Text Pioneering the Electronic Frontier
Cynthia Denton is not a cybersurfer. In fact, she knows little about computer technology and less about hacker culture. What she cares about is tutoring 10 teenagers in the tiny mountain town of Elk City, Idaho, hundreds of miles away from her home in Hobson, Mont. And for that, Denton has become a regular on the electronic frontier.
Denton is one of many ordinary people--teachers, physicians, business executives, scientists and more--who are living the future today. "For many people, the network revolution has already happened," says James O'Donnell, a classicist and computer specialist at the University of Pennsylvania. Before long, the flow of information now coming into homes, businesses and universities through telephone lines, cables and myriad other connections will merge in a single tow-way torrent of voice, images, motion pictures and text. This year has seen a slew of partnerships between cable, telephone and computer companies bent on providing interactive entertainment and home shopping. This fall, the Clinton administration added to the momentum, announcing a sweeping proposal to fund basic research and promote regulatory changes to help private industry create an "information superhighway" that will shuttle huge amount of data around the world at lightning speed.
No one knows what the ultimate impact of this information revolution will be. But the experiences of people who are already using bits and pieces of this wired world in their everyday lives suggest that it is likely to produce fundamental--perhaps wrenching--changes in our social fabric. Even in rudimentary form, the existing stretches of information superhighway are beginning to redefine the normal sense of community, the pace of intellectual life and, some say, the nature of knowledge itself.
Here and there. The most basic change resulting from the new technology will be its ability to erase the boundaries between "out there" and "here" by tying people together in ways unimaginable even a decade ago. Just as the interstate highway system decades ago enabled people to live outside town, away from their jobs, the information highway is creating "virtual communities" where people work together even if they live in a different state, time zone or country.
Nowhere is this more true than in the science community. The information superhighway eliminates the necessity for scientists to be in the same room with their equipment, says Jim Doll, a chemist at Brown University who uses the network to collaborate with a colleague in Hungary. "The machine can be on the far side of the moon for all we care." Likewise, researchers working on the multimillion-dollar Human Genome Project, the massive effort to identify all the genes in the human blueprint, are pooling their findings into a gigantic database available to anyone on the Internet. That's the vast skein of computer networks linking academic, research and government institutions that reaches tens of millions of people worldwide. The Genome Project database is just one of many in the scientific community that allow researchers instantly to compare their work with a central repository of information.
The virtual communities forged by scientists on the Internet are a harbinger of what may develop in many other field. Scientists use the Net, as it is sometimes called, as a kind of electronic salon where they can instantly exchange text, sound, images, video or data, float a new idea for comment, pass around a resume or advertise an opening for a position, and keep up with trends in their field almost anytime day or night and from anywhere around the world. During the storm of controversy over cold fusion several years ago, for instance, much of the initial scientific discussion of the announcement took place on the Internet, rather than at academic conferences or in the pages of scholarly journals. In contrast to the slow pace of publishing, the exchange produced a lightning-quick assessment that the experiments were flawed.
Indeed, the Internet has become the primary means by which many of today's scientists communicate with their colleagues. Besides sending and receiving electronic mail, many subscribe to electronic "mailing lists" that are focused on a particular topic, where the message of one person in routed to everyone else in the group as a mass mailing. One new group on the information highway, called "Systers," was recently founded as a service catering specifically to female computer researchers, who use it to discuss ideas, critique one another's work and pool their resources for jobs.
Bits of discussion. Scientists also may tap into any of the thousands of independent "electronic" discussion groups collectively known as the USENET. These groups take the form of an electronic bulletin board: Someone "posts" a public electronic-mail message asking about a particular problem. Others read the message and post responses of their own. These postings and replies constitute an electronic discussion, which others can drop in on or simply follow, as if they were reading memos thumbtacked to a cork board.
While discussions sometimes deteriorate into mindless chatter (cyberspace doesn't differ from real life in some basic ways), provocative ideas frequently emerge. "The main thrust of my research today started from a discussion I had on a USENET group," says cognitive scientist Steven Harned of Princeton University and the Center National de la Recherche Scientifique in Marseille. Harnad, who studies the mental mechanisms people use to process symbols, publishes one of the first purely electronic scientific journals on the Net. Scientists even host virtual conferences online, where they meet from around the world to discuss a topic without ever leaving their hometowns.
In some cases, research would not even be possible without the information superhighway's ability to link together flows of data scattered around the world. One "collaboratory" sponsored by the National Science Foundation includes scientists Laboratory, SRI International and the University of Maryland. They are teaming up to study the effects of solar radiation on the Earth's magnetic field, using instruments that lie 20 miles from the Greenland icecap. Connected via the Internet, all the scientists see the same display from the instruments on their computers at home and can communicate "live" with one another about their interpretations of the data. In another experiment, Woods Hole, Mass., oceanographer Robert Weller uses computer networking to keep track of mounds oceanographer Robert Weller uses computer networking to keep track of mounds of data from an array of 70 weather instruments bobbing in the Pacific Ocean.
The long reach of the Internet puts the power of the world's largest computers at the fingertips of scientists everywhere. University of Houston chemist Montgomery Pettit designs new drugs, an enterprise that requires huge numbers of calculations that can be performed only by supercomputers. For Pettit, that used to mean putting his data on magnetic tapes and mailing them off to distant supercomputers, then waiting for the results to come back. Thanks to Internet, he says, "the supercomputer is right underneath my return key."
As a first step in achieving President Clinton's vision of the information future, a team of research institutions and communications businesses, including AT & T and Sprint, recently unveiled a new high-speed connection between computers in New Hampshire, California and Oregon. The new system transmits data at a rate equaling 10 books a second--30 times faster than the fastest existing connections used in the Internet. It enables researchers around the country to simultaneously look at maps and other images combining enormous amounts of weather, geographic and geological data about the Earth.
The coming information superhighway promises to be a valuable resource not only for scientists but for other scholars and educators as well. The Internet, for example, instantly links tens of thousands of research institutions, libraries and publications around the world, making it an ideal tool for conducting intensive research on almost any subject. Scientists and students studying nearly anything--from Chaucer to quantum mechanics--can instantly connect via their computers to other computers, where they can find a host of scholarly publications on the subject ready for perusal.
This vast potential to gather further information on one's own will change the nature of education itself. Teachers will go from "the sage on the stage" to "the guide at your side."
Just as Gutenberg's printing press made possible the novel, the coming information revolution no doubt will shape knowledge and creativity in ways as yet unknown. When the first link of the Internet was built decades ago to shuttle data between two defense laboratories, it was never intended to spawn electronic mail--yet people began using network for that purpose anyway and ended up creating an entirely new form of communication. Now, because the network's communication lines are shared among millions of people, the costs of "printing and mailing" are virtually identical whether one is making two copies or 2 million, in effect leveling the playing field for new ideas that might not otherwise receive an audience. Cold fusion at first may have taken a drubbing by mainstream scholars on the Net, but those researchers who continue working on the phenomenon are keeping in touch with each other--on the Net.
In the long run, the new information technologies may fundamentally alter creativity itself. Nowadays, much of the process of scholarship-- the testing of an idea and the subsequent peer commentary--takes place in private; only the publication of a final manuscript is a public event.
"Scholarly skywriting." Internet and similar electronic connections offer a middle ground for scholars because a researcher can post the beginnings of a theory, receive comments on it from peers, incorporate new ideas and alter the details over an over until it is right. Electronic networks enable scholarly publishing to imitate the intellectual process more closely, says David L. Rodgers of the American Mathematical Society. "The unit of transaction will become the idea, not a collection of articles."
This dynamic, fluid progression of an idea--which Harnad calls "scholarly skywriting" --is possible, he says, because the speed and reach of electronic messaging "more closely match the natural biological speed of human thought." When he writes a paper, says Harned, he is able instantly to incorporate the forces of the Net into the creative process. In one part of his computer will be Emailed comments from colleagues, in another will be his own notes, in another his previous papers--and at any time, he can launch into the Net to find a new resource or paper, send off a thought to a commentator or ask a question, all as if they were in the same room. This new form of scholarship could cause problems with copyrights, however. With so many voices involved in the production of a new idea, it is more difficult than ever to pin down exactly who should receive credit for it.
Some scholars believe that the storage of documents as disembodied electronic signals will gradually alter the structure of knowledge. "Manuscripts" will increasingly be "live," changing from day to day as the author returns to fiddle and other scholars kibitz in the margins. It will be possible to update and massage documents without increased cost, so that--in some fields, at least--the notion of a bound book could become obsolete. Even the idea of authorship could change.