The business of relocating households basically hasn't changed since the Roman Empire. People still have to show up at the house, manhandle the household effects, load them into a vehicle, and transport them to the new residence, where they are physically unloaded.
The real technological advances have come in the area of communications. But even in communications, it is not certain that the increases in speed and accuracy outweigh the additional costs. At the risk of being suspected of being a Luddite, I would say that technology in the moving industry has succeeded only in increasing the power bureaucracy can exercise over a cringing business community. The next big technological advance in my business must await the coming of the Star Trek age, when your household goods will be deatomized and reassembled at your new residence.
Sam Donaldson
Coanchor of PrimeTime Live, based in Washington, D.C.
Technology is revolutionizing the communications business. Satellites, of course, give us the ability to broadcast live anywhere. We've gone from reporting on a story after the fact to actually watching it as it develops. You are there! That has changed the shelf life of news stories. In the old days -- 10, 15, 20 years ago -- stories would take days or weeks to really develop because of the transmission time and the gathering-of-the-story time. Today everyone watches the chase. Everybody. With satellites, as far as any specific incident or act is concerned, there is so much of an immediate deluge of information that people don't have to wait.
On a personal level, my wife and I have range land in New Mexico, on which we raise cattle and sheep, a few goats. I keep the records and the books, using a computer, naturally. I do the ranch checks, using Quicken, a word processor, and a dot-matrix printer.
In broadcasting I continued using a typewriter until about 1991, when I finally threw in the towel. In the old days, when I was covering hard-news beats in Washington, we would write our minute and a half in sound bites. But today, doing these 15-minute-and-longer magazine reports, there is a lot of writing to do, and a lot of correcting, and a lot of revisions. Well, if you try to do that with a typewriter, it is just impossible.
My job has become far more difficult. When I was a hard-news reporter, covering hard-news events, I knew how to do it. I knew you needed to find out who was doing what to whom. And there it was. You went after it, you worked your sources, and you stood outside doors waiting for people to come out and talk to you. Today I need to think of some additional angle that's not the obvious. And, boy, thinking is the most difficult thing in the world.
Let me go back to the range. Up until this year we didn't have cellular service in the Hondo Valley, in New Mexico, so there was no way to contact anyone out on the range unless you had one of those very expensive radio systems. Now we have very cheap cellular service, so I can pick up the phone, dial the ranch foreman, and find him out in the middle of a pasture of 16,000 acres -- whereas before, I would have to wait until the end of the day. It saves me time. It saves me money. But it's also fun! It's fun!
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Stewart Brand
Publisher and founding editor of the Whole Earth Catalog and CoEvolution Quarterly (now Whole Earth Review ), and author of The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at MIT. Brand is based in San Francisco Bay, Calif.
I just finished writing a book called How Buildings Learn. It has 350 photographs and five levels of text on nearly every spread. I laid out the book myself in detail on a computer, and wrote the captions in the legend and the credits on each spread. That was easy to do with PageMaker and Quark. So I'm able to create a book myself.
Some critics are already saying that it's a tightly integrated, beautiful book, blah, blah, blah. Well, what they're responding to is a book that was designed in detail by the author! That was not possible until now.
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Frank Wren
Assistant general manager of the Florida Marlins, a major-league baseball team based in Miami
When we started the franchise, in the fall of 1991, one of the first things we undertook was to write a scouting program to give our scouts the ability to file all their reports via modem.
I could be sitting in a hotel in Cincinnati and have access via my laptop to every report we've had in the history of our franchise on every professional player in baseball. So if we're in the middle of some trade talks and I need to do some research on a particular organization, I can sort that database, which now has more than 18,000 records of professional reports, and say, "OK, give me all the top prospects in a particular organization." And then I can filter through that and pick out the ones that meet our criteria, whatever trade it might be. That research used to take me half a day, going through written reports. Now I can do it in less than an hour.
Voice mail has been a huge time-management tool in baseball. In our business, who knows where a scout's going to be? But I know I can reach our people within five hours at the very most by one call, because they check in on a regular basis.
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Seymour Papert
MIT'S LEGO Professor of Learning Research, based in Cambridge, Mass. He is the author of Mindstorms and the creator of Logo, a programming language for children
In 1964 I came to MIT from Geneva, Switzerland. It was the first place where you could use a computer for writing and really sit down with it and have a lot of time with it. It was a tremendous revelation; it allowed for a huge explosion of creativity. It radically changed my life. I began to do things I couldn't do before. I thought, "Wouldn't it be wonderful if children could have the same experience I am having? To go from imagining a project to being able to carry it out? Wouldn't it be wonderful if a kid could find not just a pen pal but someone who shared a particular interest? And the two of them could share ideas and could do things together?" So that started me on a mission.
