INTERVIEW:
Question 1
How would you define multimediality and interactivity?
Answer
There are three concepts of multimedia. The first and simplest is the mixing of print,
pictures, both still and moving, and sound. By this definition, of course, the cinema and
television are already multimedia. The second is the delivery of content across a range of
different networks. So multimedia is content delivered either via a computer network, a
telecommunications network, or a broadcasting network. And the third definition of
multimedia is media which combine the classic forms of print, film, and sound with various
forms of computer storage and manipulation. The definition of interactivity is in my view
straightforward. An interactive communication is one in which the receiver of the
communication can send messages back to the originator of the communication. There are of
course different levels of interactivity between those in which the relationship is equal
between the sender and the receiver, as in a telephone call, and those in which - as with
much, perhaps most interactive so-called television - where the information sent back is a
very small fraction of the information actually received. A further dimension of
interactivity is that which is derived from the model of the interaction between the user
and the computer interface of some sort. That is to say, you may be interacting with a
program or a machine, and the interactivity is a measure of the extent to which you can
manipulate the information you are receiving.
Question 2
How can we give everyone the same opportunities to use new technologies?
Answer
I think as far as the access to new technologies is concerned, it is firstly, if one takes
a historical perspective, simply utopian to suppose that everybody is suddenly going to
have equal access to the new technologies. This has never happened with a technology
before, why should it happen with information technology? There are three types of use and
access I think one needs to take into account. There is firstly the access to networks: to
what extent, for instance, do all homes or individuals have access to the telephone
network over which many of the new services will be carried or to what extent do people
have access to personal computers? We know that the access to personal computers, at least
in Europe, is still at a relatively low level compared with access to telephones, and at
even a lower level compared with access to television sets. The question then is: do you,
for public policy reasons, wish to subsidize the purchase and installation of personal
computers? The second question is the problem of access to types of content, and this is a
question of how much of that access is governed by market relations, i.e. can you afford
to pay for them. We have to recognize that access to most goods and services in the
economies in which we live are in fact governed by income. People do not have equal access
to anything else in our society, why should we assume that they should have access to
information or, rather, that we need to have a special argument to justify it? So there is
a question of purchasing. It may be that the way round that is to make certain services
available on a subsided or free basis. The third and the most disregarded aspect of access
is the question of the skills we need to access information. The classic example of course
is literacy. You can only access print as a service if you are literate. Until relatively
recently in all societies and even till relatively recently in European societies, of
course, literacy was the key issue. This was solved via education in one way or another.
But another range of skills which are not equally distributed according to class, age and
gender in our society is the ability to use PCs, to understand programming languages and
so on. And making these equally available is, in the end, a question of education.
I have quite strong musical intelligence, but not particularly good spatial
intelligence. So when I was in school and I was asked to try and imagine a 3-dimensional
figure and how it was transformed, that was difficult for me to do in my head. Now I could
create an image on a computer screen and turn it around and do in front of me what I used
to have to do in my head. Because I am better in musical intelligence, if I listen to a
fugue, for example, which has a theme in it, I can hear the way the theme gets transformed
or picked up by another voice. I can do that with my own ear. But if I couldn’t do
that with my own ear, I could get a tape recorder, record the fugue, separate out the
voices, follow one through from one part of the piece to the next, and again technology
would help me to do what I can’t do inside my own head.
From my own perspective, the greatest promise of technology is to individualise
education. If a teacher has 30 or 40 students and no technology, the teacher doesn’t
have a lot of choice. He or she has to lecture or give everybody the same assignment. But
if, for example, a teacher has 30 or 40 students, but each student has his own computer or
his own CD-ROM or his own video disk player, then the teacher can teach fractions one way
to one student, and another way to another student, and the teacher can also give the
student various ways of showing what he or she understands. So technology holds the
promise for personalising and individualising education much more than before. Why is this
important? Well, traditionally, education has really been a selection device. We say, who
is it who thinks a certain way, who can pass through the eye of a needle, we will give him
or her the awards and everybody else will be pushed to the side because they can’t do
things in that way. If we individualise or personalise education, it means that rather
than having one test for everyone to pass, you can have tests which are appropriate for a
person given his or her own intelligences. This means that each person can be advanced as
far as their own potential allows, not just everybody being forced to be like a certain
prototype, and if they can’t be like that prototype, then they just don’t have
an opportunity at all.
Question 3
How do you believe new technologies influence political and economic problems?
Answer
In my view, the impact of technology itself, either politically or economically, is
exaggerated. The technology is not, in my view, determinant. It is interlaced with
political and economic processes. Let me take politics as an example: there are many
people who claim that the Internet and similar information services are going to enhance
democracy because they will make information freely available to everybody, they will make
participation and debate cheap and easy for everybody, and that this will make the ideal
of democracy with fully active participating citizens a reality. In my view, this is a
gross exaggeration of the possibilities which an information network itself can provide.
The main barriers to democracy are, once again, education, the time available to take part
in debates, the differential power exerted by political elites and so on. And in my view,
information technology is not going to make a significant difference to that problem. The
other side, of course, is that these technologies and their use are themselves part of a
struggle, which is in part political and in part economic, between those who wish to use
them for market purposes and those who wish to support public service or public interest
uses of them. And those will be resolved, as other conflicts in our society, between those
who support market imperatives versus those who support public service imperatives, as
those work out. The same would apply to conventional over-air broadcasting, the control of
the press or any other information medium. So far as the economic implications of
information technology are concerned, I think we need to make firstly a very important
distinction. It is normally assumed in general debate about the impact of technologies of
communication and, for instance, the Internet that we are talking about the market and use
of information by ordinary citizens in the same way as we are talking about, say,
broadcasting. In fact, of course, the major uses, the major impact of information
technology and new communications systems take place within the economy itself as part of
the productive system. Far and away the most expenditure on the communications system, the
largest users of Internet services and so on are using them within production and they are
paid for by the corporate sector. The domestic use of the traditional media and the
extension into the Internet is a relatively small proportion of that expenditure. And the
result of this, of course, is that most of the development and planning of those networks
and of the services that go over them, for example the Internet, are precisely designed
for business users. That was true of the telephone network. The telephone as we have it
used in the home was a parasitic by-product of the use of the telephone in the office. It
never paid for itself. It still doesn’t pay for itself. About 90 percent of the
revenue of large telco companies comes from the corporate sector. And it is likely to be
the case in other sectors. So, in my view, the arguments about the economic impact of the
new technology are about their impact on the economy as a productive enterprise. They are
not about, primarily, their impact on the public sphere or the domestic consumption of
information. So far as the domestic consumption of information is concerned, or the use by
ordinary citizens in their everyday lives of these technologies, the question remains:
what is the balance between the services that can be made available or the technologies
used and the money available to pay for them, whether this money comes from the relatively
limited disposable income of individuals and families, or whether it comes from various
forms of public subsidy or whether, indeed, it comes from advertising? In this regard we
know from historical evidence that the amount of money that will be spent on information
services in this regard is a relatively small proportion of total expenditure. It does not
grow very fast and, therefore, all projections of the huge expansion of media and
information services are, in my view, disregarding that and as a result are greatly
exaggerated.
Question 4
What do you think of the future of traditional mass media and the convergence of media
like the TV, radio, and computer?
Answer
So far as the effect of the developments in new information and communication technologies
on the traditional mass media are concerned, again I think that these effects or the
projection of these effects has been much exaggerated. In my view, if you take, for
instance, the US market as an example, in spite of having a market which has virtual
saturation of multi-channel delivery of audio-visual services via both terrestrial cable
and satellite, in spite of the fact that you now have a relatively high penetration of
personal computers and Internet services, it remains the case that the major US television
networks still have 60 percent of the audience, they have the bulk of the advertising
revenue, and that the alternative pay-TV services have never got very large penetrations.
I don’t myself think that this is going to change significantly in the foreseeable
future. I would predict that in ten to fifteen years time most people will be watching a
relatively restricted range of television channels, a few more than the present and they
will be basically delivered possibly by terrestrial digital rather than analog, but they
will not be delivered over the Internet. They will be reading a restricted number of
newspapers and magazines, and most of the Internet services will by that time have failed
commercially.
I myself am a teacher, and I think the most important thing my students learn is to
watch me at work. To see how I handle visitors, to see how I investigate a research
problem, to see how I look at data and make sense of it. Those are the kinds of things
which would be impossible to duplicate using technology, though some of it could probably
be made into a simulation or into a small video segment.
Similarly, I think the technology is going to be very hard on the student who is lazy.
Because any answer which the computer can give, we don’t need to have from the
student. So the student is going to have to be more imaginative, more creative - again,
going the extra mile. So I think computers will keep us on our toes.
Question 5
What is the impact of new technology on information and will it change the way that
information and is made available?
Answer
Clearly, the new interactive technologies make it potentially possible to make a wider
range of information more freely available and more cheaply available to a large number of
people. However, there is a real economic problem about realizing profits in this regard,
because there is a good deal of evidence that people are very resistant to paying for
information. This is one of the reasons why a lot of the current information distribution
is subsidized by advertising. Again, there is not much sign that that is going to change.
In the corporate business market, clearly, there will be an expansion of specialized
information services available online to high-value users who are prepared to pay a lot
for them. But in the general market, in my view, the information needs for which people
are prepared to pay are relatively restricted. And this is one of the reasons why there is
a lot of churn in the Internet. People go onto the Web thinking they’re going to have
access to all this wonderful information. They find it is actually very difficult to get
at it. You need very specialized skills of information searching and assimilation to be
able to use it usefully. Much of the information is of very low quality. And they discover
that the relationship between the effort and time put in, let alone the money, and what
they get out of it doesn’t make much sense. So I am not one of those who think that
the new technologies, just because we have computers connected to a World Wide Web, are
going to significantly change the way in which we collect, search for, and process
information across the society as a whole. However, in some specialized areas it clearly
makes information provision or information-rich services more global and more competitive.
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