where I am with him. But he was a real promoter.
Question 7
Let's talk about technology and politics and the risk in an electronic democracy.
Answer
The new technologies have had a tremendous impact on the economy. They have increased the
efficiency of firms which allows for large monopoly firms and global firms. Some of us say
that in another twenty years there will be twenty companies in the world providing
everything we want. Everybody is buying everybody up and that is because of these new
technologies. We have private television networks and people can see each other on the
screen and talk and have meetings. This improves the co-ordination of business which
allows businesses to grow larger and larger. I’m not sure. The term "electronic
democracy" has several different meanings. One approach, which is quite absurd, is
that somehow or other people will vote with their computer. So you say to somebody:
"Do you think we should have, for example, another big aircraft that costs US$20
billion?" The person doesn’t even know what it is, so he says: "Yeah, go
ahead. I’m in favour of them." There was an experiment we ran many years ago in
Palo Alto, where we wanted to find out if people would actually vote by telephone. Even if
they didn’t have a push-button telephone, they could vote. And we chose an issue that
was very hot - the school boards, the school issues - and the school board would come up
with an agenda and with the agenda came certain issues to vote upon. And they then would
announce that to the people and say that we want your vote. But people were very smart.
They said: "I didn’t set up this agenda. Those are not the issues I wanted. I
want to be part of the issue. Let me set it up. I’m not going to vote on this."
They wanted to structure the questions in the way that they thought were important. So
simply saying we’re going to vote by computer, no politician would buy that. He would
be foolish to allow that to happen. Who knows what he is going to get. There are a lot of
people out there who have no idea what the issues are, but if they are given the chance to
say yes or no., they’ll say yes or no.
When I say new technology, I’m really talking about this vast
communication capability. You should make the voter more intelligent, should allow the
voter to interact more, should allow the voter to really explore a question before they
vote on it. But when you have a population where 35 percent of the people vote - even in a
presidential election, you’re lucky if you get 50 percent of the people to vote in
this country - I just don’t see electronic democracy or any kind of media having any
effect. We have lost our sense of political consciousness. There was a letter to the
editor in the New York Times several weeks ago written by a professor of political
science at a university. He asked the students in his graduate class when the second world
war started. They didn’t know. He asked them when the second world war finished. They
didn’t know. He asked them what the Holocaust was about. A few knew. Then he asked
them if they were interested in history. "No. How will history help me get a
job?" So in the end, he is saying that if we are going to salvage democracy in this
country, the very people that have to do it have no idea what it is. And this with all the
media, all the television, with the Internet. I remember asking my class how many bought a
newspaper every day. Out of thirty-something students about five did. And of those five,
what did they read? The sports section. There is a very big gap, and we have lost our
contact. So I think that the new media is having a negligible effect, if not a negative
effect.
Question 8
What are the problems involved in education, new technologies and communication?
Answer
The problem of education hasn’t changed. You can put 100 teachers in the classroom
for 100 students and nothing will happen. I don’t know what students look for on the
Internet. I think the problems of education have very little to do with new technology.
They have to do with the traditional, classical problems. When we introduced television
into the classroom, it was a disaster. It failed. Even though television as an adjunct can
be of value. One of the reasons it failed is because there was a commentator who said that
television teaches as good as teachers. That scared the hell out of the teachers. They
opposed it right from the beginning. But if you’re going to make any change in
education that depends on the technology, you have to train the teachers first. The
teachers have to understand better the process of learning and how the technology fits in.
For the early years of the computer in the classroom the computer was used for drill and
practice. You know, give them numbers, add up and you just keep going. I remember visiting
somebody in the neighbourhood down in La Jolla and the student was sitting at the computer
and I asked her what she was doing. She said she was writing a report on elephants. I
asked where she was getting the information?" "Oh, it’s all on the
Internet." I asked her if she had tried the library. "No, I don’t need to
go to the library." Students don’t even know how to use a library. Here was this
kid getting information that has already been regurgitated. There is no initiative to
learn more and to interpret differently because "it’s on the Internet". One
of the things that used to bother me a great deal was students who would show me the
result of an analysis, and I would tell them it did not make sense." They’d
reply: "Well, that’s what the computer said." And I would tell them that
was what they had programmed the computer to say. You know the old statement: Garbage in,
garbage out. You have to ask yourself what you are looking for and what you expect. In
fact, that’s the first question you’ve got to ask yourself. What is it that I
expect the outcome to be? And then you test it. If it doesn’t come out that way, you
say: "Well, there are some things I don’t know." It’s the scientific
method in education. But the real issue is that the biggest problem we have is educating
the teachers, but we don’t even understand the process of learning. We don’t
understand too much about the process of learning and therefore teaching. If we did, we
might be able to do a lot better when it comes to utilising new tools that come out. But
they are only tools: you cannot get rid of the teachers. So what are the opportunities?
Well, anybody who can solve the problem of what learning is and can write software to do
that will do very well. It is very difficult. But I think you have to go back to the
original premise of education. Teach the students to be good citizens, to understand the
world, understand philosophy, understand what goes on. And have no fear of science. Right
now in a world that’s full of science, you would be surprised how many people really
don’t understand anything about it. They don’t know the difference between
astronomy and astrology. It’s a frightening world.
Question 9
What about the teachers? Is it more difficult to teach the teachers?
Answer
If the teachers are part of a union, that sometimes is a problem. The teaching profession,
at least in the United States, does not pay very well, so you don’t find very many
people looking for teaching jobs. But there are some teachers who work very hard and want
to do a good job. You’ve got to find those and work on them. I think what is needed
more than anything else is more respect for the teacher. In this country the old saying
is: "If you can’t do, teach". We don’t have any respect for the
teachers. When I was in academia people used to say to me: "If you’re so smart,
why aren’t you a rich man?". And I think that is critical. We talk about the
self-esteem of the students, let’s have self-esteem of the teachers. There are some
people that can be plucked out and really trained to do well. It takes a lot of work to
find them.
Question 10
How do you see the school of the future?
Answer
One of the things we learned a long time ago is that learning is a behavioural change. You
have to be able to interact with the students. For example, my wife works for a company
that sells high-technology education to engineers and managers. And for a while they were
thinking of getting into video and providing video lectures etcetera. I told them I did
not think it would work because you need the interaction. And they found that was true. So
they teach in a classroom. Now of course they are teaching what they call computer-based
training, where the students works by himself with a computer and there is some
interaction.
I think in the end the schools are not going to change too much. A
school does more than just pumping students full of information: it gives them a social
environment. But I guess it depends a great deal on what the school is supposed to do. For
technological training of people who are already in business for a job, they might do it
on a computer. They are more motivated. But when it comes to children in school, you need
a teacher up there to motivate the students and to interact with them, because the whole
process of learning is a behavioural process. You need people for that. I don’t see
the schools changing very much. I think there will be more so-called schools on-line,
until people learn they don’t work too well. I hate to say this but I think
computer-based training is used strictly to save the company a few dollars, but I
don’t think it’s going to have a big effect on the students. If you are
motivated, you will learn what you learn. If computer-based training is so good, how come
I get letters from the university, announcements of programs that are available to the
engineer at the university in the evening and at night? They are heavily attended.
I don’t think schools are going to change that much. I know some
people will argue with me. They see great changes in the schools, that campuses won’t
exist anymore.
Question 11
So schools that without computers will not teach worse than schools where there are
computers?
Answer
No. I don’t think so. Although there is something to be said for a student becoming
familiar with the computer and not being frightened by it. My wife got on the computer
when she was not young and I think she is still scared to death of it. I think it’s
important for kids in school to have access to it and to know how to work with it.
Children learn fast. We used to say that children learn to use the computer even faster
than an adult does. The reason is very simple: a child gets on the computer and plays with
it for days and learns. We adults don’t have that time. And that’s sad. If we
could play for a weekend with the computer, we would know it is an idiot technology that
we have to train ourselves for in our own way.
Question 12
Is e-mail a new form of social communication? Or is it just a gadget?
Answer
E-mail a valuable development. It gets rid of the telephone tag problem, where I call you,
you are not there, you call me, I’m not there and back and forth. It is a funny thing
that people have forgotten how to write, but now they are writing e-mail instead of
letters. It is a different language. Like sending facsimiles. E-mail is a very important
function. It is not just the e-mail itself, it is the ability to transmit documents, which
you use file transfer mechanisms for. I don’t know whether e-mail has changed the
world or not. I was in e-mail contact with a person for years. And then I met the person
and he was such a terrible person that I never talked to him again. On e-mail he sounded
fine, but when I met him I gave up. I have conversations on e-mail. I have a very personal
relationship with a friend in Boston, we write e-mail to each other, we talk about
personal things. But I also send a lot of little messages. Get a letter from some Italian
who wants me to be in Montreal for a meeting. I cannot go so I recommend somebody else. It
is easier than getting on the phone or writing a letter. But I still write letters.
Question 13
But you use a different language?
Answer
Well, it’s a different style. I think one of the most interesting aspects which might
cause difficulty in the future is that we have learned a lot about scientists by the
letters they wrote to their colleagues. For example, Freud wrote lots of letters. We read
in his letters how he was thinking. Faraday wrote lots of letters and we can read what he
was doing and why he was doing it. But now if they send their information by e-mail, we
won’t have that information, and that’s a great loss because we learn a great
deal about these people by their correspondence. Literary correspondence as well. But it
is a useful tool. It will give people a chance to write, which they haven’t done for
years. I am glad we have it. When I leave here, I will go to my computer and check my
e-mail. If I don’t check my e-mail, two days later I’ll get a telephone from
somebody asking why I have not checked my e-mail. The telephone is still important.
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