A real estate agent builds a model of you from a succession of houses that fit your taste with varying degrees of success. Now imagine a telephone-answering agent, a news agent, or an electronic-mail-managing agent. What they all have in common is the ability to model you. It is not just a matter of completing a questionnaire or having a fixed profile. Interface agents must learn and develop over time, like human friends and assistants.
You might be willing to pay the Boston Globe a lot more for ten pages than for a hundred pages, if you could be confident that it was delivering you the right subset of information. You would consume every bit (so to speak). Call it The Daily Me. On Sunday afternoon, however, we may wish to experience the news with much more serendipity, learning about the things we never knew we were interested in, being challenged by a crossword puzzle, having a good laugh with Art Buchwald, and finding bargains in the ads. This is The Daily Us … These are not two distinct states of being, black and white. We tend to move between them, and, depending on our mood, we will want lesser or greater degrees of personalization. Imagine a computer display of news stories with a knob that, like a volume control, allows you to crank personalization up or down.
Imagine an electronic newspaper delivered to your home as bits. Assume it is sent to a magical, paper-thin, flexible, water-proof, wireless, lightweight, bright display. The interface solution is likely to call upon mankind’s years of experience with headlining and layout, typographic landmarks, images, and a host of other techniques to assist browsing … Imagine a future in which your interface agent can read every news wire and newspaper can catch every TV and radio broadcast on the planet, and then construct a personalized summary. This kind of newspaper is printed in an edition of one.
The best metaphor I can conceive of for a human-computer interface is that of a well-trained English butler. The ‘agent’ answers the phone, recognizes the callers, disturbs you when appropriate, and may even tell a white lie on your behalf. The same agent is well trained in timing, versed in finding the opportune moments, and respectful of idiosyncrasies. People who know the butler enjoy considerable advantage over a total strangers. That is just fine … Such ‘interface agents’ are buildable … It has become obvious that people want to delegate more functions and prefer to directly manipulate computers less. The idea is to build computer surrogates that possess a body of knowledge both about something (a process, a field of interest, a way of doing) and about you in relation to that something (your taste, your inclinations, your acquaintances).
Sometime in the next millennium our grandchildren or great-grandchildren will watch a football game (if they call it that) by moving aside the coffee table (if they call it that) and letting eight-inch-high players run across the living room (if they call it that) passing a half-inch football back and forth… All the resolution is provided everywhere for any point of view. Wherever you look, you see 3-D pixels (sometimes called voxels or boxels) floating in space.
Being digital will change the nature of mass media from a process of pushing bits at people to one of allowing people (or their computers) to pull at them. This is a radical change, because our entire concept of media is one of successive layers of filtering, which reduce information and entertainment to a collection of “top stories” or “best-sellers” to be thrown at different “audiences.” … The information highway will become more of a boutique business. Its marketplace is the global information highway. The customers will be people and their computer agents. Is the digital marketplace real? Yes, but only if the interface between people and their computers improve to the point where talking to your computer is as easy as talking to another human being.
The media company is, among other things, a talent scout, and its distribution channel provides a test bed for public opinion. But after a certain point, the author may not need this forum. In the digital age, Michael Crichton could surely make far more money selling his next book direct. Sorry, Knopf.
As we go on-line and deliver more and more bits and fewer and fewer atoms, the leverage of owning printing plants will disappear. Even having a dedicated staff of reporters worldwide will lose some of its significance as talented free-lance writers discover an electronic venue directly into your home.
Should it really be unlawful to own a newspaper bit and a television bit in the same place? What if the newspaper bit is an elaboration of the TV bit in a complex, personalized multimedia information system? The consumer stands to benefit from having the bits commingle and the reporting be at various levels of depth and display quality. If current cross-ownership policies remain in existence, isn’t the American citizen being deprived of the richest possible information environment? We are shortchanging ourselves grotesquely if we forbid certain bits to commingle with others.
The entire conception and construction of the newspaper is digital, from beginning to end, until the very last step, when ink is squeezed onto dead trees. This is the step when bits becomes atoms. Now imagine that the last step does not happen in a printing plant, but that the bits are delivered to you as bits. You may elect to print them … or you may prefer to download them into your laptop, palmtop, or someday into your perfectly flexible, one-hundredth-of-an-inch-think, full-color, massively high-resolution, large-format, waterproof display (which happens to look exactly like a sheet of paper and small like one, too, if that’s what turns you on). While there are many ways to get you the bits, one is surely broadcast. The television broadcaster can send you newspaper bits.