nicholas@hq.media.mit.edu
My workday has no pattern, at MIT or working on my book in Patmos, in France, or here in a hotel room outside Chicago. I would like to spend all my time focused on the book, but I always do E-mail first. Rightly or wrongly, I have an E-mail imperative. Sometimes it will take me three hours before I can get to work. But since I wake up anywhere between 4 a.m. and 10 a.m., there is no real pattern. I do my E-mail first thing, work on the book afterward, then answer things like this E-mail.
Subject: Technological Alienation
jls@world.std.com
What do you make of the alienation that's resulted from some advanced technology? For example, car buffs can appreciate the effect of a car's advanced technology on performance but can no longer get under the hood and fix the car. There's an old piece of wisdom that goes something like, "Never own anything you can't fix." As we get further and further from that, is more alienation likely?
nicholas@hq.media.mit.edu
Do you have a pet? You can't fix it when it breaks. You have a hard time even understanding what's wrong when it is sick, yet you communicate, in many ways, much more successfully with a pet than with a computer. The axiom of "Never own anything you can't fix" is a classic example of what was true in the industrial era but not in the information age. The difference between a buggy computer program and a faulty steam engine is that the engine likely will not work. By contrast, the program will exhibit some sort of behavior, and that behavior will allow you to debug it.
jls@world.std.com
We're heading into a holiday weekend here, and I'll be in Montreal for the jazz festival for the next couple of days. I'm bringing the laptop, but if you don't hear from me until Tuesday or so, you'll know the hotel had no jack for me to plug it into.
What does the market for 500 broadcast channels say about the technologies of intelligence and the creation of information agents? Do people want information agents -- what you define as computer programs with an expertise matched against your personal plans, needs, and idiosyncrasies -- making choices for them about things such as answering the telephone, routing mail, planning trips, looking for shopping bargains, or finding books to read and movies to see? Or does the ideal system still allow for serendipitous discoveries?
nicholas@hq.media.mit.edu
E-mail is truly a question of plugs, not electronic standards.
The answer is not what people want or don't want, since we currently have no choice in the matter. Remember that those 500 channels are advertiser supported and that the economic model of agents is pay per view.
For information agents, chauffeur, gardener, and cook metaphors work well, because each of those people has an expertise and each needs to use that skill in accordance with your desires. Having one does not mean you don't like to drive, garden, or cook. You just do it when it amuses you, not because you have to.
Also, agents do not lower serendipity but allow you to modulate it. Frankly, as I may have said earlier, serendipity plays a very minor role in my life at 7 a.m. Monday morning. By contrast, on a Sunday afternoon I am more inclined to read without focus and engage in the joys of chance, even read advertising (or answer your E-mail). Magazines, your business, tend to latch onto the more serendipitous end of the spectrum of information and entertainment, hitting the extreme in my dentist's office.
jls@world.std.com
What about the whole notion of shared experiences? If personalized information is the next big thing, then why are shared experiences so popular? Take, for example, the popularity of shows like "Oprah" and "Donahue." And I don't know how much coverage the O.J. Simpson trial is getting over there, but there's another example of attraction to the shared experience -- 95 million viewers watched as Simpson drove his white Ford Bronco along the California interstate system to elude arrest. Doesn't personalized information suggest less linking with others? Is such a community-oriented crowd likely to allow personalized information to take hold?
nicholas@hq.media.mit.edu
Shared experiences are vital. One is not trading them away. Most of them are headline news. I was actually logged onto MCImail while O.J. Simpson was driving down the Los Angeles freeway and knew about it while it was happening. I even downloaded the story at the time, versus waiting three days for it to hit the stale Herald Tribune we get here. The issue is less about trashing shared experiences than about having them asynchronously. Future generations will look back at our times with some amazement that millions of people looked at "Oprah" and "Donahue" all at the same time. They might understand sports, but nothing else need be presented in such lockstep fashion except to suit the advertisers.
jls@world.std.com
We saw it happen with the fax and with internal E-mail, but before those became accepted widely, a critical mass of users was necessary. In this picture you paint, when is it likely that we'll achieve that critical mass? (Or is it even necessary?)
nicholas@hq.media.mit.edu
That critical mass varies by business type and by personal characteristics, rather than there being some overall formula. Some CEOs are already very wired. I am willing to guess that your readers are more wired than Fortune's readers.
