Hope your weather is as good as mine.
jls@world.std.com
What is the biggest obstacle to achieving such a balance between the personal and the professional? And what is the one thing you consistently find to be a frustrating drain on your energy, something that fulfills neither personal nor professional goals?
The weather here is muggy, 90+ and overcast. But Friday night at Fenway I got to see an unassisted triple play, which made up for the lousy atmospheric conditions. Do they have much baseball in Greece or France?
nicholas@hq.media.mit.edu
Good question. The biggest obstacle is obstinate people who insist on being unwired and feel that endless face-to-face happenstance is more important than thinking. Also, some people think that the work-and-life divide is healthy and that you should do something you hate so that you can later do something you love. Funny idea. Some people may have to do that, but to want to do that is loony.
When you're signing a contract, meetings about intellectual property and lawyers worrying about the same are a big drain. I have spent more wasted hours arguing about patents and property rights and have yet to see this mean anything in the long run. I suppose that if I invented a machine that could turn lead into gold tomorrow, I would feel different.
No, no baseball in either place. But who am I to say? I barely know how many bases there are.
Subject: The Haves and the Have-Nots
jls@world.std.com
I wonder if the developments we've touched on -- information agents, notebook computers, remote E-mail, and so on -- are available mostly to those who have the resources to pay for them and whether that might result in an even larger chasm between the haves and the have-nots in society. Sure, you and I marvel at this stuff and put it to incredibly effective use, but what of the guy working two shifts on the line, who as a result has no personal life to speak of and is just squeaking by? Even more out of the opportunity picture are the homeless, who don't have phones, let alone computers.
There are encouraging signs. I've heard of voice-mail accounts being set up for homeless people seeking jobs. It allows them to interview for jobs and to give a phone number where they can be reached. They can dial their voice mail from a pay phone and retrieve any messages. So there do seem to be ways to include the less fortunate population in the opportunities that technological advances afford.
Do you see the technological advances we've been discussing as widening the chasm between the haves and the have-nots?
nicholas@hq.media.mit.edu
Technology does shrink the gap between the haves and the have-nots. We see almost no gender differences in personal-computer usage. Thirty percent of all black American teenagers have a home computer. The split remains economic but is dropping radically. Even 12% of American homes with less than $20,000 income per year have home computers.
But there are three ways to answer your question:
First, there are many people whose work is so unpleasant that play and work are almost as opposite as life and death. One has to hope that machines will do those jobs in the future and that people will engage in rich(er) experiences.
Second, there is evidence that on a global scale the gap between the haves and the have-nots will shrink, especially in telecommunications, where Third World countries are able to leapfrog the First World because they do not carry the baggage of history. The places with the most widespread use of cellular telecommunications are in Thailand and Hong Kong. Mexico and other emerging nations will soon end up with better bit-transportation systems than the "developed" world has.
Third, the chasm, perhaps widening, is generational. The young -- the rich and the poor, the black and the white, the short and the tall, the Christian and the Jew -- will swim in these new media, and many people of our generation won't know where to find a life jacket. A lot of people will have to start learning from their children and grand-children.
jls@world.std.com
Have you seen any evidence of broader social uses for this technology, such as the voice-mail example I mentioned or inner-city educational programs?
nicholas@hq.media.mit.edu
That would be best answered in your visit to the Media Lab and with an additional visit to the Hennigan School. The Hennigan School is an inner-city school in Jamaica Plain, Mass., where we have had a program for seven-plus years. Our work with LEGO and Nintendo has been very encouraging (to say the least). There is tons of evidence, largely anecdotal, that computers are a formidable agent of change. Truancy at the school dropped to almost zero, and attendance at PTA meetings rose to almost 100%, for example. But that is kids' stuff. The real change is that computers are creating a love for learning.
jls@world.std.com
Do you think this love of learning you comment on comes from the novelty of the technology for these kids or from the fact that their ability to create, essentially to teach themselves, is far more effective than having someone standing in front of them telling them what to do?
