ARTS & FARCES internet

In 2003, I had a catastrophic equipment failure in my office. My working hard disk—including all of my manuscripts—and its backups were destroyed. Back then I never archived my projects, only backed them up, redundantly. I thought that was enough. I was mistaken. In referring to my earlier writings, I discovered that much of that writing holds up pretty well, so I’m reproducing it here for reference and the record. This article is from Macintosh Hypermedia Volume I, Reference Guide (Scott, Foresman and Company, 1990).

Hypermedia is indeed an interesting development for computer users and offers a wealth of benefits that appear to be available to all. Hypermedia is not, however, a panacea. There are some inherent problems of a far-reaching nature that we must begin to address now.

It is interesting to note that with the introduction of any new technology—and make no mistake, hypermedia is definitely a new technology—it has taken an overly long time for the legal issues and societal impact to catch up with the actual introduction and subsequent availability of the technology. Hypermedia, to date, is no different, notwithstanding the efforts of many hypermedia pioneers to the contrary. In this chapter we will take a step-by-step look at the underlying issues relevant to potential access to an overwhelming amount of information.

Data navigation and management

Within five years, each of us will be inundated with virtual mountains of data. How will we sort through it; how will we navigate to specific information we need; how much will it cost us? Perhaps, more importantly, what new intellectual equipment will we need to possess, and are we properly preparing our children to develop an acuity in dealing with massive amounts of information?
Before we can address those specific concerns, we must address, briefly, the notion of inherent value of access to information via hypermedia running on various computer systems.

Computer experts generally make the argument for the computer stating that the computer is a neutral machine that can be used for either good or evil or that people who question the value of computers are nothing but Luddites. Or they find it hard to believe that the machine they are constantly patching and debugging could be perceived as a threat to anyone.

It is time for all electronic publishers, information providers, and hypermedia developers to realize that what we are really doing is selling drugs. Jerry Garcia claimed that computers were the new drugs, and Jerry Daniels points out the good biochemicals we experience when we work with the Macintosh. They are right. We are pushers, not publishers, and we have a responsibility. In fact, we have a series of responsibilities.

Consider the grandly connected, intricately interwoven hypermedia system that is Xanadu—and the electronic community surrounding it and other information utilities—as a nervous system with all the dendrites and synapses that go along with it. Consider the information that travels the electronic byways of the system as chemical agents causing a reaction. It is not the hardware that Garcia considers a new drug. It is not the software that Daniels sees as good biochemicals. It is the information, the flow of that information, and the interface in which the information is presented that produces the reaction.

This is at least partially why people play with Macintosh and work with IBM. Our anal-retentive society cannot grasp the notion that something that is as fun as Macintosh can be work. This is where Apple Computer, Inc.‘s concern about “personal productivity” comes from. It might even be where Apple’s constant attempt to sell computers to big business comes from.

So the providers of these chemical agents have a series of responsibilities, not the least of which is to have fun. Other responsibilities include integrity and impeccability. Impeccability is impossible. Integrity is imperative. One out of two is not bad.

Advertising, for instance, has an adverse effect on integrity, in this case integrity of the information. Advertising is misleading, ineffective, not cost effective, and intrusive. In an electronic medium, such as hypermedia, these negatives are exacerbated.

Advertising industry analysts estimate that each of us is exposed to about 3,000 advertisements each day. They also maintain that the more ads people see, the more ads they tune out. The vast majority of these advertisements are deceptive and misleading.

A recent study conducted by the Ogilvy & Mather advertising agency showed that 72 percent of the United States public feels that advertising insults their intelligence. Another study by the R. H. Brushkin Associates research firm showed that almost half of the United States public feels that advertising produces “very little useful information.” But the ads keep coming. In 1986, $94.7 billion was spent on advertising by United States advertisers.

Yet another study, conducted by the Opinion Research Corporation for the Harvard Business School in 1967, found that 53 percent of Americans disagree that most advertisements present a true picture of the product advertised.

Discerning customers have an ingrained bias against claims made in advertisements. They assume claims made in advertisements are false. Regis McKenna, no marketing slouch by anyone’s standards, bears this out in The Regis Touch: “Increasingly, people are skeptical of what they read or see in advertisements. I often tell clients that advertising has a built-in ‘discount factor.’ People are deluged with promotional information, and they are beginning to distrust it. People are more likely to make decisions based on what they hear directly from other people—friends, experts, or even salespeople….”

Advertising people maintain that if you can measure the benefits of advertising on your business, advertising works. They further maintain that if you cannot measure the benefits of advertising, it is because your measurements are not good enough and the only sure solution is to continue advertising.

Dr. Julian L. Simon of the University of Illinois conducted in-depth research on the effectiveness of advertising in 1970 and concluded, “There is not one single piece of strong evidence to support the general belief that increasing returns exist in advertising… there are a great many studies that show diminishing marginal returns….”

Advertising carries a highly inflated self-image. Along with that inflated self-image comes a high price tag. The fact is that for a business that thrives on repeat customers—hypermedia, by definition, requires repeat customers—advertising is simply not cost-effective because you generally reach the same audience over and over again.

While bankers expect to see advertising costs as part of a business proposal, this is mostly because of the advertising community’s misrepresentation of things such as “your ad didn’t work because it wasn’t good enough, make a better ad,” and “the effects of advertising are cumulative, keep trying.”

Aside from simply not being cost-effective, advertising is ineffective mostly because it does not generate customer loyalty. In order to survive, a business requires customers, not consumers. Ads generate consumer interest, but customers—real customers—will not be swayed one way or the other by even the flashiest advertisement. The sales that are generated as a result of advertisements generally pay for the ads themselves, thus creating a vicious cycle: You have to run more ads to generate more sales to pay for the last batch of ads.

Advertising is not the be-all and end-all to making a customer base aware of a product or service. The best vehicle available, and most appropriate in the promotion of public hypermedia systems, is word of mouth. This works quite simply. Provide a quality product or service and your clients will tell folks they know about you and what you do. The key word here, however, is quality. Most of the people who bad-mouth word of mouth offer, at best, mediocre products or services.

Publicly accessible hypermedia systems can be introduced to potential customers via the computer industry infrastructure without advertising. I propose that the publicly accessible hypermedia systems be kept free of advertising. As an alternative ancillary income generator, I have no problem with the services providing listing opportunities in lieu of advertising space. Listings, placed where people are accustomed to finding them, can be very effective. Because people are generally looking for the information contained in a listing, they are not intrusive. Advertising, which has become a mainstay of popular culture, is generally intrusive and unwelcome. Advertising, more than any other single phenomenon, has degenerated television to the state it currently occupies. Hypermedia, like television before it, has incredible potential. It need not be sullied with zero-information content advertisements.

What good are computers and why should we want them?

Everyone can tell a horror story about the “computer.” An electronic funds transfer did not arrive on time because the “computer” went down. An automated teller machine failed to credit an after-hours deposit because the “computer” glitched. A credit-card purchase is denied because the “computer” failed to update the purchaser’s payment last month. Everyone has a story; here is mine: Twice during the preparation of this manuscript I had a hard-drive crash, resulting in several weeks’ work being lost on both occasions. It seems like this happens to me at least once during every major project. It has occurred so regularly that I have considered factoring it into my scheduling: Let’s see, I can complete that piece in three weeks; ordinarily, it would take two, but let’s factor in a minor hard-drive crash to be on the safe side.

So what good are these computers, anyway, and why in the world should we want to entrust our most valuable information to them? Moreover, aren’t there inherent dangers in an information repository as vast as something like Xanadu—what about all the bad things we hear about Big Brother and his even bigger computer? Why should we choose to create even more connections between information bases? Good questions, so let’s start with looking at why, perhaps, we should not use computers.

More than 150 million individual credit records are contained in computers belonging to the five largest credit-reporting companies in this country. In the mid-1970s it was discovered that one of the largest credit-reporting companies had access to the patient personal records of 90 percent of the nation’s hospitals. More than 250,000 times each day, business subscribers of these credit-reporting companies make inquiries as to the credit-worthiness of customers and receive responses within three seconds. Every year, more than 350,000 formal complaints are registered with the single-largest credit-reporting company concerning the accuracy of the credit records held in its computer data bases. Each year, more than 100,000 of these complaints result in the information being changed.

David Burnham, in his landmark The Rise of the Computer State, quotes Kent Greenwalt, a professor at Columbia University’s Law School, about the effect of such vast amounts of information in the hands of a few: “If there is increased surveillance and disclosure and it is not offset by greater tolerance, the casualties of modern society are likely to increase as fewer misfits and past wrongdoers are able to find jobs and fruitful associations. The knowledge that one cannot discard one’s past, that advancement in society depends heavily on a good record, will create considerable pressure for conformist actions. Many people will try harder than they do now to keep their records clean, avoid controversial or ‘deviant’ actions, whatever their private views and inclinations. Diversity and social vitality is almost certain to suffer, and in the long run independent private thoughts will be reduced.”

Shuddering reality, that. As we attempt to connect computers to provide very real benefits to the society at large, we also are providing kindling and a strong draft to the already raging wildfire of what has amounted to nothing less than computer surveillance.

The mass merchandising of information

We have been hearing about the “information bomb [that] is exploding in our midst” now for the better part of a decade. Alvin Toffler, John Naisbitt, and others have been warning us of the impending information explosion that we must steel ourselves against. Invariably, the solution lies in the anthropomorphizing of computers and the mass merchandising of information according to those who would point the way.

California State University history professor, Theodore Roszak, minces few words to describe these would-be futurologists and their musings: “an ungainly hybrid of potted social science, Sunday supplement journalism, and soothsaying… pitched at about the intellectual level of advertising copy.”

The ill-conceived notion of the mass production of information is traced back to one of these soothsayers, John Naisbitt, in his immensely popular Megatrends. One of Naisbitt’s central megatrend themes, possibly the only one if the material is closely examined, is that we have moved from an industrial society to an information society. Naisbitt’s view of the information society is very different from Stanley Davis’s concept of an information-based economy of intangibles covered previously. Naisbitt holds that “we now mass-produce information the way we used to mass-produce cars. In the information society, we have systematized the production of knowledge and amplified our brain power. To use an industrial metaphor, we now mass-produce knowledge and this knowledge is the driving force of our economy.”

Here Naisbitt has clearly jumped from the Sunday supplement into the realm of intentional obfuscation. While we have, without doubt, begun the process of mass merchandising information, in no way can the leap be made from information to knowledge. Again, according to Roszak, “Information, even when it moves at the speed of light, is no more than it has ever been: discrete little bundles of fact, sometimes useful, sometimes trivial, and never the substance of thought.”

Clear, clean distinctions are to be made between the notion of information and knowledge, that Naisbitt would apparently deny. According to Roszak, we have always judged the value of knowledge on three factors: depth, originality, and excellence. With the inflated valuation of information comes a blatant, if unconscious, attempt to blur the distinction between what constitutes knowledge and what is merely information. Little, if any, substance lies behind this intellectual equivalent of junk food, although Roszak attentively points out that this has not fallen completely on deaf ears.

Theodore Roszak points out that the pop futurology that is currently so popular is seen as a panacea by the political New Right, citing Georgia Congressman Newt Gingrich’s now apparently defunct Conservative Opportunity Society. Insisting that growth is the only way to ensure economic survival in this country, the Conservative Opportunists assure us that huge tax concessions to high-tech industries are sure to help us avoid the pitfall of the “antitechnological bias of the Left [which] overshadowed the possibilities of the computer age.”

Gingrich’s book carries such notary endorsements as Ronald Reagan, Jack Kemp, and Alvin Toffler.

Perhaps even more disturbing than the New Right’s infatuation with cancerous economic growth and voodoo bookkeeping is the nature of the base of technological development in this country. Since World War II, and the very seed of hypermedia, technological development in America has been funded and fueled by the defense industry—what Roszak refers to as the “militarization of our economy.” Roszak specifies that “the nation’s two most important computer development investments are also funded and controlled from military sources. Most importantly these include the Defense Department’s Information Processing Techniques Office and the recently formed twelve-company consortium, the Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation at Austin, Texas, which was launched under the chairmanship of a member of the National Security Council and CIA.”

This shows no sign of abating and is of grave concern to many within the computer industry itself, those in other industries, and within the general population. The numbers of the concerned in this area appear to be growing at a small but steady rate.

The economic impact of high-technology advancements, according to many, also tends to exacerbate the growing chasm in society between the haves and have-nots. As we quickly approach the danger of becoming a two-tiered society, high-technology enterprises in general, and the computer industry specifically, show no overt signs of attempting anything to check the slide. Everett Rogers and Judith Larsen, in Silicon Valley Fever: Growth of High Technology Culture, are quite indicting as they point out that “Silicon valley means low-wage, deadend jobs, unskilled, tedious work, and exposure to some of the most dangerous occupational health hazards in all of American industry. It is a dark side to the sparkling laboratories that neither barbecues, balloons, nor paid sabbaticals can hide.”

Information depends on knowledge, not vice versa. Many in the computer industry, however, would have us believe that they are on the verge of creating intelligence in their machines. At any given time for the past decade we have been told that artificial intelligence—and, specifically, a thinking machine capable of more and better thought than humans—was five years in coming, and, at most, a decade. This is illustrated by an ongoing process of what Roszak refers to as the “anthropomorphizing of the computer as a surrogate human intelligence.”

As a culture we have accepted and even adopted this anthropomorphizing with little tension. Many Macintosh users have named their computers and spend an inordinate amount of time with their electronic friends. We have personalized our electronic workspaces with customized background screens and specialized beeps for various system functions. We speak of interfacing with our associates and we solicit feedback from them. Most likely, this started when we began to refer to the computer as having a memory.

The anthropomorphism of the computer seems to have peaked with Apple chief executive John Sculley’s much-publicized notion of the Knowledge Navigator. Sculley’s vision focuses on the computer as an electronic buddy with very human traits that carries out our bidding for us. There seems to be a glimmer of hope within the general computer community, however: In the early winter of 1988, the Society of Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility called Sculley to task for his attempts at promoting the anthropomorphism of the computer.

Some computer enthusiasts find it hard to bear in mind that a computer is little more than a series of electronic switches that open and close at lightning-fast speeds. Many begin to speak in terms of computers that are capable of more advanced thinking than humans. Many of the artificial-intelligence researchers posit that computers are potentially more capable of thought than humans are because computer memory is much less fallible than human memory. Indeed, computer memory exists as distinct pieces that, barring system crash or media failure, are subject to total recall. Human memory, on the other hand, is fuzzy, and what Roszak referred to as “the invisible psychic adhesive that holds our identity together from moment to moment… it is fluid rather than granular, more like a wave than a particle. Like a wave, it spreads through the mind, puddling up here and there in odd personal associations that may be of the most inexplicable kind.”

Stanford University professor Avron Barr, for example, tells us that “the human mind not only is limited in its storage and processing capacity, but it also has known bugs; it is easily misled, stubborn, and even blind to the truth…. Intelligent systems, built for computer and communications technology, will someday know more than any individual human being about what is going on in complex enterprises involving millions of people.”

Views such as Barr’s are based on the notion that humans are obsolete, reducing the idea of thinking to simple information processing. If, indeed, thought and knowledge are nothing more than information processing, then indeed, computers are better suited for the task and we all may just as well go into hibernation. I have yet to see, however, any evidence that any computer is capable of anything more than advanced information processing and inference. Information processing and inference do not knowledge make, so maybe there is hope for us yet. The fact is that we think with ideas, not with information, and ideas are created by other ideas not by facts, data, or other information.

Men are creative beings by virtue of their ideas, and the computer is nothing more than just another one of man’s ideas. Roszak addresses this point adroitly by pointing to the human mind’s capacity for self-transcendence. “The mind, unlike any computer anyone has even imagined building, is gifted with the power of irrepressible self-transcendence. It is the greatest of all escape artists, constantly eluding its own efforts at self-comprehension. It can form ideas about its own ideas, including its ideas about itself. But having done that, it has already occupied new ground; in its next effort to understand its own nature, it will have to reach out still further. This makes it impossible to invent a machine that will be the mind’s equal, let alone its successor. The computer can only be one more idea in the imagination of its creator.”

While the computer only can be just another idea of its creator, its meta-tool nature—the quality computers possess of being tools used to create other tools—is what fascinates and absorbs the initiated. This phenomenon especially is apparent in the Macintosh community as the tool itself—as well as the tools it is used to create—become regenerative in nature and build on previous iterations. This, too, should come as no surprise, for this is the “difference that makes a difference” in the realm of hypermedia: that which transforms from simple information to rich knowledge.

The politics of information

Information theory, as a science—OK, as a pseudo-science—dates back to the late 1940s, when Claude Shannon founded it while working at Bell Labs. In those days, information was seen as almost physical. According to Shannon, paraphrased in the McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia of Electronics and Computers, “The information contained in a message unit was defined in terms of the average number of digits required to encode it.”

In other words, information was the signal part of the signal-to-noise ratio. Aren’t we glad we know better now….

In 1979, Gregory Bateson finally came up with a more comfortable—and accurate—definition of information: “Any difference which makes a difference.” Data, the “news of a difference” according to Bateson, is not information until it means something—“makes a difference.”

Subjectivity entered the equation.

At first blush, information seems to be void of political volatility, and most certainly, if we take Claude Shannon’s view. Following Bateson’s more enlightened approach, however, a preconscious gnawing begins. “Weeeellll, everything’s political,” we assure ourselves, sidestepping the issue.

In the old days, the days when our society and its economy were product-based, wealth was created by the creation and distribution of tangible products, which was quite simple, actually. If you created a product and sold it to me, I had it and you did not. We are in the midst of a severe paradigm shift that is so far-reaching and is occurring on such a huge scale that most of us do not even experience it; the only apt analogy would be the speed at which the earth itself revolves and circumnavigates the sun. Things are not so clear any more. As we shift from an economy based on tangibles to one based on information, the notion of product distribution becomes murky indeed.

The comfort we place in our notion of the “old days” generally is misplaced, and in the case of information is severely misplaced. Problems of the politics of information were just as rampant then.

In the early 19th century, the English Utilitarians managed to completely reform the Old Poor Law almost solely through the politicization of information. While today we take the gathering of information by governments as a given, in the “old days” things were different. The English Utilitarians were among the first to put to use the notion that the control of facts or, more appropriately, the perceived control of facts breeds power, which is a very political notion, indeed.

The English Utilitarians—precursors to the modern political action committee and think tank—headed by Jeremy Bentham, brought about this change by amassing immense amounts of statistical information in the Victorian Blue Books. With the Blue Books as a basis, the Utilitarians claimed that the Poor Law was inefficient in the extreme and that it should be replaced with a more efficient and less-expensive system, the one proposed by the Utilitarians. The Utilitarian solution was the severe workhouse system that was adequately documented by Charles Dickens. The new system was based on the broad-brush assumption that poverty was equated with parasitism and that punishment was the only cure. Interestingly, these same Victorian Blue Books formed the foundation for Karl Marx’s indictment of capitalism.

The only thing about the politicization of information that has changed since 19th-century England is that we are now better at producing it. Now we have think tanks and various policy study centers that purport to be pondering reams of information to arrive at appropriate policy decisions. In effect what really is happening is that these groups are arriving at appropriate information to support their concept of appropriate policy.

Ithiel de Sola Pool, in his Technologies of Freedom: On Free Speech in an Electronic Age, points out that political forms shape communication forms. He points out the fact that until the mid-1960s, the Soviets received radio transmissions over hard-wired speakers. In 1964, the total number of regular receivers finally outnumbered the wired speakers. The inherent political quality in the nature of information simply cannot be denied.

According to Theodore Roszak, “It is not the facts that determine policy, but more often policy that determines the facts—by selection, adjustment, distortion.” In many cultures, censorship is a way of stifling the flow of information to individuals. Most fair-thinking people regard this as inexcusable, yet the censorship issue continues to boil. In our own culture, however, we suffer from the opposite: too much information.

On the surface, this phenomenon seems to lack any redeeming merit of mention as a problem. On deeper inspection, however, it is a problem just as real and just as threatening as overt censorship. According to Roszak, “... in our society, the strategy of government is not to censor but to counter fact with fact, number with number, research with research. It even becomes advantageous to have lots of contention about facts and figures, a statistical blizzard that numbs the attention.”

Even John Naisbitt’s Pollyannaesque vision bodes ill: “We have for the first time an economy based on a key resource that is not only renewable but self-generating. Running out of it is not a problem, but drowning in it is. Data is now doubling every twenty months.”

One of hypermedia’s greatest promises is to bring a sense of supple structure to the information glut. The difference that makes a difference in hypermedia is the addition of intelligence in the interlinking structure and a level of refinement to the raw, unprocessed information. Moreover, networked hypermedia systems foreshadow the likelihood of the individual being able to maintain a footing on the same level as that of our spookish government.

David Burnham appropriately pointed out that personal computers would never be able to match the computing power at the disposal of the United States government, and that we were condemned to being subject to electronic surveillance of the most intrusive kind. Burnham pointed out that our government wields a tremendous amount of power because of the projection powers of its collective computing iron. “With the computer, organizations can analyze information about the activities, opinions, and social characteristics of individuals in ways that allow them to anticipate the future actions, desires, and fears of the groups of people with whom these individuals associate.” “The ability [to amass and analyze vast amounts of information] may be used to allow the people in control to say only what they already have determined their listeners want to hear,” continues Burnham. “The ability also may be used to develop a series of different, but not necessarily inconsistent, statements about a problem that raise complicated ethical questions about the nature of truth. The ability, in short, can be used for cynically manipulative purposes that tend to undermine the democratic process,” he concluded.

Burnham goes on to point out that no matter what level of power personal computers may reach, the government’s computers always will be more powerful. “Because this particular application of the computer requires a large amount of sophisticated expertise and equipment, it usually is available only to the richest and most powerful institutions of our society. The isolated citizen sitting in front of his personal computer cannot be a player in this very special league.” And he is certainly correct, so far as he goes.

One of the most encouraging breakthroughs of late in the field of computers is that of parallel processing. Briefly, parallel processing involves the coupling of large numbers of processors, each of which are assigned a specific and singular task to perform. The idea is that parallel processing allows several things to happen simultaneously, more closely emulating the way the human brain works, and significantly speeding up the computing process. As networked hypermedia systems come on-line, a sort of parallel-processing environment is set up by default.

For example, consider the impact of an announcement made in late 1988 by Dow Jones Information Services that it had developed a new on-line information search-and-retrieval engine called the Connection Machine that enabled on-line searches to be conducted using Englishlike command queries. Scheduled to be available on-line by the end of 1989, subscribers to the Dow Jones News Retrieval Service will be able to perform text retrieval using English queries to search various publications, including The Wall Street Journal, Fortune, Forbes, and The Washington Post.

Dow Jones’ Connection Machine is a text search-and-retrieval engine designed specifically to allow users to communicate their queries in English rather than the archaic search commands in use on other systems. Combined with the English-language query interface, the Connection Machine relies on the Thinking Machines’ parallel-processing computers as the “back end” of the system. The Connection Machine employs a Macintosh II as the front end and allows the user access to the computing power of 32,000 small processors. “The paradigm of the Connection Machine, according to Robert Millstein of Thinking Machines, “is the notion that you have a processor for every data element of a problem you are working on.”

Subscribers will be able to query the system with an English question, such as, “What is the extent of the involvement between Steve Jobs’ NeXT, Inc. and IBM and what are the implications for Apple Computer, Inc.?” and receive an abstracted and annotated bibliography in a matter of seconds. If a search yields too broad an answer, the scope of the question can be narrowed, interactively, using a “relevance feedback” feature that researches the compiled articles based on a relevance algorithm.

The front end for the Connection Machine consists of a Macintosh II and the query program written in LISP. Analysts and principals both hasten to point out that while the system is a great step forward in easing the use of on-line search-and-retrieval engines, the Connection Machine is not artificially intelligent. The addition of artificial intelligence to the formula will likely be the next breakthrough in the technology although it still is more than a few years in coming.

The importance of the Connection Machine lies in its wresting of the control of access to information from the information brokers and placing it in the hands of individuals. In fact, William Dunn, executive vice president of Dow Jones Information Services, states the control of access as a central impetus for the project. Dunn goes so far as to describe an addition to the Dow Jones News Retrieval Service that will provide an ongoing stream of data to corporations and universities through a permanent 9,600-baud connection to the service.
While the Connection Machine is a far cry from systems such as Ted Nelson’s envisioned Xanadu—where a user would have potential access to all the information in existence on a given subject—it is certainly a big step forward from what we have now.

Presently, the state of the art in information retrieval is the black art of complex Boolean logic, which is not very accessible to untrained humans. This places the information lords at a significant advantage in the access to information. This disparity of access to information has been one of the barriers Apple has continually pledged to shatter, and it looks to me like the Connection Machine offers a pretty hefty chunk of hand-sized barrier-shatterer.

Which is why it is hard to understand why Dow Jones has not been able to elicit even a modicum of cooperation, interest, or support from Apple.

Chalk it up to another instance of Apple’s inbred good-old-boy network. Like the old-timers in the South used to say, “That boy’s got some good ideas, but he ain’t from ‘round here.” Translation for the rest of us: The Connection Machine does not have a multicolored Apple logo on it, and our friends in Cupertino do not pack quite enough wallop to “acquire” Dow Jones.

While nothing can compete on a processor-to-processor basis with the supercomputers available to the United States government, developments such as the Connection Machine provide a glimmer of hope for the individual casting about in the sea of information.

The economy of information

Interestingly, or perhaps not, one of the main factors absent from the Dow Jones announcement of the Connection Machine parallel-processing information-retrieval engine was any mention of the price. Naisbitt told us in Megatrends that’ ‘the new power is not money in the hands of the few, but information in the hands of the many.” It would have been more accurate if he had rephrased the last clause to reflect the availability of information in the hands of anyone who can afford it.

Most telecommunications networks levy connect-time charges in single-minute increments. The charges range from a low of about $5 per hour to well over $100 per hour of connect time. This obviously takes the access to information out of the hands of “the many” and places it firmly in the control of “the few.” According to Roszak, “There is obviously a significant political public for whom the connect-time charges, let alone the price of the basic equipment, would be prohibitive. Networking may for some time to come remain a strictly middle-class medium.”

As an example, consider my own electronic publication, The Arts & Farces Review. For two years, the publication was distributed as a shareware product. Subscribers purchased a tangible product from me (a floppy disk containing information) that I delivered to them. In a product-based economy, I would have depleted my inventory by distributing the disks. But the nature of electronic publishing is that I still had the product after it was distributed. In fact, as a collective corpus, it was worth more to me than it was to the subscriber.

Stewart Brand, in The Media Lab, addresses this paradox in a unique way. “Information wants to be free because it has become so cheap to distribute, copy, and recombine—too cheap to meter. It wants to be expensive because it can be immeasurably valuable to the recipient. That tension will not go away.”

As an example, Brand cites the Lexis search-and-retrieval system for lawyers. The information contained in the Lexis data base—in the form of judicial decisions—are in the public domain. “Multimillion-dollar Lexis succeeds by charging handsomely for them,” says Brand, “by owning copyright on the page breaks.”

Ithiel de Sola Pool, in his 1983 Technologies of Freedom: On Free Speech in an Electronic Age, takes the point of copyright one step further by declaring, “The recognition of copyright and the paying of royalties emerged from the printing press. With the arrival of electronic reproduction, these practices became unworkable. Electronic publishing is analogous not so much to the print shop of the eighteenth century as to word-of-mouth communication, to which copyright was never applied.”

Brand states emphatically what I and other electronic publishers have experienced firsthand: People are reluctant to pay for quality information. According to Brand, this is because the “valuing is retroactive.” He points out, however, that people will “pay for quality of source, because the constancy (reliability) of source makes value somewhat predictable.”

My own experience is that people will not necessarily pay for the reliability, either. For two years, The Arts & Farces Review maintained a rigid publication cycle, never being so much as a day late with delivery. People were reading the publication on a regular basis, but simply refused to pay for it when it was available as a shareware product, perhaps because they felt they already had paid for it through their connect-time charges on the telecommunications services. Whatever the reasons, I find that Brand is correct as far as the distribution end of the information food chain goes, but he’s dead wrong about the production end.

In the United States, we have an abundance of communications media open to us. We have had our collective bouts with the gatekeepers and the ticket-takers of the information byways, but for the most part, we have had pretty easy sailing.

The government continues, for example, to insist that the radio frequencies be controlled because of a perceived scarcity. Stewart Brand offers a telling perspective on this misperception: “In Washington, D.C., there are twenty-three radio stations (licensed and regulated), eleven television stations (licensed and regulated)... and two daily newspapers, both of them fully protected by the First Amendment. Which is the scarce medium?”

And then there was the time in 1986 when President Reagan decided that a lot of publicly available information living in electronic data bases should be reclassified as “sensitive” and that access should be restricted.

But mostly we have had pretty easy sailing.

The underlying current in all of this is rather obvious, which is probably why it is not generally perceived. The right of access to information is becoming very much of a political issue, and it is not an issue, as some of the politicos just to the right of John Birch would have us believe, of only economics.

Albert Bressand, a French economist Brand cites, says that a world of information shock is coming and will crest in the 1990s. This will be similar, according to Bressand, to the oil shock of the 1970s and the world banking shock of the 1980s. This will happen—everywhere, all at once—“when the information providers decide to revalue what they produce.”

Closely tied with the economic issues encompassing the access to information is the “lowest common denominator” factor. Cable television was supposed to deliver us all from the wasteland of broadcast television by providing a broader spectrum of available programming. What we got instead, with a few notable exceptions, was a steady stream of pablum in the form of broadcast “success” clones. Information services, as well, cater to the lowest common denominator, that point at which there is not so much the most interest as the least friction. This also speaks to the politics of information, as does the economics of information, and we are confronted with the image of a snake eating its tail.

Privacy and free-speech issues and implications

As networked hypermedia systems begin to come on-line, privacy issues will become of greater concern. In a networked situation, each user will leave telltale “crumb trails,” leading into and out of the documents he or she has accessed. New trails will be forged that connect seemingly disparate bodies of information. Who will have access to this trail information? What limits will be placed on its use? What about data security?

One of the promises hypermedia front ends for vast data spaces dangle in front of our noses like a carrot in front of a donkey is the empowering of individuals to design their own search-and-retrieval interfaces. By extension, those hypermedia front ends will enable us to search vast stores of off-site information accessible via systems such as Xanadu.

When 1984 passed with relatively minor whimpers of Big Brotherishness from the fringes of the community-at-large, most felt that issues of governmental invasion of privacy and covert surveillance on the American citizenry were a thing of the past. Most of us filed those paranoiac years of the 1960s and early 1970s away in a dusty corner of our gray matter and were thankful to have made it through.

Time to dust off those memories because the current generation of Uncle Edgar’ s boys are at it again. The FBI has, for at least the past few years, taken to recruiting librarians as junior G-men to keep an eye on “suspicious activity” on the part of the library patrons, specifically, those who use the photocopiers and speak with foreign accents. The FBI, under its Library Awareness Program, insists that crucial national secrets are leaking out of the country and into the hands of The Enemy. The FBI, while offering no substantiation of these claims, says that the program is successful and will be continued.

When pressed, the FBI representatives point to the arrest of a Soviet United Nations employee several years ago for receiving classified information from a foreign exchange student who had been hired to photocopy material from libraries. Most librarians are quick to point out, however, that classified material is not available at any public library they know of, and that the FBI’s Library Awareness Program amounts to nothing more than invasion of privacy and First Amendment infringement.

According to Judith Krug, head of the American Library Association (ALA)‘s Office for Intellectual Freedom, the FBI has solicited help from at least 14 libraries during 1987 and the first half of 1988, and the ALA has been fighting the issue ever since Columbia University was first visited in 1987 and refused to cooperate. In most states, library records are confidential, although the FBI does not seem to give this fact much regard.

In 1986, the FBI teamed up with the CIA and the Air Force to coerce Mead Corporation into restricting access to its Mead Data Central that publishes the Nexis on-line data base of technical publications. Mead refused, taking the position that all of the Nexis information had been previously published. The government’s position, according to Jerry Yung, Mead’s vice president of government relations, was that although the material had been previously published and available publicly, “once aggregated with powerful computer software, it could be used against national interests.”

While Mead refused the government requests to restrict access to the Nexis data base, the data base that most likely set off the red flag, The National Technical Information Service, was dropped “for business reasons” later that year.

As the information services become more and more interlinked, as will doubtlessly happen since Judge Green’s decision finding that the Baby Bells can provide information gateways, the level of data integration available to the average telecommunicator will begin to grow in a geometric fashion. With that will come more and more government irritability, anxiety, and concern. When that access to information is paired with advanced hypermedia engines that are capable of semiautomatic and semi-intelligent information links, the Information Age finally will be under way and the individual suddenly will be capable of performing extremely complex cross-reference searches.

Access to this information is a right not a privilege, as the government would have us believe. What we read and what on-line data bases we search are our own concerns, no one else’s. This right must not be compromised in any way and must be defended at any cost.

Similarly, electronic communications are not given the same protection as first class mail is. We continue to suppose that we have freedoms and rights that simply do not exist. Wiretapping, for example, in the past had to be physically carried out. A spook had to be near the person under surveillance to listen in or at least a tape recorder had to be in the immediate vicinity. My friends who helped design the telephone companies’ Electronic Switching System (ESS) tell me that this is no longer the case. Now your conversations can be easily eavesdropped on simply by sending the proper signal tones down the telephone wire—from anywhere.

If you think your computer communications are safe from eavesdropping, you are also in for a surprise. All computers, except for those specially modified for use by the—yes, you guessed it—for use by the spooks, emit radio frequency waves that can be quite easily intercepted.

Data encryption is the answer you say? Consider that the United States government’s approved encryption standard, Data Encryption Standard (DES), has been shown by researchers as defeatable by the National Security Agency (NSA—spooks to you and me). “The DES system stands impeached. Researchers on both coasts have accused this method of being easily breakable by the National Security Agency, the government’s decoding arm; many believe it a fraud perpetrated by the U.S. government to make all ‘encoded’ transmissions readable by intelligence agencies.”

Adding fuel to the paranoia fire, Ted Nelson informs us that a better system was developed at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) that was subsequently suppressed by the United States government. “Another system of codes has been proposed that supposedly can’t be broken by any extant computer in less than millions of years. This is the RSA code, originally proposed by Hellman and Diffie of Stanford, and developed by Rivest, Shamir, and Adelman of MIT. It has several remarkable properties, among them being the ability to exchange unbreakable messages between strangers who have not had a chance to swap code keys; the ability to cosign electronic documents that anyone can read and know you signed; and more. And the U.S. government tried to suppress it.”

As if that were not enough, it gets even worse. There is no traditional way of demonstrating the authenticity of an electronic document. There are no typographic elements or watermarks as with paper publishing. Electronic characters are indistinguishable from their counterparts. “But the right sort of encoding—what is called an authentication code—may help us know when documents have been fraudulently replaced. Authentication codes, too, the government is trying to suppress. When you’re looking at what purports to be the Mona Lisa on your screen fifty years from now, and she has a mustache, don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

Ted Nelson, in the electronically published hypermedia tome, Literary Machines, said it best: “On-line text systems may or may not become universal or replace much of paper publishing. Whichever view you take, the questions are what they are to be like; what things are to be available, and to whom, and under what circumstances; and who may put things in, and who is responsible for their contents, and who may censor them, and who may protest the contents, and what gets thrown away on whose decision; and what is to be their relation to the archiving of our heritage, and how accessible they are to be, and how reliably and accessibly the personal, national, and human heritages are to be preserved. For rolled into such designs and prospects is the whole future of humanity, and, indeed, the future of the past and the future of the future—meaning the kinds of future that become forbidden, or possible.”

Do not mistake Nelson’s comments as an overstatement. To date, relatively little has been done to address any sort of bill of information rights. Senator Robert Packwood (D-Ore.) sponsored legislation in 1987 to formulate such a bill of rights, but little has been done since. Ted Nelson has perhaps been the most outspoken on the issue, and his proposed Bill of Information Rights is reprinted later in this chapter.

One of Apple Computer’s marketing catchphrases for HyperCard is “The Freedom to Associate.” This freedom to associate has proved to be a boon to the sudden increased interest in hypermedia systems. It also has brought us heads up against the very concept of freedom of speech. Abbie Hoffman learned the hard way that one cannot cry Fire! in a crowded theater—that there are, in fact, limits to any freedom. Personal freedom in a society is afforded its members only to the extent that it does not interfere with the freedom of others.

These electronic freedoms will be a battleground of the near future. We already have seen how the Reagan administration attempted to block access to information. These are rights that we will have to fight for, as Ted Nelson urges us to think fast. “These problems are real and present, and have been here waiting for us all along. Far on the horizon as they may now appear, soon they will be on us like a tornado. The way to approach these issues, I believe, is not sit in a corner and tremble, like a rabbit in a tiger cage hoping it won’t be eaten, but to run between the legs of the beast before it fully wakes up.”

Copyright and intellectual property issues and implications

As hypermedia authors begin to publish their materials, and as others form links to existing materials, our established notions of copyright become burdensome and ineffective. Tied to the issue of copyright, intellectual property issues also must be addressed. This is new territory, and hypermedia authors must inform themselves and actively participate in determining the new rules of the game.
Hypermedia very soon will become a viable alternative for some forms of paper publishing. Surely problems involved with the publishing logistics will crop up and will have to be addressed. Furthermore, differentiations must be formed between public and private publishing.

As mentioned previously, I have been actively engaged in electronic publishing for the past two years, publishing an electronic magazine, The Arts & Farces Review. During the 1987 MacWorld Exposition in Boston, the expo at which HyperCard was announced, I attempted an experiment in providing information to my subscribers in the most timely manner possible. At that time the Review was distributed via the traditional shareware channels (it has since been removed from shareware distribution and is available only on a subscription basis). The Mac World/Boston Expo of 1987 was shaping up to the fulcrum point of the widespread use of Macintosh computers and many innovative products were scheduled for release. I felt it was the most appropriate time to test the waters for the distribution of encrypted material via publicly accessible telecommunications networks, specifically General Electric Information Service’s GEnie and CompuServe’s Micronetted Apple Users Group (MAUG).

I produced four special editions of the publication each of the four days of the exposition and uploaded them in an encrypted format that locked out illegitimate users who did not possess the password to unlock the material. The files were encrypted using Harry Chesley’s Packlt utility and the encryption key was sent, well in advance, to all subscribers. The encrypted files were produced partially in an attempt to say “thanks” to those who were honorable enough to pay for the material.

The response was as surprising as it was disturbing. One negative comment was received via the GEnie network, “I firmly object to you and your so-called company using GEnie as a place to post your useless encrypted garbage text files….”

The response on CompuServe, while more literate, was just as intense:

“It seems to me that if some company wants to pass on material to their paid subscribers, they should open their own SIG.”

“Encrypted [entries] seem to violate the ‘Forum’ philosophy.”

“I’m not sure why I’m bothered by the idea of encrypted files in the MAUG data libraries, except that it seems to go against a lot of the feel of the forum
“Shareware that’s not accessible unless you’ve paid to get the key to read it is no longer shareware.”

“I’m not sure why, but it seems categorically different from the material, say, that a hard disk maker releases. Granted, the hard disk material will only work with one brand of disk, but at least it is open to everyone. If this is really a ‘commercial’ product with limited release, I am surprised to see it in the [download areas].”

“I am disturbed by the recent appearance of encrypted files in the MAUG data base. I believe that all files should be available to everyone on an equal basis.”

“I just wonder what [CompuServe] would say about (1) files taking up valuable space on their disk drives that only a very limited number of people can access, but for which they receive no additional revenue; (2) a news publication being distributed through CIS that directly competes with [CompuServe’s own publications], which the downloader (apparently) must pay for the right to read. This stuff is definitely not shareware, because you can’t see it before you pay for it.”

And then MAUG system operator, Neil Shapiro, responded: “First, I have told Mary (of MacTalk) and Mike (of A&F) that we will not be accepting encrypted files in the foreseeable future because of many complaints from our members. Now, keep in mind that no one ever figured these encrypted files would be a standard—they were ‘show issues’ being made available to paid-up readers via telecom. I thought it was a pretty acceptable idea at the time. I still do not feel that the idea of encrypted files is completely a bad one. Frankly, I think that the publishers of these types of magazines have a valid feeling that many, many people are downloading their magazines and not sending in the shareware fees. Now, unlike a program, you kinda know what a magazine is going to be like based on past issues of said magazine. So, while having an encrypted program might be asking for blind downloads, it would seem that having encrypted magazines in a series of nonencrypted issues gives the downloader a pretty good indication of what he or she will be receiving. After all, when you buy a magazine at the newsstand you do not (at least in New York City) hang out and read the whole magazine before you plunk down your money. Instead you make a ‘character judgment’ of the magazine based on your experience with back issues, the cover, and the table of contents. In a way, a magazine is sort of encrypted simply by the effort and time it takes to decode it with your eyes and brain….”

Interestingly, but probably not surprisingly, none of the messages I monitored or received opposing the encrypted files were from legitimate subscribers. Not one. Secondly, all four encrypted files were clearly labeled as encrypted and completely useless unless you were in possession of the encryption key. Because none of the negative comments came from legitimate subscribers, it was clear to me that the complaints were made only because the correspondent was suddenly confronted with being denied access to something he or she had not paid for.

I generally despise the bottom liners—those who find a sole source of motivation in numbers with dollar signs in front of them—but let’s play their game for a minute.

In the first eight months of electronically distributing The Arts & Farces Review, I had uploaded well over one and one-half megabytes of original material to the national telecommunications services. I only track the number of accesses on GEnie, and that number was well over 3,500. The average number of accesses for each piece is well over 150. That means that an average of 150 people download each of my pieces from GEnie alone.

Assume that 50 percent of those folks upload the material to either their electronic bulletin board system (BBS) or one where they live (most of our subscriptions come from folks who have downloaded the material from a local BBS). If 100 folks download the material from the local BBSs, our average first-level distribution rate is more than 7,500 for each file. With an average of six files each month, our average number of impressions each month is 45,000. Actually it is much higher than that. This 45,000 monthly impression figure represents only GEnie accesses and first-level redistribution. This does not represent the number of’ ‘pass-around’’ copies, user group distribution, Mac Underground penetration, CompuServe, EchoMac, FidoNet, and so on.

The sad fact was that not even one percent of those first-level distribution folks was subscribing (and the distribution rates were climbing at a steady and constant rate) and the publication was pulled from shareware distribution and made available on a subscription basis only.

One of the underlying research topics undertaken by the Alexandria Institute mentioned in Chapter 3 is the impact of the new communications media, such as hypermedia, on the existing copyright laws. According to Robert Kerr, chief executive officer of the Alexandria Institute, “A copyright system based on the publication, distribution, and compensation for a printed copy of a book may not be a viable model for the protection of intellectual property rights when the ‘copy’ is a single disc with the full text of 500 books representing more than 1,000 different proprietary interests.” As we have seen earlier, Mead Data has addressed this issue in a roundabout way by declaring its copyright on the page breaks contained in its Lexis legal data base. We also have seen how Ithiel de Sola Pool compares hypermedia and other forms of electronic publishing with forms of word-of-mouth communications that have never qualified for copyright protection.

The Alexandria Institute’s Kerr proposes a “pay for use” model for electronic publishing copyrights that would enable information providers and publishers to deliver their products to customers for the cost of the media on which it was contained. The information provider would be compensated by an accrual of payments based on a fee structure for the actual use of the information. This fee structure would “reflect the utility of the presentation to the user,” according to Kerr. “An electronic copy, for example, obviously carries a higher utility than simply viewing the information on a screen, and would, therefore, command a higher price.”

Kerr maintains that such a system would benefit the information provider directly by opening up new avenues of compensation for additional uses of an existing work; allowing price discrimination among types of users; adding incentives to increase the number of users; and allowing for a low-cost point of inventory for publishers. Similarly, libraries would be able to maintain a significantly larger collection at greatly lowered cost, and individuals would enjoy access to a broader knowledge base at a more reasonable cost.

Such a system surely would be met with resistance by both publishers (who would potentially lose duplication control) and libraries themselves, who now generally pay a fixed yearly subscription rate for material delivered on CD-ROM.

On a smaller, individual scale, I favor Whole Earth Review editor Kevin Kelly’s notion of “share-right,” which originally was used in reference to message postings (electronic word-of-mouth communications in the truest sense of the word) on telecommunications networks but that is equally applicable to broader electronic works. An encircled “s” similar to the copyright symbol (©), would be used to promulgate the notion: “You may reproduce this material if your recipients may also reproduce it.”

Hypermedia copyright issues are, in some ways, uncharted territory as far as copyright law goes. Current federal copyright statutes protect only original works of authorship that are contained in a tangible medium of expression. One could argue that hypermedia, and especially the networked hypermedia systems of the near future, are not tangible media.

As far as computer software (including hypermedia tools and documents distributed on disk or in other tangible form) is concerned, the courts have held that very specific aspects of the software are protected by copyright. The underlying source code—the code that actually is written by the programmer—is protected as is the object code, the interpreted or compiled source code that is read by the computer. Information contained in read-only memory chips (ROMs) also is protected as are underlying operating systems used by all computers. Finally, screen formats (generically known as the “look and feel” of an application) also recently have been granted copyright protection.

In the case of hypermedia, most attorneys agree that the underlying structure of a hypermedia document—the connections and links between bits of information—also would be afforded copyright protection, although there is little, if any, precedent in this area.

Using HyperCard as a specific example, the HyperTalk scripts and any external commands and functions (XCMDs and XFCNs) used in a stack would be covered by existing copyright laws, as would the links between the cards within the stack as well as links to other stacks. Many attorneys agree that not only would the source code itself (the actual HyperTalk scripts) be protected but so would the overall “structure, sequence, and organization” of the code itself. Current findings by the courts, and the Whelan case specifically, have resulted in the opinion held by many attorneys that the hypermedia data space itself qualifies for copyright protection. In many cases, the navigation of the data space is the most creative aspect of the hypermedia document and, the attorneys reason, should be afforded the same protections, pointing to the fact that data bases have been protected by copyright for quite some time.

Screen displays also have been protected by copyright in several cases, mostly involving computer games with screens that could be generated by any number of underlying source-code options. The courts have held that screen displays in such instances are afforded separate protection as audiovisual works. A potential double-bind situation could develop here, however, for the United States Copyright Office has maintained that screens may not be copyrighted as audiovisual works if they rely mostly on text to communicate their ideas. Under the current rules, hypermedia screens that contain mostly text are not afforded copyright protection separate from the underlying code that produced them.

This is the point at which the “look and feel” rulings and pending suits (most notably Apple v. Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard) come into play and is one of the areas that is most important to the hypermedia author and producer. In 1986, the courts held that screen layouts qualify as eligible for copyright protection against similar, but not necessarily identical, expressions. In this landmark case, the court held that the overall appearance of the screen is subject to protection, not just individual attributes of the screen, although the protection was conveyed to the underlying code of the application, not the audiovisual rules mentioned previously.

Currently, the computer industry is closely watching the developments in a suit brought by Apple Computer against Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard regarding the protections afforded the visual expressions inherent in the Macintosh operating system. Many attorneys argue that if a prediction can be drawn from past cases (although not necessarily precedent-setting cases), Apple will win because the Macintosh screen displays will be determined to be original expressions that can be implemented in other, original, ways.

Apple Computer is arguably right in defending its metaphor—that of a desktop. Although some would say that a desktop is too generic, let’s concede the point to Apple, for the time being. Apple, though, assumes that it has a right to exclusive use of certain implements—what it refers to as the Macintosh Interface, items such as windows, elevator bars, thumbs, files represented as icons, etc. And then there are the menus—Apple lays claim to any sort of drop-down, pop-up, spring-out, jump-back, or shut-up menus.

Many continue to argue that what visually and interactively became Macintosh—that is, what makes Macintosh distinctive from the other computers, its interface—came from Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). I do not want to argue or belabor that point, except to point out that in actuality, concepts such