The Shape of Things to Come
Five years ago, while still in library school, I attended my first conference at the Javits Center in New York City. I don't remember much of what happened there, apart from experiencing New York City for the first time and gauging these people with whom I was about to join leagues. And I remember a speech, given by a fascinating and articulate woman who wrote for the Economist. She said something along these lines:
The computer is a lot like the car. We know what it is technically capable of, the parts that define the engine, and the way it functions; but we have no idea what the societal implications of this technology will have brought forth in the span of 100, or even 50, years. For instance, if we could transport Ford's mechanic to the present day, he could look at an engine and explain to us its operation, what the parts do, and how they work together to run a car. But he couldn't tell you how the automobile has transformed society, knitted together space and time, and altered our sense of distance. He couldn't tell you how convenient, personal travel influenced urban design, contributed to suburbia, or expanded our options in the places we choose to live and the implications of those options. He would have no idea how the automobile changed us culturally, because all he has as reference are the technological ramifications before and behind him. His mind isn't primed to envision futuristic vistas because he still applies old technology to the new.
I thought she was fabulous. This speech greatly influenced the way I think about technology, implications, and novel applications.
One of the reasons it's so hard to predict what the future might hold is that we have no framework for where these new technologies can take us culturally, apart from some pseudo-possibilities generated by the great big imaginative minds of certain science fiction writers. Technically, we understand what's capable, but it's the far-reaching consequences that remain vaporous, indefinite, and undefined.
I often think that if I followed the art world more closely, I would have a better idea of where we're headed. Fueled by intuition, I believe artists are the visionaries, capable of a pre-verbal language that translates onto a canvas of impressions, forms, and ideas. Their minds are more receptive to intemporal frameworks, ideas born out of some sort of timeless, universal magma not boxed in by their own limited empiricism. Artist as visionary. Art, the big sister to scientific invention.
But, due to other interests and time commitments, I don't follow art (I'll take up art and wine in my 40s -- at least that's what I tell myself). And although I do have an overly active imagination, I am by no means a visionary. I can only write what I know. What I know is two things.
The first is standards. This is a no-brainer. If we're to progress to any sort of universal accessibility, we'll have to lay down the foundation. Standard languages will help to speed up initiatives like the semantic web, and clear the path toward location-independent and device-independent access of where I believe we're headed. Now, whether the location is on some remote compatible planet after we've all had the necessary DNA modifications for space travel and that device is neatly embedded in our spinal columns, I couldn't tell you.
The second is a little more difficult to put into words.
The web is not technology as much as it is people. What do people need? What do they want? I believe they want to communicate with each other, and here is where the strong point of the web lies, in communication. I know this sounds embarrassingly simplistic, and perhaps it is. But I believe self-empowering ease of use and creating accessibility for all is where the future lies.
Not too long ago I was at a party talking to a grad student. He works over at the neuroscience lab on campus and was telling me how impressed he was with the web and instant access to information. I work with this kind of thing all the time: I help students and researchers find articles and information they need every single day. A lot of the time, I find the full text in front of me on my computer. So this wasn't as delightfully shocking to me as it was to him. This was new to him. He was used to going to the library, looking up citation in the database, photocopying the article from the journal. But now, here at a click, he was able to find a study conducted just a short time ago and available as a .pdf file. All he had to do was click on the link and it was instantly accessible. (By the way, if you're ever at a party and talking to a librarian, we can talk about much more than journals, databases, and the Internet. But, hey, those are fine topics too.)
He was hugely impressed by both the convenience and the fact that somebody had thought to avail their research to others in this manner. The web was about him. These were his needs. For every one of him, there are quadroons more, shaping the Internet for their individualistic needs, desires, and dreams. The future lies where those needs channel rivers and tributaries of use.
This grad student is just one example. Perhaps in two years, we'll bump into each other again, and he'll tell me how he's learned a little HTML (or whatever we're using then) and how to upload files and make a personal website, which initiated contact with a researcher in Wellington, New Zealand, that resulted in a collaboration on a trailblazing project that the two presented on 14 months ago where he met another researcher outside his field, but very interesting, very pretty. And, oh by the way, they were married last fall and are thinking about starting a family next year, after they move into a house they're building in South Eugene. All because he learned how to link his files and use the Internet to communicate and collaborate. Who would'a thunk it?!
To a point, we can predict the technology. But as far as the implications of that technology go: Nobody knows.
