Denis Hlynka: LOOKING BACKWARD: USING THE PAST TO EXAMINE THE FUTURE

In the year 1888, American author Edward Bellamy wrote Looking Backward, destined to become one of the most popular novels of the day. In that book, he wrote:

The almost universal theme of the writers and orators who have celebrated this epoch has been the future, rather than the past, not the advance that has been made, but the progress that shall be made, ever onward and upward till the race shall achieve its ineffible destiny.

This is well, wholly well, but it seems to me that nowhere can we find more solid ground for daring anticipation of human development during the next one thousand years by "looking backward" upon the progress of the past one hundred.

This paper looks briefly at some of the predictions for new technologies of the past, and provides an exploration of the accuracy of those predictions.

The purpose of our "virtual odyssey" is to take a trip back in time, when old technologies were new, in order to examine better our own excitement, hopes and dreams for the future of informational and instructional technologies.

We begin with a small sampling of examples from the literature that celebrates the contemporary wonders of the electronic world. Naisbitt sets the stage with the final hyperbolic sentence of his 1982 best seller Megatrends: "My, God what a fantastic time to be alive!" His implication, surely, is that this is the best time to be alive. Yet such a comment must be tempered with so many qualifications. Wonderful for whom? For the millions starving in India? For the civilian population of war torn regions from Kosovo to central Africa? For those suffering under intolerable dictatorships? For the urban homeless in rich, urban North American cities? Indeed, on second thought, such a sentence "what a wonderful time to be alive" reflects a kind of uncomfortable arrogance, at which one can only smile.

Or look at this exuberant comment by Hahn and Stout (1996), explaining the wonders of the Internet:

The Internet is, by far, the greatest and most significant achievement in the history of mankind. What? Am I saying that the Internet is more impressive than the pyramids? More beautiful than Michelangelo’s David? More important to mankind than the wondrous inventions of the industrial revolution? Yes, yes, and yes. (p. xix).

Once again, one is tempted to point out to the authors that they are over-exuberant, and that a more cautious conclusion might be "No, no and no."

Don Tapscott is yet another commentator who writes about the net generation, and is overly confident in making his claim that for the first time in the history of civilization the youth have taken over.

(Obviously he never studied Romeo and Juliet.)

For the first time in history, children are more comfortable, knowledgeable and literate than their parents about an innovation central to society…Already these kids are learning, playing, communicating, working, and creating communities very differently than their parents. (Tapscott, 1998,p. 1)

In a more formal and academic text, Khan (1997), setting the stage for an examination of Web-based instruction, gets caught up in the same rhetoric:

We are blessed with the emergence of the World Wide Web as one of the most important economic and democratic mediums of learning and teaching. (p. 1).

Yet one might just as easily argue the opposite. Who says that the World Wide Web is "democratic" or even that it is a medium "of learning and teaching"? It would appear that the world of advertising has filtered down into academe. There once was a time when scholars insisted upon an "academic impartiality." This seems to have been replaced by an advocacy model in which promises of any kind and any hue are fair game.

Our first point: The literature is filled with hyperbole which argues the "blessings" of the new technologies. Such hyperbole is counter-productive and even inappropriate.

It is typical to think of the information superhighway is a 90’s phenomenon. Yet any examination of the history of the telegraph will quickly reveal that an almost identical metaphor was used over a century ago. One such history brings home the similarity with its metaphorical whimsical title: The Victorian Internet: The remarkable story of the telegraph and the nineteenth century’s on-line pioneers. The author quotes Scientific American’s use of the highway metaphor over 140 years ago: "That instantaneous highway of thought between the Old and New Worlds." (Scientific American , 1858, quoted in Standage) Standage’s history is presented as an extended metaphor which argues that the telegraph can easily be conceived of in the same way we think of the Internet today:

Imagine an almost instantaneous communication system that would allow people and governments all over the world to send and receive messages about politics, war, illness and family events. The government has tried and failed to control it and its revolutionary nature is trumpeted loudly by its backers. The Internet? Nope, the humble telegraph fit this bill back in the 1800s. The parallels between the now ubiquitous Internet and the telegraph are amazing. Offering insights into the ways new technologies can change the very fabric of society within a single generation.

(Retrieved March 7, 2000 from the WWW at http://www.amazon.com.)

Our second point: the telegraph, beginning some 150 years ago, was conceived of as an electronic "highway", and can be seen in the same light as today’s new networked technologies.

One of the most persistent myths of our contemporary information society is that it is the youth who have taken the lead over their parents in technological sophistication for the first time in history. The Tapscott comment referred to earlier is a perfect example. But actually, this is not a new phenomenon and indeed, it has often been so. Youth has always been enamoured of new technologies. Radio was a particular case in point. The popular Hardy Boys series had the boys involved in The Short Wave Mystery back in 1945. The technology was both a backdrop and a significant element in the activities of this famous teen age detective series.

As far back as 1912, Franks Webster wrote The Boys of the Wireless or A Stirring Rescue from the Deep, a teenage novel in which the young hero, Tom, is clearly right at home with the technology:

"This little side show of mine is just an experiment on a small scale. I don’t expect any grand results. It will work out the principle, though, and when I get to taking messages --"
"What! You don’t mean to say you can do that?"
"Just that, Ben," declared Tom confidently.
"From where?"
"Well, mostly from Mr. Edison’s station at Sandy Point, and maybe some stray ones that may slip past him." (p. 3).

It is appropriate to refer back to Tapscott at this point, who argued that it is only in the 1990s that teenage youth became integrally involved in new technologies.

Even more telling was the activity of the "Radio Boys". Here an entire series (more accurately some three distinct series) of books was devoted in its entirety to the teenage fascination for radio, beginning in 1922. These books were often prefaced by noted radio pioneers who often highlighted the importance of youth in taking the lead, even ahead of adults. In 1926, one of these prefaces read:

In the brief span of three years, radio has inundated humanity in a wave of enthusiasm which has no parallel in history. Its influence is active along the sandy edges of the Sahara, under the burning sun of Asia, on the pampas of South America, and beneath the antipodian skies as well as the more highly developed communities of Europe and North America...

Who is responsible for this unequalled expansion? The American boy. Boys instilled with the enthusiasm, vigor, cleanness of mind and straightforwardness of purpose…have been responsible for the gigantic grip radio has exerted upon us all.

In the preface to The Radio Boys at Mountain Pass (1922), Jack Binns notes that many radio pioneers in fact began their careers as teenage amateurs.

Even Marconi himself likes to take pride in the assertion that he too was at one time an amateur, because he insists that during his early experiments he was only a boy amateur tinkering with a little known subject. (p. v)

Several issues emerge from this brief analysis. First, it is clear that Tapscott and others like him have not read the literature. Second, it is clear that Tapscott’s argument (the youth are more technologically literate than their parents) is historically inaccurate. Clearly, the activity, involvement and even leadership of youth in the World Wide Web was preceded by like interest in radio as well as in the telegraph before it.

A mighty maze of mystic magic rays,
Is all about us in the blue,
And in sight and sound we trace,
Living pictures out of space,
To bring a new wonder to you.

The busy world before you is unfurled,
Its song, its tears, its laughter too,
One by one they play their part,
In this latest of the arts,
To bring new enchantment to you.
As by your fireside you sit,
The news will flit,
And on the silver screen,
And just for entertaining you,
With something new,
The stars will soon be seen.

So there's joy in store,
The world is at your door,
It's here for everyone to view...
Conjured up in sound and sight,
By the magic rays of light,
That bring television to you.

(Lyrics to the first song broadcast on television November 2, 1936)

The introduction of a new technology has always made people a little giddy. There's inevitably a crowd of cheerleaders who will pick up a new technology's flag and run with it; foreseeing its promise, extolling its virtues, and predicting its pre-eminence in our lives. Just as with the Internet today, television's early proponents sang (literally, in this case) its praises and made feverish claims as to how it would change all of our lives for the better. And that it has done; although whether "for better” is still a matter of opinion.

In 1967, the introduction to a book entitled Public Television: a program for action reminded us that:

We have become aware of television as a technology of immense power, growing steadily more powerful. What confronts our society is the obligation to bring that technology into the full service of man, so that its power to move image and sound is consistently coupled with a power to move mind and spirit. Television should enable us not only to see and hear more vividly, but to understand more deeply. (p. 13).

When the smoke finally cleared from our honeymoon with television, however, sober second thoughts began to emerge. In 1978, Jerry Mander, in Four Arguments For The Elimination of Television described television's technique as follows: "The programming bias is always toward the more vivid, more powerful, more cathartic, more definite 'clean' peaks of content. The result, not the process. The bizarre, rather than the usual" (p. 314).

Mander continues, this time with reference to television news: "Since much of life is now removed from our direct experience, the news we get from afar becomes our total information on the forces that shape and move our lives. That makes the distortions in it a very serious matter. (p. 319).

As with many things in life, the initial promise of a technology never seems to live up to the hyperbole that surrounds its birth. Sooner or later, the ways in which we end up using our tools of communication reveal themselves, in the cold light of analysis, to be often less than flattering. In the future, will we find statements such as that from Hahn and Stout (above) as fatuous as we do the lines of the first television song?

Or, will we even think about them at all? As Neil Postman argues in Amusing Ourselves to Death: "Twenty years ago, the question, Does television shape culture or merely reflect it? held considerable interest for many scholars and social critics. The question has largely disappeared as television has gradually become our culture." (p. 79).

Is the Internet currently poised to become our future culture? Will we, in twenty years time, be less likely to think about it in terms that require us to examine its value and question the effects it has on the ways in which we entertain ourselves, do business, or educate our young? Let us hope not.

Today we argue that "virtual reality" is dangerous in that we totally immerse ourselves in another world. In that light, lines from the opening chapter of Don Quixote de la Mancha are telling indeed. The excerpt which follows places Don Quixote in his study, immersed in a world of virtual reality. But his virtual world is not on-line: it is achieved through books:

He plunged himself so deeply in his reading of these books, as he spent many times in the lecture of them whole days and nights; and in the end through his little sleep and much reading, he dried up his brains in such sort as he lost wholly his judgment. His fantasy was filled with those things that he read, of enchantments, quarrels, battles, challenges, wounds, wooings, loves, tempests, and other impossible follies. And these toys did so firmly possess his imagination with an infallible opinion that all that machina of dreamed inventions which he read was true, as he accounted no history in the the world to be so certain and sincere as they were…Finally, his wit being wholly extingished, he fell into one of the strangest conceits that ever madman stumbled on in this world; to wit, it seemed to him… that he himself should become a knight errant, and go throughout the world with his horse and armour to seek adventure... (p 19).

What more need be added? Perhaps Cervantes did not know the phrase "virtual reality", but he certainly knew the concept. We would be hard pressed today to describe any more elegantly the impact of total immersion in a technology.

There is a popular phrase which begins "What distinguishes humankind from the other animals is..." One of the answers is that humans use technology. We create and invent artifacts. Another answer is that humans are the only animals which know their history, and therefore can progress into a future. Yet, as this paper has shown, we tend to be sloppy with our history. We forget that there is a technological imperative which has always existed within our psyche. One result is that we make extravagant claims that what we do is new, when it is not. The 1994 motion picture The Hudsucker Proxy has its lead character "inventing" the hula hoop, the bendable straw and the frisbee. But in fact, the fictitious Hudsucker Industries invented none of these. Does it matter? Of course it does. History is a record of our experiences. These experiences, when put together, add up to where we are now and point to where we might be in the future.

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