ARTS & FARCES internet

Adam Greenfield has written an excellent and truly insightful analysis of the US healthcare reform issue: “On systems, and what they do.” From the perspective of an American expatriate in Finland—or just about anyone in the developed world other than the US—issues such as universal healthcare were decided long ago. Political parties still argue about how best to meet the needs of the populace, of course, but no one talks about dismantling the social infrastructure. No one disputes the core tenets.

As Greenfield writes, “it’s not that the opponents of national health are playing the same game by a different set of rules. They’re playing a different game entirely. That is, a plurality of the folks who oppose some kind of public-sector involvement in health insurance almost certainly are not interested in helping to articulate a best-fit, balanced solution that would be minimally acceptable to everyone. Their all-but-stated aim is to deny, attrit, isolate, suppress and, ultimately, shatter their opponents.” Actually, the aim has been clearly stated, but that’s a minor point in a much bigger picture.

Opponents to national healthcare in the US have found an unpatched bug in the operating system that is American democracy, according to Greenfield, and all they have to do is exploit the vulnerability to win.

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).

Douglas C. Engelbart, the first of the second-generation hypervisionaries to follow in Vannevar Bush’s footsteps, realized straight away that while hypermedia was going to revolutionize our access to information, some sort of framework was needed to structure the capabilities we were going to be confronted with. His concept of the “augmentation of the human intellect” sprang from those concerns and has provided the framework for not only the budding hypermedia discipline, but most of the personal computer industry as well.

Regarded largely by his contemporaries as a very well-intentioned crackpot (sound familiar, yet?), Engelbart eventually received Department of Defense funding in the 1960s through the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA). Ideas that were birthed at Engelbart’s Augmentation Research Laboratory at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) include the mouse, windows, electronic mail, and computer conferencing. Engelbart’s augmentation system for the knowledge worker, however, remains to be implemented in a manner he considers to be acceptable.

If Vannevar Bush was the cerebral intellectual of the underlying concepts of hypermedia, Doug Engelbart was the task master, the visionary who got his hands dirty and got the job on track. Engelbart read Bush’s’ ‘As We May Think’’ piece while he was a radar technician in the Philippines during World War II. The ideas proposed by Bush festered until Engelbart was 25, living in the California of the 1950s, and decided to address in some manner the fact that the most pressing problems facing society were growing faster than the tools we used to solve them. Engelbart envisioned a tool that would give a small work group of people, working together, a better chance at solving problems that were becoming ever more complex.

The vast majority of American citizens want single-payer, universal healthcare coverage. Fully 72% (only 20% were opposed) of the citizenry want a “government administered health insurance plan like Medicare that would compete with private health insurance plans” according to a June 2009 New York Times/CBS News poll. A whopping 76% would settle for the public option.

Yet President Obama refuses to govern like he received a mandate. First refusing to consider a single-payer option and now signaling that he’s willing to jettison the public option as well. For what? Two Republican votes that will probably never materialize. Never mind that Obama campaigned hard on the public option being essential to healthcare reform. In fact, the only thing separating Obama’s healthcare plan from Hillary Clinton’s was mandated health insurance. Obama opposed making people purchase insurance they couldn’t afford.

What happened since the election? Has anyone asked Obama if he’d like some chicken with all that waffling?

Not only would the public option keep the private insurance companies honest, the plan would provide good insurance to millions who currently can’t afford it. But now Obama seems to be trying to talk himself—and us—out of the only real way of containing healthcare costs.

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).

While Bush’s envisioned microfilm application—the memex—was never quite realized (microfilm technology still hasn’t advanced that far), the underlying concept of his vision remains intact and very much alive in hypermedia. The idea of associative thought and information indexed and readily accessible has been made possible through the evolution of the personal computer. Commercially available hypermedia products, especially those that are used with the Macintosh that are based on these ideas, currently enjoy a widespread reception.

The underlying concept of associative links and navigational trails, originally proposed by Vannevar Bush, remains intact and forms the basis for hypertext and hypermedia. Only the media itself has changed; electronic storage and display implements are used rather than the microfilm technology.

One of the most daunting obstacles to the widespread acceptance of hypermedia as a communications medium has been the high cost of mass storage.

When I purchased my first computer, I sincerely felt that I would never have need for more than 143K (the standard disk format of the Apple II) at one time and that, oh, I might need more eventually, but I could always just buy another disk. As of this writing I have in excess of 170 megabytes of data storage on-line and I spend every Sunday evening clearing space for the next week’s additions. The cost of appropriate mass storage (about 40 MBytes is a minimal configuration for an individual hyperspace) has begun to fall drastically and various vendors provide options within the reach of the individual. Optical storage systems also are becoming available at almost mass-market prices and with their capacity of easily handling in excess of 550 MBytes of material (550 million characters), the mass-storage horizon looks very bright indeed.

The Carnegie Council has published an excerpt of a panel discussion in which Jay Rosen, faculty memeber of New York University’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute, discusses the ethic of the link (YouTube; 4:21). Hypertext links on the web are how we connect knowledge to people, and sometimes more importantly, connect people to people.

The key to what Rosen is saying is that links connect people to knowledge wherever that knowledge may reside. Corporate media has just started to understand the concept that you can grow your audience by sending them away rather than trying to hold them captive. Outbound links are important, what makes the web the web.

Similarly, Kevin Marks has written an important analysis of how Twitter works and why it became so popular. Early proponents of the web—myself included—bemoaned the lack of bidirectionality in its hypertext links. Marks astutely points out that the unidirectionality of hypertext links on the current web enable “the power-law distributed link structure that builds a small-world network to connect the web and provides the basis for Pagerank. Being able to link to something without it having to give you permission by linking back is what enabled the web to grow.”

If you provide content on the web, you need to listen to this video clip and understand what Rosen is saying and then study Marks’ analysis of Twitter. Therein is a large part of the reason why the news industry is in a tailspin.