by Kate Burns
Many people are trying to read the signs to prepare for what's to come. We listen to the prognostications of technological gurus, hunt through the business pages and writings of futurists for clues. Feeling uncertain, unprepared and continually behind the times, we are desperate for clear directions and predictability.
How different is our turning to the top players in technology from hiring someone to read chicken bones or crystal balls?
How technology will shape the future seems to be one big Rorschach Test. The future is what you want it to be until it becomes something else. The more articulate you are (could be read the more money you have and the better marketing plans you can create) the more convincing an argument you can make for advantages or disadvantages of digital developments, depending on your perspective.
In the feature article "Welcome to the Information Superhighway", (Globe and Mail, Sept.13, '97) Matthew Fraser describes how the "digital revolution" was more a marketing ploy than a possible reality. He is talking about what has been traditionally (if there is such a thing as tradition in this field) referred to has convergence.
"The frustrating lesson of the past few years is that the Digital Revolution has been based more on marketing fiction than technological fact. And the Information Superhighway, the most ambitious infrastructure project in history, has been driven mainly by the exaggerated rhetoric of the big industry players who are supposed to build it."
Fraser describes the invention of the 500-channel universe as a concept created by John Malone (whose cable empire includes 14.5 million subscribers and controlling interests in several major television channels). Fraser lists the inherent flaws in the plans for convergence and echoes George Gilder's comments in, Life After Television, Updated (Forbes ASAP, February 23, 1994). "The new technologies are often retrofit into failing industries... The publicity is easier to see than the broad tides of change that have swept through society...Most of the fiber-to-the home and fiber-to-the-curb companies have been disappointments."
Fraser and Gilder point in a different direction than Malone and anyone else heavily invested in convergence. How will the developments actually proceed? I don't think anyone knows for sure, but I'm definitely checking out what future-teller Gates has to say.