Future Perfect

by Robyn Williams

  The panel nodded, somewhat perplexed at my inventiveness, and moved on to the next topic (Beyond Viagra or whatever).

  So far, so plausible. Matt Price wrapped the segment and we repaired to the green room and drinks. My eye suddenly caught the TV monitor that continued to carry the ‘live’ Fox transmission. And there I was, pontificating about nanos and organs. But how come? The session had finished. Then it dawned on me: this was the news, and there was I making it.

  A fanciful eruption, a frolic of desperation, was off and running. The next day it featured on page five of The Australian. Then I was called by Radio 2UE for extended comment, and then by a Toowoomba station and the Channel 10 morning show. I passed on Channel Seven’s Today Tonight because I was too busy.

  So this was ‘news’ in commercial broadcasting land. For decades I had constructed carefully sourced stories for the ABC science programs, often of momentous import (world poverty, plagues, cures for most things, brain transplants), and the take-up was vanishingly small. Now I had manufactured a totally unoriginal whimsy on Fox TV off the top of my head and the world stampeded.

  After 35 years of broadcasting, I still get dumbfounded.

  My point is that there is so much factoidal material sloshing around out there that what we need is a means to focus it, rather than simply more stuff. Little discussion on communication these days is about content, very much about distribution.

  So how do we get-as writer Brenda Maddox once asked in her book Beyond Babel-beyond the cacophony of too many messages?

  To answer that question about the future we need to delve into the past.

  In human history there have been two basic kinds of message. One is ‘Here come the Huns, let’s scarper!’ The other is ‘Darren’s looking smug, I think he’s done it with Sonya.’ One is fact, knowledge raising the alarm. The other is gossip, feeding the mill. We need both.

  We need gossip, as Professor Robin Dunbar, professor of evolutionary psychology at the University of Liverpool has pointed out in Grooming, Gossip and the Evolution of Language, because it is the glue of social groupings. When our forebears left the shelter of forests, he surmises, and could no longer sit grooming each other, looking for nits and sharing tickles, because the exposure of the plains made us too conspicuous, we had to go in for virtual grooming instead: gossip. Words replaced soothing fingers.

  Hence pulp fiction, TV soaps, Hello magazine, text messages on mobile phones and Paris Hilton (she had to get into this at some stage, she’s like a walking computer virus). Should we fret? Well, perhaps not. As the late Douglas Adams pointed out, we don’t condemn the telephone of old simply because Aunty Freida was fond of chatting on it. Phones can still be used to convey the election results or the coming of peace. The technology is neutral.

  But what if the noise of chattering becomes so intrusive that it becomes difficult to find-to hear-that other component of communication in a civil society: information and ideas? How come my blathering about nanobots on Fox seemed to give me more exposure than countless science reports on ABC Radio? The answer may be in recognising where we are in this present communications revolution and seeing whether we can steer it to a more coherent (and less noisy) future.

  So where do these ‘revolutions’ come from? Ten years ago, in a book on media (Normal Service Won’t Be Resumed), I quoted geographer Dr Peter Hall, who sees media being pushed by innovations in transport, each on a roughly 50-year spurt. Thus, 150 years ago, with the triumph of the railways, came the electric telegraph (to advise when trains would arrive), primitive phones, the penny post, Pitman’s shorthand and photography. The next revolution, 100 years ago-coinciding with the arrival of cars and planes-brought the typewriter, the phonograph, duplicating machines, linotype, the cinema and radio.

  Fifty years ago, with the start of the jet age, we had, network television, photocopying and the programmable computer (ENIAC in the USA, SILLIAC in Australia), multimedia and convergent information technology. The fax, as ever, is an anomaly, having been invented long ago but finding its heyday only in the 1980s. My own office fax was turned off a year ago, as its load of junk paper came to kilos a day and threatened to choke the building.

  If Dr Hall is right, what do we make of the present transition and where might it lead? If we follow his formulation and look at links between media and transport, what we find is gridlock and chaos. Trains, first used for primitive transport two centuries ago, are trundling embarrassments, at least in Britain and most of Australia. Jet planes have ‘liberated the masses’, as cars did before, and are a cheap if temporary bonanza. (There is heated debate about the greenhouse cost of passenger planes and much sneering about ‘stag party excursions to Noosa’ by hoi polloi, but less sniping about executives flying to yet more meetings.) We move too much and are beginning to think about the benefits of staying still.

  And much the same is true of communication. It is fast, global, overwhelming-billions of people shifting masses of stuff. Yet, at the same time, creativity is in stasis. The Australian movie industry has rarely looked weaker; theatre is struggling; the bulk of television is reality/soap shows plus unlimited cops. Leading thespians tell me they now train corporate executives in public speaking because acting roles have dried up. If the technology of production is so cheap and flexible, why isn’t everyone and his best mate making drama, shooting documentaries, being creative?

  But it’s all there on YouTube.com, comes the reply. Instead of elite hand-me-downs, you have programs for the people from the people. The same with bloggers. Newspapers and TV may face a collapsing audience but the Internet offers millions of independent sources. Get modern! But does this amount to much more than home movies on the world stage, rant in lieu of journalism?

  Is this present messy revolution, then, really a shakedown of powerful owners and snobby public vehicles (ABC, CBC, BBC) in favour of a decentralised, freewheeling new media? Is it, as Malcolm Long (former CEO of SBS and of the Australian Film, TV & Radio School) asserts, as important as Gutenberg’s printing press and as significant as the first industrial revolution? Perhaps. It depends on what happens next, on how we choose the communications future.

  * * * *

  It is certainly true that the speed of service can be staggering. Bill Dutton, the first ever professor of Internet studies, who is based at Balliol College, Oxford, told me of his sudden realisation that it was quicker to look up a fact on his computer than to cross the room and pick a book off his shelf. But it helps to know what you are looking for.

  Two gaps persist. One is for those who don’t know what they are looking for, because they have never heard of it. This brings up the supposedly elitist Reithian big idea that the noble ambition of public broadcasting is to offer the populace something they don’t yet realise they want. If you are convinced you are very much a consumer-even of life-and not much a citizen, then, living on Planet Selfwill not encourage you to explore beyond your self-defined universe.

  For example: I was once asked to address second-year biomedical students at the University of New South Wales, where I am a visiting professor. I based my talk on two premises: that none of them had ever heard any of my programs (true); and that they all had some topical awareness and would therefore be interested in the science-related news stories of the previous week (false).

  Those seven days had been a bonanza of science news items (speed-of-light controversy, space-shuttle worries, new drugs), yet no one knew about them. None of those twentysomething students, supposedly the brightest of the bright, read newspapers or watched the television news (let alone knew where on the dial to find ABC Radio National). In a world with too many choices, you settle for what you know.

  The second gap consists of the dispossessed and impoverished. Seventy per cent of the world’s population has never heard a dial tone, let alone handled a computer. This is where the first opportunity for the future comes up. What many of the world’s poor are doing is trying to jump the first 150 years of Peter Hall’s communic
ations revolutions and go straight to the next one: elaborate mobile phones (cum texters, cum cameras, cum libraries). One superphone shared by a developing-world family could make a vast difference to their lives without the infrastructural clutter the rest of the world has had to put up with.

  There is also the environmental question. Each laptop requires ten times its weight in carbon to manufacture. Many machines are used for only a fraction of their possible lifetimes (fashion again). As long as they haven’t been used much to play games, which burns up cooling systems, they can easily be exported to developing countries for free distribution and a valuable second life. The European Union is legislating to make this happen.

  The new technology could, indeed, be a means for bringing education and enlightenment to those so far deprived. But it is a big challenge and needs effective policy to make it happen.

  * * * *

  On the creative side the challenge is trickier. Until now it has been assumed that being in the communications business is a bit like becoming a rock star-muck about in the garage long enough, do enough gigs and, with luck, you’ll make it. There are plenty of media courses around and thousands of students enrolled, but I come across few who have a solid preparation for broadcast program production or for journalism. They can juggle gadgetry like wunderkinder, but don’t ask them to write a program script.

  Which brings me to the technology itself.

  Each new step in communication is invariably greeted with fear and loathing. Gutenberg’s books were resisted by the Church because they threatened to diminish the power of the clergy. Offering the Bible in English instead of only Latin was also a risky business as both Wycliffe and Tyndale discovered. Typewriters (as Ted Hughes records below) seemed threatening; computers (‘word processors’) much worse. Fleet Street resisted the Murdoch move from hot metal to desktop publishing. Video promised to kill the radio star.

  We are all still here-newspapers, radio, books. More or less. But the style has changed. This is what the late Ted Hughes, former British poet laureate and widower of Sylvia Plath, wrote about his own experience. When young, he used to make summaries of plays or novels for a film company. Then, at 25, he turned from the fountain pen directly to the typewriter. ‘I realized instantly that my sentences became three times as long, much longer. My subordinate clauses flowered and multiplied and ramified away down the length of the page…’

  So much for typewriters, then came the e-revolution. Ted Hughes had been a judge on a children’s writing competition for over three decades. Entries used to be no more than a page or two. ‘But in the early eighties we suddenly began to get seventy- and eighty-page works. These were usually space fiction, always very inventive and always extraordinarily fluent-a definite impression of a command of words and prose, but without exception strangely boring. It was almost impossible to read them through.’ Word processors had arrived!

  Now, it happens that I still use a mechanical typewriter to prepare all my radio scripts. This forces me to be precise and make only minor alterations when we get to studio. I do this for a number of reasons.

  First, it frees the computer on which the recorded interviews are played. Second, I use recycled paper. All the thousands of uncollected print-outs, chucked press releases, failed photocopies, provide a colossal mountain of wasted paper. I turn the pages over and type. My paper bill over 35 years has been nil. Third, I know my using a typewriter infuriates the neophiliacs. All the chaps who have spent two decades banging on about processing systems and slim-line gadgets perceive my rejection of their obsessions as an attack on their manhood. In all this time NOT ONE PERSON has mentioned, as Ted Hughes did, writing style and content.

  Meanwhile, of course, -while no one’s looking, I write books and articles on computers. You have to. Editors refuse to accept actual pages and, frankly, sending whole books down the phone lines is almost magically impressive. But the question of style remains unexplored. I suspect the problems have been solved in professional publishing, where the efficiencies of receiving movable electronic print make up for the extra pains great writers may formerly have taken with their prose. The writing of private people and managers has become both bland and terrifyingly prolix. It looks so good on screen or in print: neat paragraphs, marching vertically forever, no corrections visible-as finished as an Act of Parliament. (For a comparison of the poetry of the King James Bible version of the 23rd Psalm with what it might look like sent as a text message, see the end of this chapter.)

  Is style also affected by the torrent of e-messages? I now spend an extra two hours every day answering this stuff in terse non-sentences. Am I, are you, now writing more like R2D2 than like Milton? And what of those of us, young and old, who spend much of our days glued to screens? The brain scientist Professor Susan Greenfield is worried that we will become so isolated, our communications so chopped up in electronic bits, that we shall be altered as human beings. She asks in Tomorrow’s People:

  Will those who live in a century from now be socially inept, by the standards of today? If virtual friends replace flesh-and-blood ones, we shall not need to learn social skills, nor think about the unwanted and unpredictable reactions of others. So within this collective consciousness there need be no interaction, no action or response but rather, should we choose it, a passivity in which we are shielded from any disagreement or disharmony.

  The key word there is ‘choose’.

  * * * *

  In these ways our lives have been consumed by the e-revolution. Will the future make it all simpler? Well, the possibilities are staggering.

  Ten years ago, in Normal Service, I conjured the scenario of a person (P) on a Very Fast Train (dream on!) wanting a book. In P’s briefcase is a book with blank pages made of a plastic material that both feels and smells like high-quality paper. P takes out what I then called a Hypertel, but which now is more likely to be a multifunction mobile phone. The phone’s screen presents an Amazon.com-like range of available titles, P chooses one, and the required work now infuses the blank pages: pictures, colour, print, everything. P then settles down to read, making the odd note on selected pages that later can be printed off. When the book is finished, another button is pressed and the volume goes blank again, ready for the next infusion.

  The result of this kind of technology could be the elimination of 95 per cent of routine publications. Only collectors’ items, sentimental choices and rarities need fill your shelves. In future your library will be in your pocket.

  But will it? A decade on I still see walls of books in shops, and warehouses crammed with backlists. The technological possibilities are, however, much closer. In 2006, at James Cook University in Townsville, I met Mohan Jacob, an engineer from India who is trying to use new materials-ceramics and superconductors-to improve reception and transmission of mobile phones. He also showed me a polymer sheet. It represents, he tells me with huge enthusiasm, the next stage on from Gutenberg. The material can receive electronic signals that alter the configuration of its molecules. The result is print, changeable print.

  Imagine now your newspaper of the future. Instead of buying your bulky set of large paper pages, many of which you immediately shed, especially on weekends when half of the paper is ditched unexamined, you will one day take one or two pages, click your paper of choice into them, add whichever sections you fancy, ignoring the others, and be charged according to your selection. No more printing lorry loads, carting paper to every town and outlet in the land; no more tonnes of unread returns, no more landfill.

  So why not stick to screens only? Because people won’t. Newspapers and magazines on your computer have been available for ages, but folk still trudge to the shop and pick up newsprint. In future they will get their newsprint, but without the trudge. And that newspaper will be updated to the minute.

  Books and newspapers: two examples of hundreds that the communications revolution might offer. On what basis should our future technological choices be made? My criteria are 1. environmental imp
act 2. efficiency and convenience 3. public demand 4. overall economy.

  Earlier I noted that the two main functions of communication are to exchange useful information and to gossip. I have assumed that gossip will look after itself. The only constraint on my generation’s phone chatter 30 years ago was the cost of a call. Let teens chat on-if they can afford it. In the process they will redefine ‘appointment’, ‘conversation’ and even time. Meetings and interaction will become almost continuous. We shall watch the social results with interest.

  The way forward for communications, in future, is streamlining and focus. Can we possibly cart yet more instruments (than phones, laptops, organisers)? Obviously not and, as we know, the move is well underway to give us something like my ‘Hypertel’, a computer/phone/camera/diary in one device.

  What about focus? The greatest frustration for most of us mired in this present e-revolution is the way information is fragmented. The TV in your American hotel with 240 channels and nothing to watch. The Googled reference with a dozen spellings of the name you want to check. A thousand possible sources offered when you want only one. What to do?

  * * * *

  Project BabelFish

  Do you remember the fish in Douglas Adams’s book The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy?

  ‘You’ll need to have this fish in your ear.’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’ asked Arthur [Dent].

  Ford was holding up a small glass jar which quite clearly had a small yellow fish wriggling around in it… [Arthur] gasped in terror at what sounded like a man trying to gargle while fighting off a pack of wolves.

  Once he had the Babel Fish in his ear, Arthur understood perfectly. The Babel Fish lives on brainwave radiation from every source but its host. It then excretes energy in the form of exactly the correct brainwaves needed by its host to understand what was just said.