Making the Information Society: Experience, Consequences, and Possibilities

MAKING THE INFORMATION S o c i e t y Experience, Consequences, and Possibilities JAMES W. CORTADA An Imprint of PEARS...

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MAKING THE INFORMATION S o c i e t y Experience, Consequences, and Possibilities

JAMES W. CORTADA

An Imprint of PEARSON EDUCATION London • New York • San Francisco • Toronto • Sydney Tokyo • Singapore • Hong Kong • Cape Town • Madrid Paris • Milan • Munich • Amsterdam

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Cortada, James W. Making the information society : experience, consequences, and possibilities / by James W. Cortada p. cm. Includes index. ISBN 0-13-065906-1 1. Information society—United States. 2. Information technology—Economic aspects—United States. 3. Information technology—Social aspects—United States. I. Title. HM851 .C676 2001 303.48'33—dc21 2001036585 Editorial/Production Supervision: Nick Radhuber Acquisitions Editor: Tim Moore Marketing Manager: Debby vanDijk Cover Design Director: Jerry Votta Cover Design: Anthony Gemmellaro Interior Design: Gail Cocker-Bogusz

© 2002 Prentice Hall PTR Prentice-Hall, Inc. Upper Saddle River, NJ 07458 Prentice Hall books are widely used by corporations and government agencies for training, marketing, and resale. The publisher offers discounts on this book when ordered in bulk quantities. For more information, contact: Corporate Sales Department, Phone: 800-382-3419; Fax: 201-236-7141; E-mail: corpsales @ prenhall.com; or write: Prentice Hall PTR, Corp. Sales Dept., One Lake Street, Upper Saddle River, NJ 07458. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, in any form or by any means, without permission in writing from the publisher. Printed in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 ISBN 0-13-065906-1 Pearson Education Ltd., London Pearson Education Australia Pty, Limited, Sydney Pearson Education Singapore, Pte. Ltd. Pearson Education North Asia Ltd. Hong Kong Pearson Education Canada, Ltd., Toronto Pearson Educación de Mexico, S.A. de C.V. Pearson Education—Japan, Tokyo Pearson Education Malaysia, Pte. Ltd. Pearson Education, Upper Saddle River, New Jersey

In an increasingly competitive world, it is quality of thinking that gives an edge. An idea that opens new doors, a technique that solves a problem, or an insight that simply helps make sense of it all. We must work with leading authors in the fields of management and finance to bring cutting-edge thinking and best learning practice to a global market. Under a range of leading imprints, including Financial Times Prentice Hall, we create world-class print publications and electronic products giving readers knowledge and understanding which can then be applied, whether studying or at work. To find out more about our business and professional products, you can visit us at www.phptr.com.

To my two sisters, Nina Winkler and Monica Ballard, whose lives and careers have involved information, books, and good deeds

Contents

Preface

CHAPTER 1

xiii

An Introduction to the Long Trip to the Information Age General Patterns of Information in American Life Birth and Evolution of the Information Age in America Events at Mid-Century Conclusions

CHAPTER 2

The Long Trip to the Information Age America’s Love Affair with Information Machines The Ubiquitous Typewriter

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1

6 12 20 22

28

31 32

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CONTENTS

Crunching Numbers: Adding and Calculating Machines Big Time Computing: Punched-Card Tabulators Hello!: Role of the Telephone The Radio in America Arrival of Electronic Entertainment: Television What Americans Thought of Information Just Before the Computer Conclusions

CHAPTER 3

Big Gizmos, New Tools, and a Changing Way of Life, 1950–1995 A Quick Course on How Computers Were Invented The Invention of Software Military Uses of Computers Business Uses of Computers Computers for Entertainment Consequences of the Computer Conclusions

CHAPTER 4

America’s Love Affair with the Internet Creation of the Internet Digitizing America the Small Way The Special Role of Globalization Conclusions

35 38 42 46 47

51 54

59

63 70 73 76 82 87 92

97 99 114 124 127

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CONTENTS

CHAPTER 5

How Information Is Playing a Bigger Role in American Work Some Realities About the American Economy Information Workers and Knowledge Management Book Publishing: As Source of Information Role of Newspapers and Magazines: American Information Landmarks Everyone an Information Technology Worker? A Peek at Our Future? Patterns in Work and Workplaces The Internet as a Source of Information Consequences and Implications for Worker Productivity Conclusions

CHAPTER 6

Information and Leisure Activities Informationalizing Sports: Baseball, Football, and Basketball Reading and Collecting Books for Entertainment Information, Tourism, and the American Vacation Pursuing Education on One’s Own Initiative Playing on the Net Television: A Media in Transition Patterns and Consequences Conclusions

136

139 145 150 154 162 170 174 178 183

190

193 202 206 216 222 227 236 240

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CONTENTS

CHAPTER 7

Information and Religion Patterns From the Age of Paper Origins of American Religious Practices The Special Role of the Bible Role of Radio and TV Cyber-Religion: Religious Life and the Internet Consequences and Possibilities

CHAPTER 8

Public Policy and Information Origins of Policies and Infrastructures in the Age of Paper The Special Role of Book Banning The Special Role of the Press Expanding Access to Information Policies and Infrastructures in the Electrical Age V-Chips and Television Recent Trends in Regulatory Practices Uncle Sam, the Ultimate Venture Capitalist of Digital Technologies The Special Case of the Internet Conclusions

CHAPTER 9

A Digital Democracy How Will e-Democracy Evolve? The Special Role of the Internet So What Are We to Do?

249 253 255 261 268 276 286

294

299 302 307 311 314 318 320 324 329 332

340 345 350 358

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CONTENTS

CHAPTER 10

The Future of Information in America Does Technology Have a Will of Its Own? Some Basic Assumptions About the Future How Information Technology Is Affecting Our Future Effects of Further Economic Globalization on How Americans Use Information American Values, Beliefs, and Habits The Nature of American Information Conclusions

CHAPTER 11

Leveraging Information for Fun and Profit Consequences and Possibilities for Workers and Managers Consequences and Possibilities for Players Consequences and Possibilities for the Religious Consequences and Possibilities for Public Officials and Citizens Some Final Thoughts

CHAPTER 12

Learning More About InfoAmerica Historical Background The Telephone

369

373 378 382

390 395 400 404

412

416 419 421 425 428

431 432 434

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CONTENTS

The Computer Economics of the Information Age Work in the United States Sociological Views of Information in America Leisure in the United States Religion in the United States The Internet Public Policy and Information Future of Information in America

435 437 438

Index

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440 440 442 443 446 449

PREFACE

One can hardly escape the notion that many nations are evolving into new forms, often simply labeled the Information Age or the Information Economy. While changes are clearly underway, they are not isolated from past experiences. Societies have long rooted their values and behavior in earlier experiences, actions, and memories that influence today’s patterns of development. Current experiences surrounding rising standards of living in advanced industrial societies, the rapidly expanding deployment of telecommunications and the Internet, and the growing deployment of computer-based technologies in work and products all suggest that much is changing. To be sure, that is the case, but not the whole story. The whole story would have to take into account the fact that this process of evolution to perhaps an “Information Society” has been underway not only for decades, but centuries. That process of historical evolution—the experience I refer to in the title of this book—is insufficiently acknowledged by those who want to describe what is happening today. Yet it is that experience which profoundly influences the nature of contemporary behavior. There are consequences of any action, and the happenings in any society have always had many. Therefore, any discussion about how a society

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evolves takes into account the consequences of its actions, and hence the reason for the second word in the subtitle of this book. Consequences must be linked to experience if we are to get a sense of what is happening today. Finally, all change presents opportunities—I chose to use the word possibilities—and the actions people take today mimic many of those taken in the past: they identify new things to do and take action. Making the Information Society: Experience, Consequences, and Possibilities is thus about how these three elements have come to influence the evolution of society. To illustrate the process of evolution, I have chosen to present the experience of the United States because it clearly is recognized around the world as a society that is either already living in an Information Age or is well on its way to being an information society. While the definition of the terms Information Age and Information Society remain fuzzy at best, we cannot ignore them because they are in such wide use. Furthermore, they help provide focus on the fundamental role of information and its artifacts in everyday life. When we probe more deeply under those labels, we see specific patterns of behavior that are familiar to residents in other nations. Americans love technology and have long been obsessed with access to information. They have always used both to make a dollar, to enjoy life, and to build a better world. The extensive use of information and its technologies, from broadsides to broadcasts, from the telegraph to the Internet, is so American. A key premise of this book is that extensive use of information is a fundamental feature of society and culture in the United States. Americans collectively admire information technology and the use of its byproducts: data, information, and knowledge. Information content plays a much larger role in American society than is often recognized. Information is exploited for fun and profit, always tied to action. Conversely, entertainment and leisure activities have frequently been a source of new information. But the fundamental point is that information in all its variant forms is central to any appreciation of what happens in American society. This feature must sit alongside others that we have come to believe make up American culture, including respect for the rights of individuals, freedom of speech, the impulse to be active in business, the love of law and democracy,

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and the utopian aspiration to build a better society at home while serving as a model for the world. If we recognize the special role that information plays in the evolution of American society, we gain yet another useful perspective on how this nation came to be what it is and how it might yet evolve. Information and its technologies are not subjects restricted to engineering and business history; they are also very social and cultural in form. Because they were used so extensively across the centuries and by such a high percentage of Americans, I cannot avoid the conclusion that the topic of this book is crucial to any appreciation of what has been happening in the United States. These comments may seem disingenuous to Europeans and East Asians, but they are not intended to be so. They simply reflect the American condition, stated at no intended expense of any different society. Other countries have also relied on information and its technologies, and in recent years we have seen an enormous increase in the adoption of computer-based tools around the world. But that is another story for a different book. The reason for selecting the United States grew out of the fact that so much was done with information and its technologies, often sooner here than in other countries. To understand the American experience enriches our appreciation of what is currently happening in other industrialized nations that are beginning to evolve into service-based economies. A second point is the fact that Americans did not get to the Information Revolution or the Information Age in the 1990s or even in the 1970s or 1980s, or even with the arrival of widespread use of computers in the 1960s. That just did not happen overnight. European residents in North America came to the New World literate, with an historical desire of freedom to live as they chose. They did not hesitate to use information to achieve their objectives. They devoted considerable time, effort, and resources over the next several centuries, exploiting existing technologies and inventing new ones that made the availability and use of information an important feature of their lives. Regardless of what one may want to call our era, the fact remains that Americans have been at this information game for a very long time. That observation leads first to a different, more enriched view of how this

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nation developed and second, it suggests how we might evolve in the future. While the future is difficult to predict, the constant influencing features of our world are less obscure. This book is not intended to be a formal academic monograph. That means several trappings of sound scholarship are missing on purpose. First, I do not engage in extensive dialogues with scholars who have written on various aspects of this story, arguing against or agreeing with one point or another. Rather, I use their findings and data. Such a dialogue would have led to a much larger book, something neither I nor the publisher wanted. Second, this is not a complete or definitive history of the subject. I have left out, for example, long discussions about how one sector of society versus another viewed and used information, such as women versus men in one period or another, or the approach of one class, ethnic group, or region over various periods. I recognize that the book may be criticized for that, but I opted to take a run at the “big picture.” Third, I took a great risk in generalizing throughout the book, even though I recognize that whenever you generalize, the generalization has its exceptions and thus is never quite right. I generalize because this book is intended to generate not only awareness of basic info-features of American society to inform or entertain, but also to offer some basic insights that can influence future behavior, in areas such as public policy or business strategy. These three decisions put this book at odds with what experts normally prefer to see. They like to describe differences and nuances in how various groups in society viewed an issue. Generalizations should always be extensively qualified. But, my goals are different. The biggest objection might be to the underlying use of the term American society as if it were one monolithic, homogeneous one, with everyone behaving the same way. Obviously this is not true; however, I contend, and have written this book with the belief, that there are some features, even myths, to which Americans subscribe, that influence their behavior and the way they see themselves. Scholars for most of the second half of the twentieth century have patently rejected national characteristics as a viable notion. In large part they reacted this way because of the world’s experience with Nazi Germany and its racist policies. These policies were

PREFACE

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based on generalizations believed by its political leaders, and influenced such initiatives as the extermination of Jews, gays, the mentally ill, and a variety of ethnic and national groups. However, I think the wholesale rejection of the notion of national characteristics does a disservice to the general reader. If a scholar wants to describe differences in attitudes and behavior of one ethnic group or another within a pluralistic society such as that in the United States, the rejection is essential. But there are times when national generalizations are useful because a pattern of behavior or belief is sufficiently extensive, regardless of class or race. I think the role of information fits into this category. I am referring to a predisposition. In the case of the United States, there is clear evidence of the love of information and of its use, just as there has long been great nervousness about curtailing application of the First Amendment, even though Americans at times become frustrated with comments made by unpopular groups (e.g., those who want to burn the American flag or curtail public prayer). I am not alone anymore in thinking of national features. In the area of political science, for example, after over a half century of silence on the subject, scholars are beginning to pick it up again. Colin Crouch has written about preconditions of modern corporatism. The distinguished political scientist John Hall has called on his colleagues to identify national characteristics.1 Alex Inkeles went the extra step to do this in looking at the role of democracy. In fact, I found his definition of national features useful in writing this book: “National character refers to relatively enduring personality characteristics and patterns that are model among the adult members of a society.”2 When we get to the period of the personal computer, there is ample survey data to demonstrate specifically patterns of use. To quickly illustrate the point, between 1984 and 1997, the U.S. Census Bureau documented the expanded use of computers in the workplace, from 18 percent of the adult population having used computers in 1984 to 53 percent reporting they had in 1997. As the Internet expanded, so too did use of it, to the point where by the end of the century over 80 million Americans had logged on to it.3 We can, therefore, speak generally of American uses of PCs.

xviii PREFACE

This book is an extended essay intended to raise our awareness about the role information plays in our lives. I also want to suggest actions that can be taken by the nation as a whole and individuals in specific aspects of their lives, to leverage the information I present in this book. So, more than simply an historical essay, I have an agenda. Simply stated, it is this: Americans have a love of information and its technologies. They find practical uses for this information and its technologies in all aspects of their lives. They should continue to invest in the infrastructures, that make information available, and nurture an economic and political environment in which new forms are developed, brought to market, and exploited. Or, to use a wonderful idea developed by historian Joel Mokyr, leverage information and technology to advantage. His notion was that the Western World became prosperous because it leveraged technology.4 That pattern extends effectively to the role of information in American society. Now that I have written this book, I know that to have done the topic justice the book could have easily been twice as long. But by keeping it shorter and focused just on the American experience, I could communicate the key themes without the clutter of a larger tome. It became possible to write such a book because so many historians, economists, sociologists, and business professors have been nibbling at the topic from their various points of view. When you put together their findings, a new pattern emerges that was not so obvious before; We Americans love our information and extensively use its technologies. Like children with toys, we fill our homes and offices with new electronic gadgets as fast as they are invented and look to our engineers, scientists, and manufacturers to come up with yet additional ones. Simultaneously, you begin noticing that our political values concerning free flow of information, freedom of expression, and protection for inventors through patents, make it possible for Americans to have so much information. These circumstances also apply to all the devices that support this information, from pagers to personal computers, from scores of channels on television to fax machines and fat Sunday newspapers. I have concluded that our relationship with information is a far more pervasive feature of American life than journalists, historians, sociologists

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or political scientists have told us before. Until now, when they discussed the Information Age, many observers treated it as if it were something new, an emerging world of connectivity through the Internet with vast quantities of information. The discussion was normally all about computers. As you will see, they basically missed the big point, namely, that we have been at this for a long time and that it is about more than computers. As a result, information and its technologies have been a greater part of who we are than otherwise has been acknowledged. New waves of technology are part of a larger pattern making up the American experience.

HOW THIS BOOK IS ORGANIZED Because I intended to flush out only enough evidence to make my points, I chose to organize the material into three groups of chapters. The first four are intended to provide a very high-level, brief, general overview of the introduction and use of information and its associated technologies in the United States over the past three centuries. The chapters are full of generalizations to save time and space, and touch only on key issues with just enough detail to situate the current national experience in historical context. This context is intended to help the general reader get ready for the second part of the book. In the next five chapters, I look at various slices of American life, such as work, play, and religion, to probe deeper into the role of information and how it is used. In each chapter, I am biased toward the positive, emphasizing more what worked, while minimizing discussions about the fits and starts, exceptions and protests, failures and weaknesses. For example, I was less concerned about what computers could not do, and more concerned about what they did. Without apology, this book tells a story in relatively positive terms to emphasize what works and why. As with the first four chapters, each of these could have taken up a book or more, but we are on a fast trip through a great deal of material. The final two chapters address the question “So What?” Americans are a practical people; their love affair with informa-

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tion proves that. To know the history of the use of information in America is only entertainment if we do not go the extra step of exploring consequences and possibilities. As a manager, as a user of information and its technologies, as a parent, and as an American, knowledge about information is not enough. I want to apply the insights gained from such a book as this one. Chapter 1 sets the table by describing general patterns in the use of information up to the start of the Gilded Age in post Civil War America. The basics of many features of American use of information were laid down in this period. Chapter 2 takes the story to the point where the modern digital computer makes its appearance in the private sector. In this chapter I review many of the post Civil War electronic innovations and uses, such as those surrounding the telephone, radio, TV, and so many other devices. I also describe what Americans thought about information just before the arrival of the computer. Chapter 3 deals squarely with the development and deployment of the computer, including the personal computer. But I focus primarily on the impact of the computer chip and its uses. Chapter 4 is devoted to two issues: arrival of the Internet, and how it is being used. It is the most important evolution in information technology to have come in a long time and must be carefully understood. Beginning with Chapter 5, I start looking at how all the many iterations of technology, information tools (e.g., books), and data are used in various aspects of American life. In each of the next several chapters I look at one slice of activity, both historically and in its contemporary form. Chapter 5 looks at work. Chapter 6 is broad, covering a raft of activities not done at work: sports, reading and collecting books, tourism and vacationing, and adult education. I also look at the emerging role of the Internet as a source of entertainment and recreation. Because religion plays an important role in American society and is the venue for the use of all kinds of information and info-technologies, a whole chapter is devoted to this subject. Chapter 7 shows how what was learned in other areas of life are applied simultaneously in religious matters. Chapter 8 looks at how government officials work with, regulate, and influence the use of information and, more important, its

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infrastructure. Chapter 9 looks at democracy and the effects of information and its technologies on our political practices. An underlying theme in this book is the profound influence information technologies have on how information is used. Therefore, any appreciation of future developments has to be predicated on our understanding of what will come next in what is today the most important medium for information: digital formats. To that end, I have devoted all of Chapter 10. The final chapter discusses the implications of the findings from Chapter 10 and all the earlier parts of the book, and what these findings mean to individuals. I discuss these both in general and by slice of life, bringing to a logical conclusion my reviews of work, leisure, religion, and politics. The bibliographic essay is a sampling of additional materials for those who wish to explore more fully the themes and stories told in this book. One final comment on language should help. I use the word American very often to refer collectively to the United States, sometimes to Canada, but usually not, and to residents of this continent, even though some are not U.S. citizens. I did this for two reasons. First, it reduces the need for lots of qualifying language that would simply make the book longer, and second, it is my observation that in general residents on this continent reflected some common behaviors and lived in a shared environment in which the actions described in this book took place.

HOW THIS BOOK CAME ABOUT This book has a history that reflects a common American experience with information. One of the features of information in America is the openness with which ideas flow back and forth, causing people to put notions together in new ways, leading to different, often useful, applications. And so it is with this book. Although trained as an historian, I have spent the bulk of my adult life working at IBM—itself a major American provider of information technology since before World War I—selling, managing, and consulting on computer-related issues. It was at IBM that I learned about how computer technology is developed and used, whether for a mainframe or a PC. Colleagues at IBM, and even more important, my many

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American customers over the years, made sure I had ample opportunity to learn how to exploit and manage information and its technologies. That experience led me to write a series of books on the management of computing and later about the history of information processing in America I participated recently in a project that further shaped my thinking about the role of information in America and became the basis of much of the material in the first three chapters of this book. I became involved with a wonderful team of experts on information and business history and management that was writing a history of the role of information in America. They focused largely on the arrival and use of the enabling technologies, such as the telegraph, telephone, radio, television, transistor, and computer chip. Led by America’s premier business historian, Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., the team included Richard D. Brown, Richard R. John, JoAnne Yates, Margaret Graham, Richard L. Nolan, and Lee Sproull—all experts on various aspects of the role of information in America. I relied on much of their knowledge and publications to become familiar with important themes discussed in this book. The result of their effort was a book, A Nation Transformed by Information: How Information Has Shaped the United States From Colonial Times to the Present (Oxford University Press, 2000). But more important than the book were the lessons each taught me, sharpening my awareness of the many factors one has to consider in looking at the contemporary American experience with information. While our project was very historical in theme, and the book you are reading more focused on the present (but with historical perspective), they showed me the direct link between the past and today. This book is a direct product of their influence on me, hopefully a meaningful extension of the good work we did together. But in the end, it reflects my thinking and research and should not be seen as their endorsement of it. We are all on a journey of discovery of the American experience with information, and so over time we will refine our perspectives on different aspects of the story; it is a normal process in the creation of information and knowledge. Many people helped or influenced my thinking. The team that worked on the book mentioned previously is one group.

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One of America’s leading experts on knowledge management, Larry Prusak, encouraged me to pay greater attention to the role of information in the daily work of business workers. The great commentator of American society of the early 1800s, Alexis de Tocqueville, made essentially the same point: “Look at how Americans conduct business and you will better understand what America is all about.” Credit for the original concept of this book has to go to a highly experienced editor, Jack Repcheck, who urged me to write it and then gave me advice on how it could be improved, even as he moved from one publishing firm to another. The staff at the Charles Babbage Institute at the University of Minnesota, the premier center in the world for the study of the history of information technology, and the scholars who routinely use its resources, have been continuously helpful in providing me with information and insights that I used in this publication. Professor Edward Wakin, at Fordham University, mentored and challenged me on the ideas in the book and line by line as I sought to tighten my logic, defend it with research, and yet make it readable and sensible. This book, however, is the product of my own thinking and writing. I want to give credit to those who helped make it useful, but I must accept responsibilities for its weaknesses. This book is not a statement either of their views nor necessarily those of IBM or my colleagues there. I dedicated this book to my two sisters because they are typical of the kinds of workers I discuss—people who have built careers on information—one as a U.S. government executive, the other as a teacher. Both are extensive users of the Internet, read a great number of books, listen to the radio, watch television, subscribe to newspapers, talk on the phone, love wireless communications, and are defenders of the political values that made all this possible. Tim Moore, my publisher at Prentice Hall, played an important role in the development of this book. He did more than just agree to publish it; he helped frame some of its arguments and focus, as a world-class editor should do. I also want to thank the production team at Prentice Hall for their good work in getting this book in print efficiently and in a timely manner, and in particular, Nick Radhuber. Finally, I cannot

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overlook my wife, Dora, who made it possible in countless of ways for me to find the time to work on this project over the past five years. James W. Cortada

ENDNOTES 1. Colin Crouch, “Sharing Public Space: Status and Organizated Interests in Western Europe,” in States in History, ed. John A Hall (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986): 177–210; Hall took a similar position, Ibid., 20. 2. Alex Inkeles, National Character and Modern Political Systems,” in Psychological Anthropology: Approaches to Culture and Personality, ed. Francis L. K. Hsu (Homewood, Ill: Dorsey, 1961): 173. 3. Robert Kominski, “Access Denied: Changes in Computer Ownership and Use: 1984–1997,” a paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association, August 1999, and available at the Web site for the Census Bureau, http://www .census.gov; “Tracking Online Life,” press release, Pew Internet and American Life Project, May 10, 2000, http:// www .pewtrusts.com/news/DocDisplay.cfm. 4. The book is intended for fellow academics but worth reading because it is full of wonderful insights: Joel Mokyr, The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990).

R E T P

From an Age of Paper to the Dawn of the Second Industrial Revolution, 1600–1875

C

H

A

1

AN INTRODUCTION TO THE LONG TRIP TO THE INFORMATION AGE:

The world which is arising is still half buried in the ruins of the world falling into decay, and in the vast confusion of all human affairs at present, no one can know which of the old institutions and former mores will continue to hold up their heads and which will in the end go under. ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE

A

s the pilgrims in the early 1600s were sailing toward what we would eventually call New England, they spent time preparing a document of understanding about how they would run their lives in the wilderness. They considered their journey to be one to a New Eden, to a place where they could create a more perfect world, a world that had to include freedom to worship as they pleased and where the rule of law would prevail. These were literate passengers who worried about more than just making a living. They considered what quality of life they wanted. If you were making a movie of that journey, you could almost imagine the first Pilgrim jumping out of a rowboat onto Plymouth Rock with a newspaper under his arm so that he could read the latest news about stocks and the 1

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MAKING THE INFORMATION SOCIETY

price of pork rinds. But of course, all of that came much later. What really happened was that a group of determined, literate people introduced into the wilderness of North America their Old World culture which included the use of written and published information. A century and a half later, the British colonists were moving toward a military revolt against their home government. By the mid-1700s, they were straining against controls being imposed on them by London that they thought were restricting their freedom of expression and commerce. Into this environment came one Thomas Paine, writing what would become a bestseller by either colonial or today’s standards, a pamphlet titled Common Sense (1776), with more than 150,000 copies sold in that year alone. We remember this pamphlet as the most popular description written at the time of how bad the British government was, and equally how important it was for the Colonists to strike out on their own. It was written in the common language of the day without legalisms or esoteric language, appealing to a very wide audience with arguments they had been thinking about. A very important consequence was that the entire British colonial community shared for the first time a common body of information on political and economic matters. The pamphlet and the shared experience resulted in action, contributing mightily to the process of binding a people to a shared set of values. One of those values, argued in Common Sense, was that the citizenry should be informed—indeed had a right to be—an idea that stood in contrast to much of the prevailing opinion of the day in Britain. The future citizens of the United States bought into the logic; two centuries later it remains a basic pillar of American political thought. Push the calendar ahead another century, and you see the invention and deployment of a rash of information technologies. After 250 years of storing and using information on paper, Americans began creating and transporting it electronically. It began with the American invention of the telegraph by the Moses-looking Samuel Morse. Then came the American invention of the telephone, followed by exploitation of the radio in the early 1900s. Depending on whose history book

CHAPTER 1 • AN INTRODUCTION TO THE LONG TRIP

3

you read, television was an American invention of the 1920s and early 1930s (even though important early technical developments occurred in Britain and Germany), and was followed by the very American development of the computer and American inventions of the transistor, computer chip, personal computer, and the Internet. The last four were all genuine 100 percent certified American originals. Even in the Age of Paper, we have some unique American creations. The public library system (which expanded so well thanks especially to the generosity of industrialist Andrew Carnegie at the end of the 19th century), was typical Americana: philanthropic, tied to learning and education, and a byproduct of American capitalism at work. It continues today with another American capitalist, Bill Gates, also a product of American culture, putting up buildings at various U.S. universities and wiring schools for the Internet. Wealthy Americans of the late 19th century to the present have given generously to hundreds of colleges and universities, making it possible to build quickly an information infrastructure across the nation. Closely tied to that information infrastructure was an equally important network of public and private schools, from Beacon Hill in Boston to the western towns of American territories. The great American historian, Daniel J. Boorstin, has argued that these were established “to complete a democratic apparatus,” and that “never before in any modern nation had there been such a need, simply because the opportunity to enter institutions of higher learning had never been so widespread.”1 To get to college, you needed elementary and high schools. With those doors of economic opportunity opened, one could exploit knowledge and its artifact, information, more readily. As de Tocqueville had noted in the 1820s, much of American energy was always focused on business initiatives, with education an important tool in the arsenal of commerce. Boorstin added the logic that education reinforced democratic values. Whatever the motivation, educational investments led to a more literate society, one that could, therefore, access information; where anyone who was comfortable with using data could go about their business leveraging that information for

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personal advantage. North Americans always had higher rates of literacy than their European counterparts. In New England of the early 18th century, male literacy among whites of European extraction exceeded 80 percent, and rose to over 90 percent by the dawn of the next century. By the 19th century, white women generally enjoyed levels of literacy similar to those of men, and very high levels of literacy existed across the entire continent. One student of the subject concluded that, “the capacity to read and write was always present among a broad range of Anglo-Americans, and that by the early decades of the nineteenth century virtually all of the northern white population was literate.”2 In short, a major component of the information society was in place. Education and learning were one and the same, and were most attractive when used for practical purposes. The one major sector of American society that had very low levels of literacy, and hence limited access to large quantities of information, were slaves. Yet early on, even this group generally recognized the value of literacy. During the period in which slavery existed, a few learned to read and write. Freed slaves, although a tiny proportion of the general black population, also ascribed to literacy. As free persons after 1865, ex-slaves began remedying their problem of illiteracy, primarily through several generations of emphasis on the need for education. Their efforts were slow, stymied by segregation and Jim Crow practices, but resulted nonetheless in incremental improvements in literacy and education within the black communities across the United States by the 1970s, a century after emancipation. Even immigrants coming into the United States throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, either initially illiterate or literate only in their native language, made their acquisition of English a high priority. They saw it as an essential skill to have if one were to thrive in America. That attitude cut across all ethnic groups, economic conditions, and periods. This was the case despite the fact that there were obstacles to acquiring education. The Irish were kept in the lowest economic positions possible in New York and Boston and across the nation in the 1840s and 1850s. East Europeans


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experienced a similar problem in the 1890s through World War I. Women faced obstacles in nearly every decade of American history (but were not denied access to education after 1830–1840). If we think of the period prior to the use of electronic forms of information as an Age of Paper, but use some of the analogies we have come to apply to any description of computers as systems, we can see that the nation built infrastructures and systems to support the flow of information. Begin with the obvious: The United States created a postal system par excellence, which the new nation could hardly afford, but whose leaders felt it could not live without. We have freedom of expression and of the press, hard-wired into our political practices with a clause put into the U.S. Constitution during the late 18th century, which guaranteed editors and publishers the opportunity to exploit as they wished the all-important technology of their time—the printing press. In the early decades of the New Republic, the postal system carried newspapers across the land, linking people to common experiences and information. In short, it was the first American information infrastructure. It is easy to forget the postal system because it is so ubiquitous. Every town has at least one post office. Postal carriers wearing their blue uniforms are a common sight. But it is important to recognize that this information infrastructure was created so early in the life of this nation. By 1840, post offices existed in 13,500 counties and communities, delivering over 500 different newspapers. To ensure fast delivery, the national and many local governments mobilized resources to build postal roads, improving not only the movement of information, but also goods and crops. Home delivery of mail was not a common service until the early 20th century, although nearly 20 million out of 75 million Americans got home delivery in 1890. So most people went to their post office, where they picked up their mail, heard someone read a newspaper, and talked informally with neighbors, thereby sharing information. The obvious conclusion we can reach is that the American public has always had an interest in information that extends much further back in time than the computer. The conclusion

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is demonstrated extensively in future chapters. In all aspects of their lives—business, entertainment, sports, religion, and public policy—information has played an important role. Americans have always been wealthy in the amount and types of information they had. They either developed or exploited every major information technology that has appeared since the Renaissance. They have consistently been willing and able to build the necessary infrastructures needed to support these, from 18th century legal protections for copyright to the postal systems of the early 1800s, to railroads in the mid-19th century, to President Bill Clinton’s program to make the Internet available in classrooms across America. These trends are no accident. Americans routinely turned effectively to information and to its attendant technologies to improve their lives. Their utopian dream of Paradise on Earth includes newspapers, books, TVs, and personal computers. But how did this come about? Why do we have such a continuous interest that has lasted for so many centuries? How was it possible that Americans could enjoy the benefits of information on the one hand and yet, on the other, could afford to invent and use its technologies? How do we use information today? Are there patterns of behavior historic in scope that can give us a peak into the future? To answer these questions, let’s take a quick trip through the American experience with information.

GENERAL PATTERNS OF INFORMATION IN AMERICAN LIFE We need to begin with an understanding of how the word information is used in this book. While the word has a long history, dating from the ancient Greeks, and in modern times has provided part of the descriptor for computers (information technology), for our purposes we need a more generalized definition because it must also cover technologies and uses predating the computer. Information in this book consists of facts, data, insights, text, and numbers which people use to equip themselves to conduct business, protect lives and property, entertain, and better appreciate the world in which they


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live. While I cannot prove it in absolute terms, there is implied as part of the notion of the word information an American value, the concept that knowledge helps one be more successful and happier in life. The implication seems to be there because Americans have long connected these aspirations to such notions of ideas and actions as knowledge, skills, education, and “book learning.” To be sure, in their earliest days, residents in North America were most influenced by their European experiences. Only over the course of time, as local experiences began to influence the nature of local society, did North American experiences play increasingly important roles in influencing the type and use of information in America. Yet some patterns evident in the earliest days, such as using information to enhance the quality of life, continued to the present. Specifically, Americans from their earliest times have cherished education and information as good things that make life better, believing that practical knowledge exists. Workers’ lending libraries in the 1840s and 1850s stocked their shelves with “how to” books. That genre of publication remains a major segment of the book publishing industry today, as I demonstrate later. While the word information has become a very important metaphor of our times (e.g., Information Age), it has always existed in many forms as part of all environments in all ages of European occupation of North America. As in most of the world, we think of information as facts put down on paper (in books, for example), or in our heads, and today, inside a computer. But the key idea is that there long has been a link between facts, insights, and knowledge, and recorded forms that could be applied in various parts of our lives, from religion and entertainment to politics and work.3 The American experience demonstrates that residents on the North American continent used information in each part of their lives. In fact, beginning with Chapter 5, I show how that occurred and suggest what the implications are for the future of the United States. We should recognize, however, that information always came in a variety of forms. This variety helped determine how information would be collected and used. For example, prior to the availability of electricity, information was stored

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largely in paper forms and formats, such as broadsides, newspapers, magazines, and specific types of books (e.g., commercial guides, religious tracts, and later, novels). After the arrival of electricity, we had additional forms, such as video, television programs, and printouts from computers. There was also the question of varied media, such as databases or the Internet. One could even argue that in the Age of Paper the media dictated the nature of information, for example, the weekly newspaper versus the fat book. The way information was packaged profoundly influenced how it was used and by whom, and finally, what new innovations in existing or needed technologies occurred. These are distinctions we should pay attention to as we look at the enormous variety of uses to which Americans applied such tools.4 Looking at the artifacts of a particular information technology in any period is just as useful for explaining use and possible benefits as it is today when we stare at some new cell phone that can download text from the Internet, or an e-mail appliance intended for use in a kitchen. For that reason, in the chapters that follow, I focus on many objects, from newspapers and bibles to telephones and computers. As any good historian of technology will argue, however, people use informational artifacts. The devices and media do not have a life of their own. People in different circumstances in society used artifacts in ways particular to their situation. For example, African Americans relied extensively on memory and oral traditions until at least the end of the 19th century. For purposes of preserving genealogy, cooking recipes, family history, and handed-down skills, these were still being applied at the end of the 20th century. Middle- and upper-class white women used these techniques too, particularly in the 18th and early 19th centuries. But as the 19th century progressed, they also wrote thousands of diaries and even larger numbers of letters, and read books and magazines as these two published media dropped in cost and became more widely available across the nation. As women moved into office work after 1875, female clerks and others in a growing variety of office jobs soon dominated documentation and transmission of much information. They did this first as typists, later as telephone operators, and simultaneously as teachers and librari-


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ans. In short, gender, class, and ethnicity mattered. What someone did influenced profoundly the kind of information they collected and used, and what tools and artifacts they favored. We need to link information to the technologies with which we gather and use it because this nation has a long history of effectively applying technologies of information handling. For our purposes, information technology will mean any device or method that allows us to gather, use, and modify information. Thus a whole raft of information tools and approaches fit here: broadsides, books, newspapers, pamphlets, magazines, journals, telegraph, telephones, typewriters, adding machines, calculators, radios, televisions, computers, phonograph players, tape recorders, CDs, pagers, and cell phones among the more obvious artifacts. But so too are their base technologies, such as printing presses, telephony, transistors, and computer chips. Finally, we have to include their base infrastructures: postal systems, railroad networks, telegraph and telephone networks of lines, electrical networks, and systems of satellites, cable, and the Internet. All became national in scope. Some observers have even argued that approaches to the use of information also fit here, such as education, statistical process control, mathematics, and knowledge management.5 Information is organic in form, changing, depending on how one moves it about (e.g., in a book or within a laptop), and because of how it influences our behavior. Because Americans were always quick to apply information and their associated technologies for commercial purposes, information in turn profoundly affected what we could do. Take railroads as an example. Historians of this form of transportation long ago concluded that it could not have been expanded across the nation in an organized system without timely information to make it possible to schedule trains, track rolling stock, and operate safely and profitably. When the telegraph was invented, railroad managers quickly seized on this technology as the way to facilitate management of companies that kept growing in size as railroads spread across the nation from the 1840s through the 1870s. That is why, for

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instance, telegraph lines were strung along railroad tracks, facilitated by federal grants of land and local rights of way. Improved communications via telegraph made it possible to have larger railroad companies covering more territory, creating a crucial transportation network that in turn encouraged settlement of the American West. The movement of goods and people had the collateral effect of creating national markets for what otherwise would have been products available only in smaller regions. The emergence of national markets made it possible for national companies to exist: Sears with its mail order business in the late 1800s, Burroughs Adding Machines Company sending its desk-top information devices all over the United States, or Remington Arms Company selling its products across the entire continent. Historian Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., has argued that without applied information we would not have had the development of corporations that could function across the North American continent or around the world. Two fundamental developments between roughly 1870 and the end of the 1920s made the corporation possible: creation of a class of workers called managers and the availability of information that they could use to run these large enterprises. JoAnne Yates, of MIT’s Sloan School, has shown how organized information worked in many companies, motivating use of all kinds of information handling tools: the 3 × 5 card, file cabinets, three-ring binders, folders, ledgers, then punched-card tabulators (IBM’s main product for a half century).6 These tools evolved extensively within corporate environments (and not just, e.g., in colleges, universities, and libraries), reinforcing the richness of variety in American information handling devices. Today the process continues. With the opening of the Internet to the public at large in the early 1990s, new opportunities emerged for exploiting information and its technology. A wonderful case from the mid-1990s is that of Amazon.com. A small group of technically savvy people got together to form an online bookselling company. The firm took, in effect, the information available in such guides as Books in Print, loaded that information into an electronic


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file which anyone could look at, took orders, ported them over to the publishers to fill (later Amazon did this out of their own warehouses), and offered this service at prices that were often as much as 40 percent below retail. By the end of 1998, Amazon.com had essentially reconstructed the bookselling business in America, threatening the likes of Borders and Barnes & Noble, great retail chains of the late 20th century. Millions of books were bought online around the world. By the end of 1998, Amazon.com had also become one of the few new widely recognized brands created in the 1990s. Almost all the other new brands were also information based: Microsoft (although it dated from the 1980s), Netscape, and AOL to mention a few. Like the railroads before them, these firms found ways to apply information technology to create whole new businesses. But this is a process that had been going on for a very long time. With the creation of the postal system in the early decades of the 19th century, newspaper publishers could sell their products all over the nation. During the 1820s–1840s, a high percentage of all mail traffic consisted of newspapers mailed to over ten thousand communities across the nation. Newspapers facilitated shared national experiences. They were frequently delivered on Saturdays. Either that day or the next, people would come to their post office where someone would read the papers to the assembled crowd. It happened all over the nation. Editors sold newspapers while citizens shared common news stories. A similar sharing continued with newspapers in our electronic age with U.S.A Today, a new product of the 1980s that emerged at a time when one would have thought no national newspaper could thrive in the face of such massive use of TV and radio. Yet its editors applied new technologies as they came along; today they have a site on the Internet where one can go for news updates all day long, and to pick up information not routinely published in the daily. The publisher also established links to electronic media for the purpose of sharing stories. That these various applications of information succeeded is a testament to the fact that Americans wanted to use data for practical purposes, which in turn caused new forms of commerce to take shape.

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BIRTH AND EVOLUTION OF THE INFORMATION AGE IN AMERICA To understand how information came to be a feature of American society and how it evolved over the centuries, it is helpful to look at history. Invariably, with any form of information, the technologies they underpin or the value and joy people receive from them have always been tied to the interaction of four sets of economic and social forces. First is the information itself, which I have already discussed briefly. The observation to add is that the volume and type of information available in North America grew in quantity, variety, and at dramatic rates over the past four centuries. For instance, as the nation grew in population and number of states, more publications, mail, telegraphic messages, and telephone calls were made. In each of the case study chapters later, I discuss their history in more detail. Current conditions are the outcomes of prior experience and need to be understood if we are to appreciate possible future developments. Second, because of the abundance of natural resources that always existed in North America, people who populated this continent could generally afford to acquire, use, and enhance information in their politics, businesses, private lives, play, and religion. This observation cuts across all classes, genders, and ethnic groups, because information and its artifacts came in sufficiently varied forms that the majority of North Americans had access to one or more types. Women, children, and men could hear newspapers read in the 1840s if they could not read themselves or afford to buy a paper. Teachers taught blacks, Indians, and urban immigrants in 1900. Today, one can even pull off the Internet free information on all types of subjects. In short, information and access were varied and virtually universal. This reality should not confuse a different issue related to access, which currently occupies much attention, particularly on the part of the American government: access to the Internet. The Clinton administration conducted a series of studies that demonstrated that the poorer one was, the less likely one


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was to have access to the Internet. As a result of these findings, government policies toward the spread of the Internet were an effort to enhance access. In time, access to the Internet will expand even to the poorest in the nation, thus conforming to the historic pattern of ever-increasing access to a constantly expanding variety of information tools.7 The issue turns, as in earlier periods, on timing. Those best off economically have always had earliest access to the newest information media and tools. The wealthy of 1830 could always afford to mail a letter or buy a book, which in that decade could cost as much as a week’s salary for a common laborer. Black residents of the South had to wait until after emancipation to acquire any reasonable amount of formal education. It is no accident, for example, that colleges for blacks were all founded after the Civil War, decades or centuries after many institutions of higher education were established for white students. When PCs first came into existence, a worker earning a minimum wage and employed for 40 hours a week would have needed several months’ salary to buy a microcomputer. In the first two centuries of the U.S. history, the generous and inexpensive supply of economic wherewithal came overwhelmingly from such natural resources as cheap and abundant farmland, forests, and mines. In addition to fueling national economic development and a long-term rise in standard of living across the nation, spillover of resources into the collection, dissemination, and use of information became possible. With the economic takeoff of the nation, beginning in the 1840s, into what historians like to call the Second Industrial Revolution, the United States went on a massive binge to acquire information. This involved not only acquisition, but also a variety of new technologies and uses of information. One scholar who studied this phenomenon, James R. Beniger, concluded that it was a revolution, and he did not hesitate to use that word in the title of his book, The Control Revolution.8 Also, this is a big country with huge markets and many people to use whatever new forms of information came along. The economy simply did well in general over the four centuries. To be sure, there were major recessions and depressions, particularly throughout the 19th and first half of the 20th centuries, but the economy continued to expand and thrive. As more

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expensive and complex technologies came along, it could afford them. The nation built and paid for a national postal system in the early 1800s, and constructed many canals which carried agricultural produce to towns and cities, manufactured products all over the nation, and distributed mail, newspapers, and books. Later, in the 19th century, this nation built a massive network of railroads, followed by complex combinations of national highways, electricity, telephone, and telecommunications during the 20th century. These patterns of behavior did not exist in isolation from what was occurring in other countries. Europeans built railroads at the same time as the United States, but they had to wait a few years before they could use the American invented telegraph. Once they got it, they too were aggressive users. Of course, the Age of Paper had existed in Europe long before colonists started populating the United States. But Americans seemed to be more extreme in their interest in information. Daniel Headrick, a historian who has looked at the role of information practices in Europe for the period 1700-1850, also noticed the same pattern. He observed that “to foreigners, Americans seemed obsessed with numbers” because it served their political interests “for opinions seemed to threaten the still precarious unity of the nation, whereas ‘facts’ would bring them together.”9 Headrick also observed that Americans were the most advanced of all countries he studied in the use of information, for example, statistics, in the promotion of sound religious behavior.10 Even in this early period, when he found differences, they were more about lag times than use.11 Thus, for example, the U.S. census, begun in 1790 and taken every decade, initially asked fewer questions than those taken in Europe, but rapidly expanded in scope such that by the Civil War they were at least as substantive as their European variants. A similar pattern of American exuberance regarding information and its technologies has been evident in the post Civil War period, persisting to the present. What one can observe with numbers—seen as the ultimate type of fact—is that data—again facts—tend to unite people because this kind of information is seen to be an incontrovertible reality. In other words, people can agree on a number


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more easily than they can on an idea. It is what it is. On the other hand, opinions served often to both join and separate Americans over the centuries, allowing them to use facts— often numbers—in support of their various perspectives. The development of various religious sects in the first half of the 19th century, the method of tracking performance in baseball, and the highly statistical basis by which government agencies attempt to herald the arrival of e-commerce, all point to the complex role that numbers, facts, and opinions play within a society. Interest in information was always supported by continuous economic expansion and hence affordability of such technology. This pattern has continued to the present. Just during the era of the computer (from 1950 forward), in each decade the U.S. economy grew between 22 and 48 percent.12 After 1900 the United States had more people within its national economy than most industrialized nations. In short, economies of scale existed. Third, in this nation there emerged economic incentives for people to exploit information. In the 18th century, Boston had a half dozen newspapers that catered primarily to the needs of the business community and to the political and social elite. By the 1870s, most Americans could afford to buy a newspaper. Production costs had dropped over time, driven largely by improvements in printing technology during the middle years of the century. This led to lower costs for printed matter, which. in turn, created larger markets for printed materials, making possible further economies of scale. Patent protection became another source of economic incentives. Patents made it possible for inventors in the 19th century to anticipate profits by solving information-based problems. Thus, we have a printer, Santa Claus-looking Christopher Latham Scholes, developing the first commercially viable typewriter in Milwaukee in the late 1860s, or William S. Burroughs devising a practical adding machine in the 1880s. Then there was Herman Hollerith, an employee at the U.S. Census Bureau, who developed and rented punched card equipment in the 1890s to analyze and manage huge chunks of data (first for taking a national census, later for

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tracking insurance information). Even later, John Presper Eckert and John W. Mauchly took their ideas on the possibility of a commercial digital computer out of their university in the 1940s, eventually building the UNIVAC I. Tied to economic incentives were more specific managerial needs. When, for example, railroads came into being in the 1840s, their operators realized they needed ways to schedule trains and manage large inventories across a huge continent. All of that called for new ways to gather, communicate, and exploit information. Economic incentives were there—the nation collectively wanted to use railroads—and so railroad companies found it attractive to spread use of the telegraph across the entire continent.13 This is not to say there were no railroad tycoons exploiting the opportunity, but the fact remained that in general, railroads played a positive, indeed crucial, role in the economic development of the nation during the late 1800s. In the process they stimulated new and more sophisticated uses of information technologies. Later, through the efforts of the federal government using tax revenues, officials promoted programs to expand infrastructures needed to bring electricity to all parts of the country, even in the 1930s while the U.S. was experiencing its worst depression. Given the way the Bell System had evolved since the late 1890s, and with sound business and later social applications proving attractive, telephones became common. Over 95 percent of all households, and virtually all businesses, were equipped with this technology by the 1960s. Fourth, maybe even more important than economic incentives, political values of the nation proved instrumental in nurturing the use of information technologies and the data these carried. I have already suggested that the openness of communications and sharing of knowledge were crucial to both business success and to the proper functioning of democracy. The need for current and timely economic information is obvious—the subject of greatest interest by early newspapers—but equally crucial were political intents. By the middle of the 18th century, the notion of an informed citizenry began to be explored by many of the elite of North American society. This happened even though information, particularly printed


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information, remained the preserve of the wealthy, the merchant classes, and the highly educated in such knowledgebased professions as the clergy and the law. Their motives were essentially political and economic, concerning the imposition of restrictions or taxes by the British government. Access to information and expression of thoughts expanded in the years between 1763 and 1775, when tensions between Britain and its American colonists grew. John Adams observed “that whenever, a general Knowledge and sensibility have prevailed among the People, Arbitrary Government and every kind of oppression have lessened and disappeared in Proportion.”14 It is through the evolution of thinking over time toward the notion of the informed citizenry that we arrive at Thomas Paine’s famous pamphlet. With the American Revolution behind them, the founding fathers went about the task of weaving their political beliefs into the various instruments of government, from state to federal constitutions, the Federalist Papers, countless political tracts and newspaper articles, and state laws over the next half century. The most obvious was the absolute requirement of a free press, followed simultaneously by free expression. How free, and how enlightened, makes for complicated history, but eventually the nation reached the point where practice and law merged on the general point that freedom of expression and the exchange of information should not be constrained by the state. Thus for many Americans, the most familiar part of the U.S. Constitution became the First Amendment, which prohibited Congress from “abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.” To ensure the citizenry was informed, the Congress created the U.S. Post Office, already mentioned. The lack of good postal communications had allowed misinformation to circulate in the Colonies during the crisis of the 1770s, a problem that the growing nation needed to avoid. Therein lay the origins of the American government’s constant attention over the past two centuries to creating information “highways,” initially actual roads, followed by electronic communications, and to encouraging the private sector to participate in that effort. The effort was never well coordinated nationally, and it emerged in fits and starts, varying from one section of the country to another, but it grew nonetheless. Education was

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part of the strategy. As post offices and roads were built, communities and states invested in education to inform their citizenry on how they could function politically and economically. Noah Webster argued the popular case for the role of public education, writing as early as 1790 that curriculums should provide “an acquaintance with ethics and with the general principles of law, commerce, money, and government.”15 The national government played a critical role in the dissemination of information. Perhaps one of the most telling examples of people creating their own information was the growth of self-help organizations that began in the 1800s. These are still with us today. In 1836, a group of well-known national leaders from across 26 states and territories formed the American Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, for the purpose of promoting the “general diffusion of knowledge,” which they quoted directly from George Washington’s Farewell Address. Local schools grew up simultaneously as inexpensive yet crucial parts of modern American society. By the 1850s, leading lights such as Congressman Henry Wise and educator Horace Mann were arguing that becoming informed was a birthright of every American. Admittedly, these noble pronouncements were intended primarily for white men and women and their children, and did not include Hispanics, Indians, or slaves. Not until the 20th century did nonwhites get incorporated into the political ethos of the right to be informed and to have virtually unlimited access to information. In the late 20th century, in addition to Web sites and schools, there was a multibillion dollar self-help industry that included weekend classes at hotels, Steven Covey seminars, and a slew of television programs. Political emphasis on the informed citizenry was a logical and direct outgrowth of the public’s experiences of the Revolutionary Era, from the 1760s to the early 1800s. By the third quarter of the 19th century, concern had broadened to include pleasurable uses of information and access to data for commercial applications. The right to vote was extended to larger groups of Americans, with major milestones all through the 19th and 20th centuries. Perhaps the most influential


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event was the extension of the right to vote to women, provided for by the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution, passed in 1920. It proved profound for two reasons. First, it was the largest single act of enfranchisement of a group of citizens since the founding of the Republic. Second, from then on, political debate about the right of citizens to have information dropped sharply, although it lingered in some quarters, such as in the South, when it came to the issue of black Americans participating in the political process. Even in that case, the debate turned not on whether black Americans should vote, but how. In the era of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, federal officials did not debate if blacks should vote, rather how to stop anyone from blocking them. In the end they perdured. If one acquired and used information, it essentially became a private matter. Public policy concerning regulation of electronic transportation of information remained, but only as a way of ensuring diversity of expression and access to information. Hence the creation and role of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), which has said grace over the activities of radio, television, and telecommunications for three quarters of a century, and about which we will have more to say in Chapter 8. The debates we witness today about the role of education, government involvement, and the value of information in society thus have a long history. One of the best students of the history of American information, historian Richard D. Brown, drew the following observation: Compulsory education laws and truancy regulations indicate the belief that uninformed citizens are dangerous and expensive, and therefore, moral considerations aside, it is prudent to raise the general level of education. In an economy that needs fewer and fewer unskilled workers and supplies basic support to millions who are not at work, ignorance and incompetence put burdens on the public purse.

As he concluded, “few would regard the expenses of ignorance as acceptable.”16

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EVENTS AT MID-CENTURY The decades of mid-century, from roughly 1850 to 1875, were important from almost any historical perspective because in this period three major events occurred: the economic takeoff that led the U.S. squarely into the Second Industrial Revolution, the Civil War, and the emancipation of slaves. Any one of those events would have ensured that the period would always be seen as decisive as any period in American history. Indeed, their consequences still influence the nation. Those consequences emerging out of the economic takeoff will be the subject of the next two chapters. Emancipation does not have a profound influence on information in America until very late in the century and more so in the next. The Civil War, as with any nation’s civil war, had so many effects on the nation that historians are still uncovering them.17 This conflict had an information feature about it too. First, there are the obvious elements. Sale of newspapers increased in both the North and South as the conflict became imminent and later throughout the war. We will look at newspaper circulation later. It is enough right now to acknowledge that the war generated intense interest in all aspects of the conflict, from causes and battles to results and lists of the dead. Second, with two governments in operation, the nation had two organizations publishing laws, decrees, and other official documents. Confederate imprints ran into the thousands, none of which would have been published if the war had not taken place. Bible societies distributed tens of thousands of publications to soldiers. With more than a million men at arms, of which over 600,000 would die with little word of their fate reported to family and friends, the volume of letters circulating around the nation shot up, exceeding the volumes of the 1840s or 1850s. Third, military applications of information technologies were in evidence on both sides. In the North in particular, the Union Army adopted the telegraph both to communicate with various units and also to conduct intelligence operations. For example, in various campaigns in Virginia, Union telegraph operators went up in hot air balloons to report on the disposi-


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tion of enemy forces. As railroad lines expanded to meet military needs, again primarily on the Union side but also in the Confederacy, soldiers strung telegraph wire alongside tracks. In fact, it was during the Civil War that railroads worked out many of the process details associated with using the telegraph to coordinate rail traffic that would so facilitate the expanded use of this mode of transportation in the twenty years following the end of the war. The vastness of the country created the demand for a fast form of transportation, and stimulated development of the railroad to a greater extent than even in Europe, which was geographically smaller. For example, in 1860, the British built 9,000 lines of road, the U.S. 30,000. By 1880, the British had laid down 15,563 lines of track, the U.S. 93,292 miles. In fact, throughout the rest of the century, the U.S. outpaced such nations as Britain, France, and Germany in the number of miles of track. During the 1850s, American railroad companies had begun to learn how to use the telegraph to operate large lines, so by the time of the Civil War experience existed that could be put to use.18 President Abraham Lincoln used the telegraph to make his initial call for 75,000 troops after the fall of Fort Sumter in 1861. He usually heard about military developments via telegraph; in fact, he spent much time during the war in the basement telegraph office at the War Department, where messages continuously flowed in from various Union armies. As armies moved to new campsites, the telegraph followed them on both sides. The Union Army organized the Military Telegraph Corps, the first major high-tech information unit created in the United States. By the end of 1864, it had more than 1,200 operators. Union military forces strung more than 15,000 miles of lines, and handled more than 6 million messages. Both sides used telegraph operators as spies who could transmit information by tapping telegraph lines. Each experimented with electronic ciphers for the first time, and with censorship. Neither side hesitated to control the nature of communications over the telegraph, although censorship proved difficult to enforce because of the tradition of free expression, which existed on both sides.19

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After the war, nearly two thousand military operators went to work for railroads and telegraph companies. The federal government returned to civilian control the U.S. network of telegraph lines, while the South had to rebuild its infrastructure network, just as it had to reconstruct such other information networks such as roads, railroads, and publishing firms. The wartime experience with the telegraph pushed forward an appreciation for its use, just as future wars did the same for radio, radar, advanced electronics, and computers. In the years immediately following the Civil War, telegraph lines, newspapers, and publishers expanded westward into new lands, following new waves of settlers and merchants. Rights of way granted by the federal government encouraged railroads to move quickly westward, although it would be late in the century before they covered the entire continent. But by 1910, railroad lines and telegraph coverage had expanded to ten times that of Germany and far more than the British. One would have to look to Russia and India to find massive expansions of both in the same period. Commerce dominated telegraph traffic almost immediately following the end of the Civil War. As Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., the father of modern business history, has argued in a series of books, the years following the Civil War saw the rise of large enterprises—called corporations—finally stabilizing their “look and feel” by the 1920s. These enterprises were largely made possible because of the use of a wide range of information handling tools, such as the telegraph, to control activities, which was also Beniger’s main point in his book about the origins of information processing during the Second Industrial Revolution.

CONCLUSIONS A variety of influences affected the adoption, expansion, and transformation of numerous information handling tools and processes in the years from the 1600s to the mid-19th century. Multiple information technologies emerged, coexisting side by side with newer ones. That pattern of coexistence intensified in the second half of the 19th century as new information technologies came on stream, a pattern continued in the 20th cen-


23

tury (e.g., newspapers and television, telegraph with telephone). Economic needs created opportunities for dissemination of information and invention of new information handling tools. Government policies ensured people could have sufficient freedom to invent and sell their creations, then use them with minimal concern over censure or constraints in the free market economic system.20 The cherished value of information, knowledge, and education in what normally has been a highly literate society, simply encouraged people to reach for information handling tools with which to create wealth and pleasure, often at faster rates than citizens and customers in other nations. As I show in subsequent chapters, it was no accident, for example, that deployment of television, radio, and computers occurred earlier, faster and more fully in the United States than anywhere else in the world. That positive experience, in turn, encouraged further creation and use of information and the underlying technologies, pushing the nation down a path of learning and experience that led Americans to believe they had arrived at a post-industrial era that so many are trying to call the Information Age. Looking at this journey from the perspective of economic history, one could argue that since the 17th century, residents of North America have had an enormous appetite for information (the demand side of the economic equation). They also sought and acquired a vast array of technologies to aid in delivering information (supply side). From the beginning, the ideology of the value of information was widespread that, in turn, encouraged the emergence of a supply of both information and associated technologies.21 Each of the three influences on the role of information in America—natural resources, economic incentives, and political values—came from multiple sources. While each source is presented, as an equal influence they vary in degree of effect on each other. But all three affected one another. For example, our belief in the openness of information led directly to creation of a postal system for distributing newspapers, that carried information so vital to the political practices of the nation as well as for stimulating commerce.22 On the other hand, invention of transistors and computer chips, not only patent protection, made it possible for the development of computers and consequently of such things as the personal computer and

24


the Internet. The availability of infrastructure (e.g., telephone lines into most homes and businesses) made it easy for so many millions of people to cost-effectively plug in to the Internet, often in less than an hour, because the necessary lines were in place. Existence of information necessary for the management of large corporations working in many states had a great influence in the creation of infrastructure (e.g., stringing of telegraph lines). Invention of a host of small office machines (e.g., cash registers and typewriters) had less to do with the existence of knowledge than the opportunity to meet an economic demand. But in almost every era, each of the three elements could be found influencing how information or a specific technological tool came into wide use. Then came the “engines of the mind,” the “mechanical brains,” which in time we called computers. Americans entered a period in which the Age of Paper became a part of a larger tapestry of information technology. The emergence of the computer and a substantial variety of related technologies became the next feature of modern American society. We look at the emergence of this new information technology rightfully saying that it proved to be a profoundly important development. What I think made it possible for Americans to understand quickly the importance of this technology was their already considerable experience with information and its tools. It was no accident that computers became such a crucial element of contemporary U.S. life. What happened before the arrival of the computer is a crucial piece of the story and for that reason is the subject of the next chapter. It is a fascinating tale of technological diversity.

ENDNOTES 1. Daniel J. Boorstin, The Americans: The Democratic Experience (New York: Vintage Books, 1973): 491. 2. Richard D. Brown, Knowledge Is Power: The Diffusion of Information in Early America, 1700–1865 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989): 12.


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3. For an excellent yet brief discussion of the definition of information that is also sensitive to the influence of computing, see Michael E. Hobart and Zachary S. Schiffman, Information Ages: Literacy, Numeracy, and the Computer Revolution (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998): 3–6. 4. For a fascinating discussion of the differences between genres of communications and media of communications—hence of information handling—using the case of American experiences in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, see JoAnne Yates and Wanda J. Orlikowski, “Genres of Organizational Communication: A Structurational Approach to Studying Communication and Media,” Academy of Management Review 17 (April 1992): 299–326. 5. The leading voices around the issue of information and knowledge are Thomas H. Davenport and Laurence Prusak, who have published two books on this theme, Working Knowledge: How Organizations Manage What They Know (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1998) and Information Ecology: Mastering the Information and Knowledge Environment (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). For an excellent review of recent literature, see Stuart Silverstone, “A Knowledge Manager’s Bookshelf,” Knowledge Management 2, no. 8 (August 1999): 54–56, 58, 60, 62–64. 6. JoAnne Yates, Control Through Communication: The Rise of System in American Management (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989). 7. The study that started the process, leading to a series of national policies concerning the Internet, and to further examination of the “digital divide” issue is U.S. Department of Commerce, The Emerging Digital Economy (April 1998), available at http://www.ecommerce.gov/emerging.htm. 8. James R. Beniger, The Control Revolution: Technological and Economic Origins of the Information Society (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986). 9. Daniel Headrick, When Information Came of Age: Technologies of Knowledge in the Age of Reason and Revolution, 1700–1850 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000): 78. 10. Ibid., 79.

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11. Ibid., 79–80. 12. I have discussed the role of the economy in “Economic Preconditions That Made Possible Application of Commercial Computing in the United States,” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 19, no. 3 (1997): 27–40. 13. Beniger, The Control Revolution. 14. Robert J. Taylor et al., Papers of John Adams (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1977): 1:108. 15. Quoted in Frederick Rudolph (ed.), Essays on Education in the Early Republic (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1965): 66. 16. Richard D. Brown, The Strength of a People: The Idea of an Informed Citizenry in America, 1650–1870 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996): 201. 17. This is especially the case in the South where, even as late as 2000 the government of South Carolina and the NAACP argued over the appropriateness of flying the Confederate flag over the state capitol. After the NAACP launched an economic boycott of the state, the legislature agreed to move the flag to a Confederate monument on the grounds of the state capitol. 18. The majority of the material for the Civil War discussion is drawn from Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., Scale and Scope: The Dynamics of Industrial Capitalism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990): 53–58. 19. George P. Oslin, The Story of Telecommunications (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1992): 119–136. 20. The primary exceptions to this statement are the antitrust practices of the nation, about which I will have more to say in Chapter 6. 21. This argument has been well put forward in a highly readable book by two respected economic historians of technology, David C. Mowery and Nathan Rosenberg, Paths of Innovation: Technological Change in 20th Century America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 22. From the beginning of the postal system it was also used to carry private correspondence and business documents, which were also intended tasks of the postal system, but not the most important political motivators. Very quickly, however, the eco-


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nomic utility of the postal system was realized and exploited along with newspaper traffic. For details, see Richard R. John, Spreading the News: The American Postal System from Franklin to Morse (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995): 25–63.

THE LONG TRIP

2

From the Gilded Age to the Dawn of the Computer Age, 1875–1950

H

Anything that won’t sell, I don’t want to invent.

C

A

P

T

E

R

TO THE INFORMATION AGE:

THOMAS A. EDISON

I

n the early decades of the 20th century, we could see the grand old man of invention—Thomas Edison—in old newsreels with his white hair, his long black suits and black bowties, speaking to us from deep in the 19th century. Most Americans know him as a prodigious inventor of more than a thousand items, the most famous of which included the phonograph, the light bulb and the electrical utility company needed to provide businesses and homes with electricity, and motion pictures. Edison, however, can also be seen as an early player in the world of information. Born in Ohio in 1847 and schooled at home by his mother, by the age of fifteen he was the editor of a small newspaper called the Weekly Herald. In 1863, still a teenager of 16, he began a career as a telegraph 28

CHAPTER 2 • THE LONG TRIP TO THE INFORMATION AGE

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operator, a job he held for four years. In the 1870s he was in full swing with his inventions, many of the most important of which were tools used to collect and use information. The phonograph in time also came to illustrate the relationship that always existed between information and entertainment. Originally designed to hold verbal information, the phonograph evolved quickly into an early high-tech entertainment device. The same, of course, happened with motion pictures. By the time he died in 1937, he had become a folk hero in America, a symbol and example of how Americans invented and applied their knowledge and information. Adding the business component put the focus on the practical use of information. If we needed a poster child for the use of information in the half century following the Civil War, Edison is as good a candidate as we can find. In 1887, Edison made it clear that inventions of the modern age should be the result of perceived opportunity to turn a profit. The quote at the start of this chapter is emblematic of an attitude that helped drive the expansion of the American economy from the dawn of the Second Industrial Age down to the present. In that historic period of nearly a century and a half, one of the engines of growth, of opportunities, was the development of new technologies. In that period came almost everything we have today: gasoline, the automobile, electricity, electric lights, flight, computers, antibiotics, radar, missiles, television, tractors, papermaking machines, washing machines, lawn mowers, pop up toasters, escalators, hair dryers; the list is endless. Included in that enormous wave of new technologies and devices were a series of information processing tools. Like many developments in other parts of economic life, tools were invented that were made out of metal, not wood or leather. There were devices that could handle many activities, such as sorting punch cards or adding columns of numbers, and still later, some that could almost think, but at a minimum manipulated and analyzed facts. We are so used to these devices being a part of our lives that it must seem difficult to appreciate what extraordinary achievements these were both for the economy of the world and for the quality of life of so many people.

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It was during the period following the American Civil War, and continuing to the start of the Korean War, that Americans and Europeans developed so many of the basic concepts of information processing that became the basis of modern computing and the Information Age we are just entering. This extraordinary achievement centered around the resolution of practical business problems through the use of mechanical devices, such as the typewriter or adding machine. Along the way a body of knowledge emerged that led to the development of such advanced tools as the earliest computers. The bulk of the creation of these new information-handling tools of the Gilded Age occurred in the United States. To be sure, parallel developments often took place in Europe—as with the development of alternative forms of adding and calculating machinery and later other punch card tabulators—but the majority of developments and the most extensive deployment of these proto-engines of the mind took place in the United States. In this chapter I explore the American experience by looking at several technologies: typewriters, adding and calculating machinery, punched-card tabulators, telephone, and television. I end this chapter with a brief survey of what Americans thought about information in 1950, just as the computer was about to burst on the scene. That year the first computer used in a commercial setting was installed, culminating several decades of engineering and scientific research on computing devices, which had led to the manufacture of the very earliest computers. While the information handling tools of the precomputer era, such as the ubiquitous NCR cash register and so on, continued to be used long after 1950, a new era came into being, the subject of Chapter 3. My fundamental point is that Americans were enamored with information tools, and invented them in profusion when they saw how such items could facilitate their acquisition and use of data in support of practical or entertaining activities.


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AMERICA’S LOVE AFFAIR WITH INFORMATION MACHINES After the Civil War, the number and variety of information handling tools that became available boggles the mind. Americans continued to believe in the value of tools and inventiveness. We have only to think of the classically American role model of Thomas A. Edison, inventor of the phonograph player, movies, even the light bulb and the electrical utility needed to supply it with “juice.” If you needed a tool for a specific purpose, you organized people and information and went after it. That was the basis of his Menlo Park “invention factory” of the late 1800s. So American in his outlook, Edison viewed his work as the production of inventions that met the needs of the market, paralleling the American shift from the informed citizen for political purposes to the informed citizen capable of applying information for economic advantage. He invented the light bulb to improve productivity in factories. He formed the Edison Electric Light Company in 1878 for practical reasons. And he had vision. He told a reporter at the New York Sun that he would build a system that would allow a half million New Yorkers to enjoy the benefits of his light. He presaged the arrival of the project team and lab inventors. By the early 1880s, lone inventors were gone for the most part, now working in teams with other shop workers. Dozens of corporate development labs were in great evidence by the early decades of the next century, such as AT&T’s Bell Labs and others at RCA, IBM, GE, and Ford.1 Inventors of information handling devices were no different than their peers in other industries, particularly after the American Civil War, when they saw needs, met them, and enjoyed prosperity. Several cases illustrate the pattern, involving the typewriter, the adding machine, punched-card tabulator, telephone, radio, and television. The first four cases concern business applications, the last two entertainment. But there were others as well, such as the phonograph, telegraph, teletype, tape recorder, and so on, all information handling technologies. Each enjoyed enormous popularity and use in the United States. Some, such as the telephone and television,

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became ubiquitous, used in over 95 percent of American homes. The same could be said of businesses about adding machines, telephones, cash registers and, of course, the typewriter. And this all occurred before the arrival of the modern computer and the PC!

THE UBIQUITOUS TYPEWRITER The typewriter is the first case, first not only because it came to market before so many other office appliances but also because of its early acceptance and importance. The earliest practical version of this machine was developed and patented in the United States, although others had been under development in Europe since the early 1700s. But it became a widely accepted device in the United States first, during the last quarter of the 19th century. Its importance is magnified because it facilitated the creation of the job of secretary in offices, providing an early socially acceptable career path for women as typists in government and business. Americans embraced the machine quickly. Invented in the late 1860s, and marketed initially in the early 1870s, by 1900 there was one typewriter in the U.S. for every 640 Americans. Large enterprises and government agencies adopted them quickly for capturing text. At the peace talks ending World War I, the Americans were the only participants using typewriters. By the 1930s, publishers insisted that book manuscripts be typed. By World War II the machine was commonplace in almost every office. Millions had been sold just in the United States. Nearly a third of all U.S. production of such machines were exported around the world. It was clearly a growing industry in the United States. The story is a familiar one. The Milwaukee printer, Christopher L. Sholes, first built a wooden typewriter, still preserved by the city’s museum, then moved on to a practical metal model that he had the firm of E. Remington and Sons, manufacturers of weapons, produce. The Remington No. 1 appeared in 1874. To make a long story short, hundreds of innovations and over 150 typewriter vendors operated in the American economy between the early 1870s and the decade


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before World War I. A major consolidation of manufacturers occurred between 1905 and 1920, reducing the number of major suppliers to less than ten. Some became well-known brands: Smith-Corona, Remington, and Underwood to name a few. By 1900, over 100,000 machines had been sold, with companies manufacturing over 20,000 new machines each year. Innovations came upon additional improvements, piling up over 6,200 patents by 1910 alone, and that was before the arrival of the electric typewriter of the 1930s and 1940s! While nearly a dozen dominated the industry, there were nearly 90 U.S. firms and approximately two dozen foreign vendors selling machines in the United States by 1920. Many suppliers of other office equipment also sold typewriters. One could buy machines made by Oliver and Victor, and later, in the 1930s, by IBM. Conversely, typewriter vendors branched out, selling cash registers and adding machines as well. All three products relied on similar technologies, manufacturing and marketing practices, and often the same customers. The typewriter became the first member of a new industry that emerged in the United States during the last 25 years of the 19th century, and which became known as the Office Appliance Industry by the early 1900s. It became an industry that by World War I had hundreds of suppliers and products with thousands of adding and calculating machines and punched-card tabulators, but also tickertape printers, metal addressing plates for mass mailings, coin changers, and vending machines. During the 1930s and 1940s, typewriters became the smallest machines offered by the expanding office appliance industry. By the end of the 1940s electric typewriters began appearing, with the two great rivalries in this market during the 1950s and 1960s coming from two large office appliance and computer vendors: Remington and IBM. The former created the UNIVAC I computer in the early 1950s, considered by most historians to be the first commercially available computer in the United States. IBM, the largest mainframe manufacturer by the mid-1960s, sold the very popular Selectric typewriter. The typewriter is so familiar to so many Americans that it almost seems unnecessary to discuss how it was used. This is

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understood. We appreciated less, however, how the typewriter helped stimulate the flow of information in America. I already alluded to the idea that vendors of these machines learned how to make other mechanical aids to information handling, such as adding machines. The technical insights gained from one device helped vendors excel in developing other machines, and learning how to sell them to customers. That created within a crowded industry already used to extensive competition, incentives to apply new insights in the further development of technology-based products. These products in turn were sold within a national economy that kept growing throughout the period from the 1870s to the present, while its economic activities shifted toward ever-larger amounts of office work. In short, Americans developed, manufactured, sold, and bought these machines in such huge quantities at a perfect economic time for these technologies. By World War II, typewriters were familiar tools to millions of Americans, as were adding and calculating machines. We can get a hint of how familiar Americans had become with the typewriter by looking at the few statistics on training that have survived. Many schools had typing classes and other classes dedicated to office equipment in general. Classes on typing had been taught at YWCAs since the late 1890s. In the 1920s, Felt & Tarrant operated 100 schools in the United States and Canada to teach people how to use its adding machine, the second-best seller after Burroughs. In 1931, 51 high schools taught classes on the use of other office equipment. By the end of the 1930s most high schools taught typing. Every major vendor of every type of office equipment, from typewriters to high-end scientific calculators, had training programs offered for free or fee to their customers. These facilitated use of the equipment while also reinforcing brand loyalty for those products already mastered.2 Adding machines and calculators were far more complicated information handling devices than typewriters, and also closer to our image of what an information machine ought to handle. We think that way because these devices more closely resembled our future understanding of what a computer does: calculates, spits out answers, and “stores” data. Typewriters


35

did not “store,” let alone calculate. However, typewriters reproduced information in a useful format. Carbon paper made it possible to make multiple copies simultaneously. As late as the 1960s, one could even find typewriters acting as the data input device controlling Honeywell digital computers. Manufacturers in the 1970s and 1980s developed word processors by marrying the “store” and programming functions of a computer to the data input capabilities of a typewriter. Personal computers continued the marriage of the two down to the present, with word processing the single most widely used application on a PC in the 1980s and early 1990s. Not until the availability of the Internet did typing text begin to decline as the primary use of the all-familiar typewriter keyboard.

CRUNCHING NUMBERS: ADDING AND CALCULATING MACHINES Europeans had been tinkering with mechanical adding and calculating machines since the 1600s; many worked, yet none became viable products to sell until the 19th century. The big spurt in available practical commercial products came after 1870, both in Europe and in the United States, with similarly useful products. Those in the United States ultimately formed the basis of some highly successful corporations, such as the Burroughs Adding Machine Company, which sold massive quantities of such machines in the American economy and around the world. As with the typewriter, a fertile economic climate made it possible for inventing to go on, then formation of companies to distribute products in very large quantities. The same need to manage growing amounts of data, much of it accounting data, across a huge geographic expanse within corporations, made these products timely, even perfect, additions to the tool kits of American workers and managers. As is usual with early inventions, lone tinkerers often took the initiative by blending their perceived need to solve a problem with a personal mechanical ability or skill to fill the gap. Historians increasingly are discovering that inventors of the period had metalworkers and other craftsmen helping them develop these new machines. The 19th century was no differ-

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ent than the 18th on that point. Take the case of one William S. Burroughs, born in 1855, the son of a mechanic and exposed to machinery. In time he became a bank clerk. As a clerk he spent many hours bent over a desk, calculating long rows of numbers during very long days. This work broke his health. There had to be a better way. At the age of 24, he went back to work for his father, while exploring the notion of a machine to help bank clerks. In 1880 he had completed the design for a machine, and next hunted for manufacturing and capital. In 1885 he established the Arithmometer Company, and continued to refine his machine, building one prototype after another until it worked well enough. By 1889 he had built 50 machines, then spent the 1890s refining his originally clumsy device. In 1898, the year of his death, he had a factory in the United States and another in Great Britain, with a product line of four models. After his death, the firm’s management renamed the enterprise after him: Burroughs Adding Machine Company.3 Burroughs became the largest vendor of adding machines in the United States, although the firm faced dozens of competitors in the early decades of the 20th century. To give a sense of the volume of machines sold, we can see that in the 1890s he sold hundreds of machines each year, with 1,399 in 1900. By the end of 1904, the firm was selling more than 5,000 each year. Over the next 30 years, several dozen vendors offered hundreds of various billing and accounting machines developed from the technology originally developed by Burroughs. His company enjoyed continuously growing sales all through the 1920s, with a dip during the Great Depression, then back into the $40 million per year range by the start of World War II.4 IBM also sold calculating equipment, as did the National Cash Register Company (NCR), the world’s largest supplier of cash registers by 1910, Remington Rand after its formation in 1928, Felt & Tarrant, and Monroe. Even typewriter firms such as Royal and Underwood were in the business. Most of these companies enjoyed double-digit growth rates in sales all through the first half of the 20th century. Even as the computer was slowly moving out of the laboratories of American universities into the economy at large after World War II, sales of adding and calculating devices kept


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growing. By the late 1940s, adding and calculating machines accounted for about 38 percent of NCR’s revenues, about 25 percent of Remington Rand’s, and a third of typewriter giant Underwood’s. In 1947 Burroughs sold $69 million in machines; in 1950, nearly $87 million. A mere five years later, it turned in a record of $271.76 million in sales.5 While this chapter is designed to cover the period ending in 1950 so that we can next discuss the emergence of the computer, it is important to point out that sales of adding and calculating equipment continued to rise despite the arrival of the computer in the 1950s. Put another way, in addition to acquiring computers, Americans continued to use adding machines and calculators simultaneously. With development in the 1970s of handheld calculators based on computer chips, expansion continued. By the early 1990s, there were more calculators in use in the United States than there were people. They cost less than $5 in some cases, and children routinely used them in elementary school mathematics classes. If one wanted an example of something that was as ubiquitous as the telephone or television in American society, try the handheld calculator, another information handling device. Just as children in the 1990s were being described as naturally comfortable with PCs, so too “Generation X” that grew up in the 1980s had become comfortable with their little TI calculators. Their parents, however, had nearly the same degree of familiarity with typewriters, and many with adding machines and calculators. Measuring the effects of such a large body of information machines scattered about the economy is difficult to do. We know that people became comfortable with such technology and used it extensively. One sociologist studying the effects on workers in the middle decades of the 20th century noted the expansion of ever more specialized work. Such technologies also made it possible for women to continue to move into socially acceptable jobs in offices as clerks, secretaries, accountants, and administrative assistants. One reliable source estimated that, by 1930, already one-third of all female office workers used machines other than typewriters to do their work.6 Like the typewriter, these machines

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took their places in most American offices, on many factory floors, and in schools and colleges.

BIG TIME COMPUTING: PUNCHED-CARD TABULATORS Historians often look at the tabulator class of machines as the direct ancestor of the modern computer. It was one of its grandparents, (some might argue a first cousin), but nonetheless an important innovation in American information handling. If nothing else, punched-card tabulators gave us the computer card so familiar to Americans throughout most of the 20th century and even in use in the national elections of 2000. The idea of their use is simple to explain: You punch holes in different parts of the card to represent specific numbers or facts, just like a punched hole in a train ticket means that the conductor has acknowledged you paid the fare. In fact, the inventor of the modern punched card, Herman Hollerith, got the idea of using punched holes from a railway ticket. The idea was that you could punch holes on cards to represent information and then later “read” (look at) the holes to play back the data they represented. There had been variations of this idea at work since the 18th century, especially in Europe, where cotton looms were “programmed” by a series of cards with a configuration of holes to instruct the loom what pattern of cloth to make. Hollerith may have known about this, but more important to our story, he had a practical problem to work on. In the 1880s he was an employee of the U.S. Bureau of the Census. The 1880 census had taken place, but it took the Bureau almost the entire decade to analyze the few pieces of information it had gathered on each American. Meanwhile the nation’s population kept growing, and the amounts of different pieces of information the federal government wanted to collect on each American did too. So what was the best way to speed up the analysis of such data? The big fear was that without a different system the 1900 census would arrive before the data of 1890 was completely analyzed and reported to the nation. Work on a card-based system had already started at the Bureau when Hollerith was encouraged


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to put his mind to the problem. Specifically, John Shaw Billings, the Director of Vital Statistics, suggested that “there ought to be some mechanical way of doing this job, something on the principal of the Jacquard loom.” He was referring to the European cotton looms.7 To make a long story short, Hollerith invented a system of machines that could punch holes in cards, sort them, and then tabulate results. They were used for the 1890 census and proved very successful. Data was analyzed quickly and the cost of doing the work proved less than before. He continued to improve his machines, and decided to make a living renting them. He went on to apply his punched-card tabulating approaches to other national censuses in Western Europe and in the United States, and to the work of large organizations, such as other government agencies, insurance companies, and railroads. Accounting practices were changing too, which made his equipment very attractive to use. Between about 1890 and 1920, as the number and size of companies and agencies grew, accounting became more important and more complicated. Hollerith’s machines made it possible to gather and analyze data quicker than by manual approaches. His equipment was used, for example, to tabulate sales statistics, sort and tabulate voucher distributions, sort consumer trend analysis, check bill extensions, allocate costs, and number job orders, all before World War I. Like so many other inventors in the United States, Hollerith did not hesitate to exploit his creations. He patented them, left the Census Bureau, and formed the Tabulating Machine Company in 1896. In order to raise more capital to build additional machines, he agreed to become part of a larger firm made up of several others, called C-T-R in 1911. His was the “T.” Just about every large corporation in America used his equipment by 1920. While there were two other competitors (one American and the other European), he “owned” 90 percent of the market. He rented equipment to users but sold them the cards fed into these machines, thereby combining both rental and sales income, a practice continued by the future data processing industry until the end of the 1970s. By

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1910, his firm was annually generating $350,000 in revenue. In 1914, C-T-R hired a director with solid sales and managerial experience from NCR to run C-T-R. Like many inventors, Hollerith was a better developer of equipment than a manager; the same applied to Burroughs and the adding machine business. This new manager, Thomas J. Watson, Sr., looked at the various pieces of C-T-R and eventually decided to focus on the punched-card portion of the business, slowly retiring other product lines such as meat scales and lecture podiums. In February 1924, he changed the name of the company to International Business Machines, Incorporated, known better simply as IBM. He ran IBM until the mid-1950s. This often stern-looking, bright executive set out to build a well-managed organization with strong marketing and sales skills and a full product line of tabulating equipment. IBM’s experience makes up one of the great success stories of American business history. Growth is always an indicator of a company’s success. At IBM, in 1915, the first full year Watson ran the firm, he generated $4 million in revenue with 1,672 employees. In 1924, his revenues reached $11 million with 3,384 employees. In 1931—in the heart of the Great Depression—revenues stood at $19 million with 6,331 IBMers. During World War II troops were recruited, paid, and battles planned using his equipment, with the result that revenues in 1943 reached $131 million with 21,251 employees. Postwar prosperity led to more opportunities; revenues exceeded a billion dollars for the first time in 1957 with an employee base of over 85,000. The overwhelming majority of these revenues over the previous half century came from punched-card equipment. IBM earned two-thirds of that revenue in the U.S. economy, the rest in over two dozen countries. While we will discuss IBM as a computer company in more detail in Chapter 3, suffice it to point out that long before IBM entered the computer business it had a huge base of customers who had learned how to use computing equipment to do business accounting. These had come to rely on the use of tabulating equipment, along with accounting and adding machines from other vendors (e.g., from Burroughs and NCR), with which to do their daily work. Long before the computer, American


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managers had become addicted to vast quantities of information with which to expand and control their businesses. These machines, both tabulators and desktop adding and calculating devices, came into use at exactly the moment when the number of American office workers— logical users of such technologies—grew enormously, fundamentally changing the characteristics of work and the employment landscape of this nation. Take the humble clerk as an example. Between 1900 and 1910, their population increased 127 percent, and by another 70 percent in the next decade. During the Roaring Twenties they expanded by 28 percent, and even during the decade of the Great Depression by yet another 15 percent.8 During the same period the overall growth in the U.S. labor force in all professions was normally two-thirds less. So, the proportion of people working in offices expanded dramatically. Now look at those professions that directly used office equipment full-time, usually called office machine operators. Between 1900 and 1940, they experienced growth rates not unlike clerks (70 percent between 1900 and 1910, 203 percent between 1910 and 1920, 30 percent during the 1920s, and yet another 31 percent during the Depression).9 We can safely conclude that without the availability of office equipment, especially punchedcard equipment, it would be hard to imagine how large organizations, such as American corporations or an information intensive institution such as the U.S. Social Security Administration, could have developed the way they did. This situation is not really so different than one confronted by Americans in the 1980s and 1990s, in which it would have been difficult to imagine how so many people could come to rely on the microcomputer to do their work, communication, and play without the availability of a widely adopted operating system, such as Microsoft’s Windows. But the key lesson about punched cards is that over a period of more than a half century, this technology influenced how organizations ran, and what jobs people had, while demonstrating the continuance of the long-standing American tradition of applying machines (technology) to do the work quicker, often in less expensive ways than before. Thus, by the time the computer came into being, many could understand its poten-

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tial value once they had been exposed to how it worked. That exposure, and commitment to using computers, took this nation roughly a decade to accomplish once commercial versions of the systems became available. Part of the reason why American managers could reach for computers so quickly grew out of their earlier positive experience with Hollerith’s punched-card equipment.

HELLO!: ROLE OF THE TELEPHONE Another information technology that emerged in the Victorian Age was also an American invention, but similarly to the telegraph, went into wide use in the industrialized world by the end of the Gilded Age. However, for the purposes of this book, we need only to understand how it became one of various information handling tools in America. It is the first technology discussed in this chapter that bridged both business and private life. Television would complete the bridge to an almost entertainment-only information technology. It is hard to imagine how personal and business communications could have taken place without the telephone. Today over 98 percent of all homes and offices have at least one telephone; most middle and upper class homes more than one. Tens of thousands of new users of cell phones come online every month in the United States; children even carry them around, along with pagers. Yet there was a time after the telephone had been invented when its deployment across the nation was limited. Its reception by the American public was a slow process. Many reasons for this existed, ranging from technical limitations (such as how to transmit long distance phone calls) to the price telephone companies had to charge a customer to make the technology a profitable venture. This is a technology that has been studied extensively by historians, economists, sociologists, and political scientists. We do not need to probe its history in any great detail; however, some of the key elements of the story are informative about how technology came into American society. On March 10, 1876, Alexander Graham Bell became the first person to transmit speech electronically. In time the public learned of


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the new technology and reacted variously from wonder and delight to outright disbelief that voice could be carried over wires. Yet Americans had already been exposed to the notion of sending data over telegraph lines for some forty years. When Graham invented the telephone, the United States already had 214,000 miles of telegraph lines transmitting 31,703,181 telegrams out of 8,500 telegraphic offices. One student of the telephone, Sidney H. Aronson, argued persuasively that because of the wide use of the telegraph, many people could not see why the telephone might have a major role to play in the galaxy of American telecommunications. It took a number of years before people found uses for the telephone apart from those of the telegraph. Before the end of the 1870s, however, business people began to recognize the convenience of telephone conversations. They substituted the telephone for the telegraph during the last two decades of the 19th century. When telephone services were offered, eventually by the expanding AT&T, it was business enterprises that could most afford the high cost of telephones. Telephone networks emerged first in large urban centers, such as in New York, then slowly spread. Meanwhile, technological innovations kept advancing the quality and scope of telephone conversations to the point where, in the early decades of the 20th century, long-distance telephone calls became practical, while the costs of conversations continued to decline.10 Initially, telephones concentrated in New England, but after 1890 expanded quickly westward. In 1915 a transnational long distance phone call could be made. The nation was effectively networked during the 1920s as additional technological improvements were made by AT&T in transmission and in creating machinery that could handle growing volumes of telephone calls. Phone calls remained expensive because the technology was costly to develop and maintain, despite declining costs all through the first eight decades of the 20th century. But, as we saw with other information networks, the nation invested in this technology. Through most of the century, investments in this technology outpaced increases in the gross national product of the United States. The heavy costs of this investment primar-

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ily accounted for the high cost of long distance phone service for many decades.11 Delivery of this technology across the nation followed a very predictable pattern of invention, local implementation, and finally national deployment, complete with necessary technological innovations, creation of organizations in support of the technologies, and a business model that could show the way to turning a profit. Bell established a firm to exploit his invention. To make a long story short, Bell’s embryonic firm ultimately became AT&T. By the end of the century, this firm was expanding services across the nation. Meanwhile, other local telephone companies were cropping up all over the nation. From a national policy perspective, in time the American government essentially granted AT&T monopoly rights to dominate the national telephone infrastructure, but with constraints and oversight. Local telephone companies either acquired services from AT&T or folded. But the key point to make is that in American society the choice that emerged was to rely on the private sector to provide this service. This is the same choice that emerged with telegraphic services, despite a continuous debate about the pros and cons of the government taking over either network. This strategy of relying essentially on the private sector to deploy the technology stands in contrast to the experience of other nations. The French, when it came time to deploy the telegraph, opted for government to do the job because officials did not believe the private sector could do it. The problem was insufficient interest among businesses in using the telegraph in its early stages. European governments also saw the telegraph as a militarily strategic technology, which they needed to control and exploit. The Americans viewed this technology, and that of the telephone, more as weapons of industry than of armies.12 So when the telephone came along, government agencies existed with experience in managing telecommunications infrastructures. Often information technologies in the United States are contrasted with the British experience by historians and economists, and so it was with the telephone. The technology became available in Britain soon after its invention in the United


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States, but its deployment was far slower than in the U.S. Many reasons have been offered as explanations. One of the most obvious is the fact that in the 19th century, the British had excellent alternative ways to transport information—the post office and telegraph—which were less expensive than the telephone. The telegraph system was heavily subsidized by the British government, which kept down the costs of transmission. Government officials thus felt less inclined to promote the use of telephones through any encouragement of its deployment, for example, into rural areas. Yet, as in the United States, the earliest users were businesses, and for the same reasons. Complaints arose in the 1880s and 1890s when the British Post Office, which licensed all telecommunications companies, did little to foster expanded use of the telephone. In 1912, the whole situation came to a head when the Post Office finally bought the largest phone company in the nation— National Telephone Company—and then as national policy, began to promote the broader use of quality phone service in Britain. Additional capital for expansion became available, and the new service gained access to a national market. This changed situation contrasted with the one before, where the phone company had been limited to providing services in the eastern half of the nation and the Post Office, through its own network, to citizens in the western part of Britain. Subsequently, the number of users began to rise sharply all through the middle years of the 20th century.13 The French experience was a variation of the British one. The French government bought out the one major phone company in the nation—General Telephone Company—on July 13, 1889, thereby creating a national monopoly. Like the British, they had experience with government-run information networks for postal and telegraphic services. The state wanted to control and to dominate the flow of information in all electronic forms, a sharply different attitude than in the United States, where Congress did not want to manage the process. Furthermore, the U.S. Constitution discouraged national control over the flow of information. So, by the time the telephone came into being, the French already had a national policy toward the flow of electronic information. The state took the initiative to expand its network from the 1880s

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forward. As with the British, a major inhibitor was not technological, but the lack of sufficient capital funding to invest in the expansion of a network, a problem of smaller proportions in the United States where economic incentives played a stronger role. One study of the French experience concluded that it was not until the second half of the 20th century that the government finally realized the necessity of investing heavily in this information infrastructure.14

THE RADIO IN AMERICA While I will have a great deal to say about the radio later in this book, and therefore do not want to review its history here, there are several points that we must keep in mind. It came into wide use in the United States during the 20th century, particularly after World War I. During that war a great number of American military personnel were exposed to the technology. Prior to the war, a few individuals had attempted to develop a radio industry in the United States, but that did not really take off until after World War I. Companies that in time came into the television business built the radio industry. That meant manufacturing and selling radios, transmission equipment for radio stations, and creating programming appealing to listeners. As with other information technologies in the U.S., several common patterns were evident. First, deployment was in the hands of the private sector, although the government encouraged expanded use either by regulation or by consciously shying away from control. Government officials, while they came in time to regulate many aspects of the radio business, were normally hunting for national policies that made access to multiple radio stations and programming possible for the largest number of citizens. In that effort, they proved far more effective than their European counterparts. Second, military considerations, while important, were overtaken by the opportunities presented by entertainment. This is the same pattern that occurred later with both television and the Internet. While the specifics varied in each of these three cases, we cannot ignore the broad general pattern—it simply was too obvi-


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ous and so similar. Third, once deployment took off, it occurred rapidly and thoroughly. In the 1920s radios represented one of the most popular products of the decade. By the end of World War II, even very remote rural homes and farms frequently had radios. The nation had radio stations in every major city. By the time television arrived, Americans had their electronic information tastes: news and weather, baseball games, comedy shows, religious programming, music, and dramatic theater. The leap to television was thus a smaller jump than had been required from mail to telephone.

ARRIVAL OF ELECTRONIC ENTERTAINMENT: TELEVISION Television is a wonderful technology to follow our discussions of the radio and telephone, which were used for work and play, and adding machines and tabulators used only for work, because TV was overwhelmingly for entertainment and flourished in the home. While increasing numbers of Americans were being exposed to a variety of information handling equipment, from the telephone to the tabulator, along came television. This technology conditioned Americans to the idea that information could be sent to them on a screen and, in time, altered how they spent their leisure hours and how they received facts. Today’s microcomputer, connected to the Internet, would have been impossible without the prior technology of the television and the preparation of Americans that TV performed. While television began as an instrument of entertainment for most Americans, and the screen (cathode ray tube) an important work tool for a few (such as flight control personnel and those operating radar systems for the military), it became quickly another way to represent data. The variety of information, of course, grew enormously between the 1950s and the late 1990s, from images of Howdy Doody to CNN’s financial statistics of the day, to graphs and charts using Lotus 1-2-3 on a PC. While television is really a story for the post1950 period, it had a history in America that long predated the start of the next half century.

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The history of the evolution of the technology that made up TV is a long and complicated story. Not one person, but many, worked in several countries, focusing on various aspects of the technology. However, what is not always appreciated is how early and extensively this new medium was explored in the United States. Quite correctly, television became very important in American society after 1950, and appeared in more U.S. homes in the 1950s and 1960s than anywhere else in the world. That rate of adoption made it, for all practical purposes, an American phenomenon, representing a rate of adoption that would not occur in other parts of the world until the 1970s in Western Europe, and the 1980s in East Asia. Much work had been done on this device in the decades of the 1920s–1940s. Development of this technology also reflected how new devices were being invented in the 20th century. Engineers now worked in laboratories, such as AT&T’s Bell Labs, or for radio companies, such as RCA, to develop the new devices, and often employed many people and large budgets to get the job done. It was a technology whose history is as much a story about the business of television as it is about the science of radio pictures. In the 19th century, several European researchers had started work on such things as transmitting pictures over telegraph lines, developing components for such a system, but none of these got anywhere. By about 1920, however, enough technical know-how had accumulated to make it possible for U.S. corporations to start looking seriously at the technology. General Electric launched a television project in the 1920s; in 1925 one Charles Jenkins produced television images; the following year the same happened in Great Britain. Vladimir Zworykin, a Russian working on the same, moved to the United States in 1919 to avoid the political problems and revolutions in his homeland and spent the 1920s working at Westinghouse. During the decade he patented a variety of components for television. At the same time, AT&T, already a powerhouse in many high-tech areas, also conducted research on television, particularly on color transmission. The big problem for AT&T was to figure out how to produce clear television images and


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equipment that were affordable to growing numbers of customers. All during the 1920s and 1930s, the major radio companies in the United States dabbled in television research. General Electric demonstrated TV in 1928, Philco in 1931. RCA participated all through the 1920s with the enthusiastic support of the firm’s head, Abraham Sarnoff. Although he spent the 1920s focused primarily on the big business of RCA—radio—he invested in and talked up the benefits of television. During the 1920s, one lone wolf named Philo Farnsworth, working in California with some financial backing from George Everson, an advertising executive, developed equipment as good as Zworykin’s and at the same time. By the early 1930s Farnsworth had been filing patents on his equipment, moved his laboratory to Philadelphia—at the time the radio capital of the United States—and caught the attention of Sarnoff, who saw him as a threat. Farnsworth, meanwhile, had linked up with Philco, and thus had a strong corporate partner to do battle against RCA. By the end of the decade he was licensing out his patents, even to RCA. During the 1930s, some experimentation with transmission of television occurred, primarily in New York City. William Paley, head of CBS, even established two experimental television stations as far back as 1931, broadcasting in New York a few hours each week. The problems faced by television businesses was very similar to what PC vendors faced years later. First, there was the problem of getting a TV set down to a reasonable cost; in the 1930s they cost anywhere from as little as $600 to $1,000, the annual income of many workers. PCs in the late 1970s and early 1980s often cost thousands of dollars, far more than many Americans could initially afford. Then there was the problem of programming. A television set was useless if there were few or no programs being broadcast to it; that required broadcast studios and programming (i.e., shows). PCs in the 1970s suffered from the lack of software; until software programs came along in abundance, demand for PCs remained very limited. In May 1939, E.F. McDonald, head of Zenith, proclaimed in an advertisement: “Radio Dealers! Zenith has television sets . . . Zenith is ready—But Television Is Not.”15 So already the problem of broadcasting was occupying the attention of American TV executives. But nothing

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essential happened because World War II began, diverting attention to more immediate issues. However, work on the technology continued on such things, for example, as cathode ray tubes, vacuum tubes, miniaturization of electrical components, radar, and telecommunications—all sources of the television systems of the postwar period and that made up many of the parts of the earliest computers. After the war, Sarnoff and others were back at it again. RCA, CBS, and others had already anticipated the postwar period by opening or reopening TV broadcasting facilities as early as 1944. By autumn 1947, the nation could claim it had 20 TV stations. They broadcast primarily sports and cowboy movies, but news programs and talk shows were gaining in popularity. Popular radio programs were migrating to television, making Americans comfortable with the new technology. Such programs included “Author Meets the Critiques,” and “Meet the Press.” New programs designed just for television also emerged, such as the “Kraft Television Theater.” All of this occurred in the 1940s! Large radio firms such as NBC and CBS thus got into the television game early. Meanwhile, RCA expanded its manufacturing role as producer of television equipment and receivers. What is interesting in hindsight was how much interest there was so early in television. Manufacturing figures hint at this interest. In 1946 for instance, RCA manufactured 10,000 TV sets; not bad. In 1947, the number jumped to 200,000; in 1949, 600,000, and in 1950, 900,000 for a total postwar production of nearly two million sets (1946–50)! To put that in perspective, in 1946 RCA manufactured all the TVs made in the United States, 80 percent of the sets in 1947, and 12 percent in 1950.16 The nation got hooked on television fast! Prices for those machines also dropped as programming increased. For example, one of those 1946 devices would have cost a consumer about $500; in 1950 the price hovered at about $360, still a great deal of money. But already a pattern of declining costs had started, one which continued to the early 1990s (when they leveled off), making it possible for almost anyone to afford a television set. The reason for telling the story of TV’s evolution is simple: It is an information technology that reflects patterns of


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American behavior. It expanded when it had practical use. That use normally involved providing entertainment, which in turn made it possible to deliver information (e.g., news) or shared experiences and values (like novels always did). Our themes of the practical, the informational, and entertainment are evident across the entire history of TV. Of all the information technologies of the 20th century, TV did most to provide shared experiences across the nation, much like the Bible provided the nation a set of shared values and stories in the 19th century. In both instances, the effect of bonding the nation came from information and its artifacts.

WHAT AMERICANS THOUGHT OF INFORMATION JUST BEFORE THE COMPUTER The phrase “just before the computer,” as with just before any new technology, means the period prior to the device becoming economically attractive. For television it was anytime before roughly 1947 or 1948; for radio any time prior to about 1919; for punched-card equipment before about 1890; for adding machines before 1885; for typewriters prior to about 1875. Yet in each case, much work had gone on in the decades before commercial success in the slow evolution of the technology, and always in anticipation of commercial success. In each instance, profits were potentially available and developers attempted to meet a need or solve a problem, typically business issues. The role of information also evolved in different ways. The early protections provided in the U.S. Constitution clearly suggest that in the 18th century many leaders saw information as playing a positive political role, making it possible for one to be an effective citizen. By the late 19th century, information made possible good consumers through inventions and knowledge about products. That trend has continued to the present. But a third element clearly existed by the late 1800s—information used as a source of entertainment. All three elements become evident in the chapters that follow. That is the context in which we can consider the development

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of the computer and, more immediately, attitudes of Americans at the halfway point through the 20th century. While I have much to say about computers in Chapter 3 and beyond, we should recognize that work on the development of this important machine had been underway in the United States since the 1920s at such places at MIT, University of Pennsylvania, and at Bell Labs. During World War II, machines were built at the government’s expense to handle a variety of war-related applications, ranging from deciphering enemy radio transmissions to calculating firing tables for artillery. In the immediate postwar period, nearly two dozen computer development projects were underway, mainly housed in U.S. universities funded by the U.S. Government, while several computer manufacturing companies came into existence, formed by engineers who had worked on various war-related computing projects. Much had been shrouded in secrecy during the war but after, the number of articles and presentations on the new information-handling machine began to increase. In 1946, about twenty articles were published in widely read magazines in the U.S. on the subject; that number doubled annually through 1950. However, if we tracked the number of articles, the real takeoff does not occur until 1953, when the number climbs sharply. Those journals publishing in the late 1940s increased their coverage to over 100 articles a year by the late 1950s.17 So what did the information landscape look like in the United States in 1950? Middle class children were almost universally going to school; public schools were even available in poor neighborhoods. The GI Bill made it possible for thousands of returning veterans of all races and social classes to attend college, generating the largest increase in student enrollments in the history of the nation. Public libraries had nearly reached their maximum level of penetration into the cities and towns of America and were, in fact, beginning to reach out to more rural areas with bookmobiles, initially converted buses. Newspaper and magazine subscriptions per household rose all through the late 1940s and early 1950s. Over 30 percent of all homes had at least one radio, and over


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two million had televisions. Automobiles now routinely had a radio, although it was still an option that had to be ordered. By the late 1950s, literacy was above 85 percent of the adult population. Graduating from high school had become a relatively routine passage toward adulthood in most communities for both boys and girls. School attendance was very high. In 1950, 44 percent of all people between the ages of 5 and 34 (kindergarten through graduate school) were attending school. That percentage rose steadily all through the 1950s and 1960s. At work, small office machines, ranging from typewriters to adding machines, were not only commonplace but were being replaced in massive quantities by new models. In October 1948, IBM introduced its Model A “Standard” electric typewriter and the following May, its “Executive” model. But it was the same story over at Burroughs, Victor, NCR, and Remington-Rand. Prosperity meant that the wherewithal existed to acquire new equipment, and to replace older machines. Manufacturing expanded as veterans came home to their old jobs while new ones were added. The top five office equipment manufacturers in 1948 collectively employed nearly 100,000 workers; those numbers kept rising in the years prior to the arrival of the computer.18 Even “The Cash,” as NCR was known, the predominant supplier of America’s cash registers, boomed; revenues in 1946 were $77.4 million but by the end of 1950, had reached $170.5 million.19 The modern way was to start collecting sales data at the point of sale, with cash registers that accumulated ever-increasing amounts of information. In short, the nation was retooling its inventory of information machines, increasing its skills and education, and relying incrementally on technology to get the work done. The computer, of course, encouraged these trends rather sharply, but as Americans sat at the start of the Computer Age, they already were surrounded by the things of the Information Age. But what did they say about information and its technologies? The new comments frequently focused on computers, somewhat less on TV, and clearly on their functionality and implications for American society. Those who commented in print overwhelmingly were experts in the field, often writing for others of like mind. The business literature covered the

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emergence of the computer very closely. In both cases, experts and business journals were overwhelmingly positive about the future benefits of computers. They overestimated the capabilities of the technology, but saw it as part of the ongoing emergence of new and productive technologies continuing to flow out of the American economy. Productivity in labor, lower costs of operation, and the appearance of modernity all played into the logic of their writing. It would not be until the mid-1960s that one would begin to see articles and books critical of computers. Even then, criticism was muted. In the 1970s and 1980s, significant concerns about the negative effects of computers began to appear in print, but these were drowned out by laudatory defenses of the technology. Thus, as had happened with the telephone, adding machines, and punch card tabulators, commentators were positive all through the period. Computers, in short, were just more good technology coming forth.20

CONCLUSIONS What seems remarkable about the story of the adoption of various technologies is the almost total lack of acknowledgment of its historical pedigree, especially on the part of those who have commented on the role of information handling tools. The same even occurred with the computer without “experts” realizing how it is really yet another turn of the technological screw. It is the latest in a long string of information technologies that were either invented in the United States or were extensively used here. It is as if we had a collective amnesia. However, the situation is more like the problem of connecting the dots. It has only been over the last two decades of the 20th century that students of information technology have begun to understand the links among newspapers, books, telephone, typewriter, adding machines, radio, and television.21 What becomes quickly evident is that a pattern of use emerges, along with a nation enamored of information tools. The pattern was one of development, exploitation, and coexistence with other types of information tools. The mosaic is real, as subsequent chapters demonstrate.


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If there is a surprise, it is always the speed with which information technologies are adopted. Both industry insiders and commentators usually miscalculated demand. Forecasts by vendors reporting internally to their senior management, for example, historically underestimated the American demand for these kinds of tools. Shortages occurred with every major innovation from the Civil War to the present. Even today with the Internet, we are surprised at how quickly it is spreading. The U.S. Secretary of Commerce in the second Clinton administration, William M. Daley, in his cover letter on a major report regarding the Internet published by his department said what so many looking at the industry had been saying for a half century: “This past year, electronic commerce has grown beyond almost everyone’s expectations.”22 The team of economists who put together the report said the same thing: “Growth in the available measures of e-commerce . . . is outpacing last year’s most optimistic projections.”23 But the surprise is explainable by the natural conservative nature of people being asked to predict the future (e.g., product and sales managers) and also because most Americans in informationprocessing industries do not have historical perspective, let alone rely on past experiences to gauge product demand. On the other hand, those writing on the role of technology routinely overestimated demand, exaggerating its impact, and often did not predict the “killer apps” that made a particular device ultimately popular. Phonograph records (cylinders in the 1800s and very early 1900s) were not used to record living wills as Thomas Edison thought would happen; people instead recorded great music. Xerox machines were not used just to replace carbon paper for management’s letters—think about everything people photocopy today. In the 1950s people talked about “giant brains,” and the unfulfilled promise of artificial intelligence to provide synthetic brains is legendary. And the list goes on. The reality more often was that forecasters outside vendor organizations overestimated the speed with which a particular technology would be adopted or improved sufficiently to make it a viable alternative to some existing ones. The problem is that those who published were those who influenced opinions

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and set expectations. Product managers within firms were trying to achieve predetermined targets or control costs of inventory. In the period of the computer, 3- to 4-year lags between when a technology was touted as the great new breakthrough and when it was widely adopted became a relatively normal pattern. Yet journalists, industry pundits, and editors beat the drums heralding the arrival of some new gadget. As Americans became familiar with a technology, they figured out new and better ways to work with it. They either applied it in innovative ways or went back to the manufacturer and said, “improve such and such,” often with specific recommendations about what and how. In fact, product innovations of office appliances from the 1880s to the present routinely came from users. No self-respecting manufacturer of high tech equipment anywhere in the world today would introduce a complex product without that kind of feedback routinized into the management of the new offering.24 What is also an obvious pattern of usage is how quickly and easily Americans have woven all manner of information technology into the rhythm of their daily lives and work activities. This practice applies as much to the Age of Paper as it does to what is happening today. But before we can discern how today’s technologies are used, we need to understand the special role of the computer. That is why Chapter 3 is dedicated to the origins of the digital experience of the United States.

ENDNOTES 1. The problem with a useful generalization is that there are always exceptions. A notable example of one is Chester F. Carlson, inventor of what eventually would become the Xerox copier, or Edward H. Land, who invented the Polaroid instant photography. We can reasonably also observe that both of these inventions were information technologies, each dealing with the collection and reproduction of images. My interpretation of events are drawn largely from David A. Hounshell, “The Evolution of Industrial Research in the United States,” in Richard S. Rosenbloom and William J. Spencer (eds.), Engines of Innova-


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tion: U.S. Industrial Research at the End of an Era (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1996): 13–85. 2. An extreme example is the author’s father who, even in the 1970s typed on a circa 1930 Remington typewriter, resisting for many years even the use of an electric typewriter, let alone a word processor! 3. James W. Cortada, Before the Computer: IBM, NCR, Burroughs, and Remington Rand and the Industry They Created, 1865–1956 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993): 31–37. 4. Ibid., 175. 5. Ibid., 242. 6. The sociologist was C. Wright Mills, White Collar (New York: Oxford University Press, 1951): 195. 7. Leon E. Trusdell, The Development of Punched Card Tabulation in the Bureau of the Census, 1890–1940 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1965): 30–31. 8. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Historical Abstracts (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1975) 1: 140–141. 9. Ibid. 10. Sidney H. Aronson, “Bell’s Electrical Toy: What’s the Use? The Sociology of Early Telephone Usage,” in Ithiel de Sola Pool (ed.), The Social Impact of the Telephone (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1977): 15–39). 11. Ronald Abler, “The Telephone and the Evolution of the American Metropolitan System,” in Pool, The Social Impact of the Telephone, 318–341. 12. Daniel R. Headrick, When Information Came of Age: Technologies of Knowledge in the Age of Reason and Revolution, 1700–1850 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000): 204–206. 13. Charles R. Perry, “The British Experience 1876–1912: The Impact of the Telephone During the Years of Delay,” in Pool, The Social Impact of the Telephone, 69–96. 14. Jacques Attali and Yves Stourdze, “The Birth of the Telephone and Economic Crisis: The Slow Death of Monologue in French Society,” in Ibid., 97–111.

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15. Quoted in Robert Sobel, RCA (New York: Stein and Day, 1986): 132. 16. The data can be found in Electronic Industries, January 30, 1963, p. 101. But see Sobel, RCA, for details, pp.148–152. 17. For an account of how the American public met the computer in the 1940s and 1950s, see James W. Cortada, The Computer in the United States (New York: M.E. Sharpe, 1993): 102–124. 18. Cortada, Before the Computer, p. 225. 19. NCR, Annual Reports. 20. I have begun to explore the popular literature on the American public’s attitude toward computers in several publications. See, for example, James W. Cortada, The Computer in the United States, 102–124; James W. Cortada, A Bibliographic Guide to the History of Computer Applications, 1950–1990 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996). 21. For an example of the dots being connected, see Alfred D. Chandler, Jr. and James W. Cortada (eds), A Nation Transformed by Information: How Information Shaped the United States from Colonial Times to the Present (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000). 22. U.S. Department of Commerce, The Emerging Digital Economy II (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Commerce, June 1999): unpaginated cover letter. 23. Ibid., unpaginated “Executive Summary.” 24. Getting the “voice of the customer” into business decisions is now canon law in all industrialized economies. To see how that is done, consult Harvey Thompson, The Customer Centered Enterprise (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2000).

R E T P H

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BIG GIZMOS, NEW TOOLS, AND A CHANGING WAY OF LIFE, 1950–1995

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The history of America is a history of gigantic engineering feats and colossal mechanical construction. —LOUIS LOZOWICK, 1926

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andolph-Macon College, the small Methodist college located just outside of Richmond, Virginia, in 1969 acquired an IBM System 360. Historians later would note that this product line was perhaps the most successful product in the history of the United States for it made it possible for IBM to double its revenues in five years and propelled the computer industry rapidly on its path to the importance and size it has today. But in that spring of 1969 all that lay in the future. The liberal arts college did not yet even have a computer science program, but its administrators saw the need for a modern computer. Installed in the basement of the oldest dormitory on campus, it became a magnet for a motley assortment of students interested in science, mathematics, technologies, 59

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radio, and stereo equipment. They stood around watching as IBM field engineers carefully wheeled in the various parts of the computer and an assortment of peripheral devices, all the machines decked out in IBM’s famous blue. Within days the students competed with staff to “get on the machine.” Years later, the children of these students shared the same experience when they too saw a computer wheeled into the house, this time a personal computer, and clamored for the right to “get on the machine.” Now the very young grandchildren of those students at Randolph-Macon eagerly await the arrival of a wide variety of toys that have almost as much horsepower as that wonderful computer in the basement of Randolph-Macon College. What had happened in all those years? Why did a small Southern college, with barely 850 students, find it so natural yet so exciting to install a state-of-the art computer system? What had happened in the nearly twenty years before that had conditioned the students of 1969 to gather in the basement of that old dorm? The answer, quite simply, lay in the fact that by then having a computer was expected—the technology had established itself as practical, even essential. At the heart of the adoption of computers—and an essential theme of this chapter—was the business application of computers. Commercialization of this technology made it possible for Randolph-Macon College to afford this machine and to find uses for it. The notion of practical uses of computers had been around for a long, long time. Thomas J. Watson, Sr., the president of IBM, stood up to address employees in Endicott, New York, on November 10, 1926. He was fond of talking about the potential for using machine-readable information. He often commented that only 5 percent of all accounting information had been put into machines, leaving 95 percent yet to go. In a typically American fashion, he pointed out the central reason for computing and information: “Every machine we manufacture makes money for the individual or organization that buys it.” Imagine, he argued, if these did not exist: “The wheels of progress would be retarded.”1 The same points were made by his son, Thomas J. Watson, Jr., thirty years later. The theme turned on the business application of information tools, new tools for new uses.

CHAPTER 3 • BIG GIZMOS, NEW TOOLS

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In 1981, when IBM advertised the sale of its personal computers, it harked back to this notion, labeling the PC, “A Tool For Modern Times.” The diffusion of computers across America turned out to be one of the major economic and technical events of the second half of the 20th century. Computers navigated spaceships to the moon, printed almost every paycheck in America after 1980, and medical diagnostic devices in the 1990s delivered on the promise to detect accurately complex medical problems without the intrusion of surgery. Businesses spent several billion dollars on computers to perform more efficiently and effectively. Press coverage of the more mundane use of computers always remained limited and low-keyed. But it was the day-to-day use of computers that is the important story. Writing about the use of the ENIAC to do calculations for the design of an atomic bomb is a lot more glamorous to publishers and readers than reporting on the use of punched-card equipment to generate payrolls for World War II soldiers. Computers appeared in almost every niche of America. Americans latched on to computers as soon as they became available with an intensity that exceeded what the rest of the world experienced initially. They found uses for these machines, turning the technology into novel tools, from handheld calculators to point-of-sale terminals, from ATM machines to video games and programmable home entertainment centers. As a consequence, they changed their lives and environment. Walk into a middle-class home today and you will find over a hundred microprocessors buried in washing machines, microwave ovens, bread makers, televisions, PCs, automobiles, VCRs, digital clock radios, boom boxes, and telephones.2 Watch the modern American manager strap on her hardware for combat in the workplace and you will see more technology at work: the stylish digital watch, the “beeper,” and the now-almost obligatory cell phone. These make up more computing power than the first large computer had in the 1940s. America has had a love affair with technology for a long time, but never as intense a passion as with the computer and its assorted peripheral components. Applying the technology in such a myriad of ways, from the little

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handheld calculator to the FAA network controlling the flight of thousands of aircraft, is what is so interesting. If there is a uniqueness in the American experience it lies in the fact that people embraced the technology far more extensively than many in other countries. To be sure, adoption of a wide variety of computer chips across a broad spectrum of machines is well recognized. In fact, almost all the forecasts of America’s future include discussions about the increased use of computers. Often these projections verged on extreme views of a perfectly digitized world.3 But demand has always been conditioned by practical uses. Flexibility of the technology made useful applications possible. Flexibility also translated into a variety of new forms of this technology. That variety has been made possible by two conditions. First, because Americans were early adopters of every form of computer that came along, they learned about the potentials of this technology while operating in an economy wealthy enough to support novel uses and financially reward application of the gizmos and their base technologies. Second, the technology became highly portable and contained. The transistor was always small, and its successor, the computer chip, large when it was first the size of a piece of candy-coated gum, but now almost invisible to the naked eye. Miniaturization meant portability; one could stick it anywhere: inside a watch, into a pacemaker implanted in a person’s chest, or as part of a car radio. By the end of the 1960s, these chips carried within their physical package many of their own instructions on what to do. They were miniature computers that could store data, analyze and calculate, and generate results which caused action, such as the display of the current time on a watch, or the effective mixture of air and gasoline in our cars. Those two features—miniaturization and the ability to carry a full set of actionable instructions— made it possible to plug these little devices into so many areas. In turn, demand drove down the cost of these digital building blocks over the course of the past four decades, while creating the technical and economic incentives needed to have even smaller devices that were more reliable and had greater function. At the end of the 1990s, over a million


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Americans went to work each day in what we now called the semiconductor industry, designing, manufacturing, and selling several thousand models of the computer chip. Yet for all their uses, most Americans did not fully understand how the machines worked, and could not have cared less. That is why these devices retained a certain mystery about them, why we can call them gizmos. It did not matter how the internal combustion engine operated; the question was, would the car run? The complaints about Windows 98’s performance is less about the arcane design and programming strategies employed by Microsoft and more about reliability and, analogous with our car, miles per gallon. This nation has long been blessed with the technical talent and wherewithal to design a Windows 98 or a fuel-efficient car. But the real action has always been on the demand side, the practical, a nearly insatiable appetite of the American people for more function, greater reliability, and economic value. Because computers became such a pervasive part of so many American lives, the next two chapters are devoted to the subject. In this one I review the emergence of computers, discuss how they spread through American society, and were used. Because the Internet changed so many things, and nothing more so than how computers were used, I devote Chapter 4 to that technology and to how Americans embraced it. Then, beginning with Chapter 5, I describe how all information technologies were used over time, beginning with work.

A QUICK COURSE ON HOW COMPUTERS WERE INVENTED If it weren’t for Johnny von Neumann, a brilliant, slightly stocky Hungarian immigrant working in the United States, we might not have understood what a computer should look like as quickly as engineers did. One of the most distinguished mathematicians in mid-century America, he advised the U.S. Army and other American government agencies about the use of computers and other calculating devices during and after World War II. He was one of the most energetic proponents of

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the construction of the ENIAC, the first functioning digital computer built in the United States, which became operational in 1946. Von Neumann went on to design and build other computers; but what we really remember him for was a paper he wrote in the spring of 1945, with the very dry title, “First Draft of a Report on EDVAC,” about the machine to follow the ENIAC. In this report he consolidated and codified what the design of the modern computer should look like. Originally just circulated among a few colleagues, in time it rallied thinking about the design of machines around his idea that a computer should have five components: arithmetic, central control, memory, input, and output units. He described the idea that programs—the instructions to a computer—should be stored in the machine along with the data, what we came to call the concept of the “stored program.” His descriptions became the blueprint for the computer as we know it today. Up until this time, what should make up a computer system had not been clear; afterwards it was. There were many experimental machines in various stages of development in the United States, usually at large universities with strong engineering programs, such as the University of Pennsylvania, MIT, and Cal Tech. These were paid for by federal agencies during the 1940s and 1950s. As time passed, computers became reliable and cost-effective, and people figured out what to use them for. Thus, by the early 1950s, they were used in military and business applications. Demand for civilian/business uses led new startup firms to emerge in the 1940s and 1950s, such as ERA and the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation, and encouraged long-established office appliance companies such as Burroughs, Remington-Rand, and IBM to invest in the new technology. Mainline electrical appliance firms, such as General Electric and Honeywell did too. By the end of the 1950s, it was clear to manufacturers that only a few firms would be able to commit the massive resources required to build these systems and had the base of customers needed to buy them. Most of these companies were old office appliance providers, such as Burroughs, NCR, and IBM. Earlier startup firms consolidated, such as ERA and the company that invented the UNIVAC (the Eckert-Mauchly firm), into Remington-Rand, later renamed Sperry Univac.


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The big breakthrough in the ability of these companies to deliver such machines into the American economy came in the early 1960s, when IBM introduced five computers, along with about 150 other pieces of equipment and software that were compatible with each other. That is, a program in one machine could run in a different model, avoiding the horribly complex and expensive conversions that had plagued large computer users in the 1950s. Compatibility meant the cost of computing could drop, that other vendors could invent equipment and software that would work on such systems, and that people could acquire programming and other technical skills that were transferable from one firm to another. During the 1960s and 1970s that is exactly what happened. American companies were deluged with new vendors of hardware, software, and services. The computer industry offered a large variety of offerings, particularly around the start of the 1970s, as machines of different sizes appeared, from super computers at the high end to large mainframes for normal business applications, and to mid-sized machines built for specialized applications, such as for engineering and manufacturing. In the second half of the 1970s, a new class of machines appeared that in time we called personal computers. Built initially out of existing components, frequently in the beginning by tinkerers such as college students and some corporate engineers and hobbyists, they were desktop machines. Some of the early machines were the Altair, Osborne, TRS-80, Commodore, and, of course, the Apple II. In August 1981, the dominant provider of computer equipment in America— IBM—introduced its own personal computer. That event signaled to many American businesses that it was now OK to use personal computers. No longer were they the purview of hobbyists; now they could go to mainstream corporate America and mainstream they did. At the end of the 1970s, Americans had bought less than 100,000 machines from all vendors in any given year. By the end of 1982, that number had risen to more than a million units a year. Americans never looked back. By the late 1990s they were buying tens of millions of machines each year. Computers went from just being the private property of large corporations with highly skilled technical staffs babysitting them, to a democratic technology that

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anyone could have access to in school, home, or at work. Computers went from costing millions of dollars in the 1950s to less than $1,000 at the end of the 1990s. What made all of this possible, of course, were the underlying technologies of the computer. There were the conceptual, architectural designs—what von Neumann contributed—and engineers who knew how to put existing components together and invent other ones—from Eckert and Mauchly with their ENIAC, EDVAC and UNIVAC, to Bill Gates in the 1970s doing the same thing for operating systems running on desktop machines. But the keys were computing technologies: transistors and integrated circuits (the computer chip). During the 1930s and 1940s at Bell Labs, scientists had been working on ways to transmit information electronically, studying metals and other naturally occurring substances. In 1947, three of them—Walter Brattain, John Bardeen and William B. Shockley—finally discovered that they could reenergize an electrical impulse through a simple little device they called a transistor. Your one physics lesson in this book: elements like silicon and germanium are semiconductors, that is to say, substances that can amplify electronic impulses. Unlike the vacuum tube that had dominated all types of electronics since the turn of the century, transistors were light, reliable, and relatively cheap. These men went on to American-style fame and glory, winning Nobel prizes, appearing on coffee mugs, magazine covers, and tee shirts, and acquiring lots of fame, á la Americain. But more seriously, they achieved an important place in the history of 20th century science and technology because during the 1950s transistors were used to make computers run faster, cooler, cheaper, more reliably, and with greater capacity. Transistors were also used elsewhere, in radios, stereo equipment, and in various industrial equipment. The hunt was on for even more effective, smaller devices needed as much for commercial reasons as for military requirements. Engineers could not send a rocket up with a computer the size of a room on board to direct its trajectory. They needed really small machines. During the 1950s engineers and


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scientists kept experimenting and developing better transistors, and at the end of the decade, researchers at two firms developed simultaneously what we came to call the computer chip. Jack Kilby at Texas Instruments and Robert Noyce at Fairchild both tumbled across the idea of the integrated circuit in 1959. Kilby, a quiet “let me work alone” type of inventor, and Noyce, an outgoing, instinct-driven inventor, simultaneously took the notion of the transistor to a new level, designing devices that ultimately could be programmed, be made intelligent, and that became the real “brains” of the computer. As Figure 3–1 makes plain, it was little. Now one could make rockets really smart, sport a digital clock on your wrist, have a better quality radio, and eventually have programmable devices like VCRs. Hardly five years went by before computer manufacturers had switched from transistors to integrated circuits as the guts of their computing systems. From the early 1960s to the present, engineers shrank the size and cost of the integrated circuit—the computer chip—while increasing its capacity and reliability. A running joke in the late 1970s—when the computer chip was barely 20 years old—was that if cars had become as productive as the computer chip, you could buy a Rolls Royce for $5! What is essential to understand about the computer chip is precisely that it had come down in cost while increasing in function to the point that by the 1980s, microprocessors (computers on a chip) were cheap and easy enough to plug into all kinds of machines. Because of their versatility, we may someday look back at the computer chip as one of the two or three most important inventions of the 20th century, and it took place in the United States. Its success can be tied to the fact that it made available greater quantities of information in ways that were practical. Like books before it, once applications of the chip became possible, so too its profound evolution into everimproving forms. Let’s summarize: In the 1940s, U.S. government agencies supported development of the first digital computers, often bringing together companies and university labs on these projects so that they could exchange information and get the work

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FIGURE 3–1 Multiple generations of computer technology—vacuum tubes (1940s), transistors (1950s), and silicon-based “chips” (1960s)—all packaged as they would appear inside computers. (Copyright of this image is held by IBM Corporate Archives.)

done. Then, in the 1950s, office appliance and electronic firms either came into existence or added computers to their product lines that were acquired by government agencies—particularly the military for Cold War applications—or by companies for industrial and accounting uses. IBM dominated that market around the world by the end of the 1970s, but lived with at least a half dozen rivals in hot pursuit. Every large company and most large government agencies installed mainframes during the 1960s, particularly as their cost dropped and their capacity and reliability increased. Software programming languages, invented in the 1950s and early 1960s, became practical and, by the early 1970s, vendors were selling software products to do such things as collect data and conduct normal accounting work (e.g., billing, general ledger, and accounts receivable).


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Different-size machines were introduced, from large mainframes to minis, and finally, the desktop or personal computer. As computer costs dropped further, demand for these systems rose all through the 1970s and 1980s. Meanwhile, personal computers were first installed by hobbyists, followed by users at work, and, by the end of the 1980s, had become popular household items. By the end of the 1990s, over onethird of all American homes had a PC, and over 80 percent of the U.S. workforce worked with computers in some fashion at the office, lab, or factory. Even the cash register at McDonald’s was a desktop computer. In the 1990s the miniaturization that had been underway since the 1940s finally reached a point where a large number of very intelligent devices became possible. The most popular included the portable phone which, by the end of the decade, was no larger than a pack of cigarettes, but rich in function; the pager that could “beep” that you had a message, deliver text, and store information; the personal digital assistant (PDA) which allowed people to store telephone numbers, keep an electronic calendar, and hold some notes. Children found miniaturization affected them too. As technology shrank size and cost, they could go from playing video games on large pinball-sized machines to little handheld units from Game Boy, while the graphics became more real, faster, and more exciting. The numbers involved were amazing. Americans as a nation went from spending only hundreds of thousands of dollars in the 1940s to over 5 percent of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) by the late 1990s. The world, with the United States taking the lion’s portion, had shelled out $5 trillion dollars on computing products and services over the past half century. Hundreds of millions of personal computers have been built; the number of computer chips is now measured in the billions. We went from less than 1,500 programmers in the early 1950s, to where nearly a third of the U.S. population has done some sort of programming, whether they knew it not.4 IBM, Microsoft, Cisco, and other firms measure their annual U.S. revenues in billions of dollars. In the mid-1970s, executives in the Fortune 1000 companies in the U.S. were routinely spending about 1 percent of their budgets on computers; by the end

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of the 1990s, that percentage had nearly tripled, with some industries over 8 percent (e.g., banks and other financial institutions). The constant evolution of computer chips made possible this unrelenting, upward demand.

THE INVENTION OF SOFTWARE Software is the computer’s way of handling information. Without this technical media computers would be useless. As Harvard business historian Alfred D. Chandler, Jr. liked to say so often in print and in lectures, software became the energy of the Information Age. While excellent work occurred in both the United States and in Western Europe in development of software over the past half century, demand always proved greatest in the U.S. Needed first were instructions to computers to tell them how to coordinate various activities of all the pieces of a system, from the part of the machine that “crunched numbers” to that which printed answers. Called operating systems, these were first developed at American universities but quickly became part of what computer companies had to do. These became relatively standardized by the mid-1960s for mainframes with IBM’s operating systems, just as they did for the desktop with Microsoft’s Windows in the 1990s. Next we needed programming languages, that is to say, tools with which to “talk” to computers to instruct them how to calculate a bill, print an address label, or aim a rocket at the moon. Over a thousand were designed between the 1950s and today, but, like hardware, programmers standardized on a few. The first relatively easy-to-use programming language came from a team at IBM. It was called FORTRAN, and became very popular with engineers and scientists. Then came COBOL, the most widely used programming language for business applications from the early 1960s through the 1980s. In time, other popular languages came into use: PL/1, BASIC, C+, and so forth. At any time you can count on at least 100 to 200 in use around the world. Beginning in the mid-1960s, firms started to produce software as products that did specific things. Called packages, these software tools were sold to large corporations for hundreds of thousands of dollars, although utilities (used to orga-


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nize information, sort data, run printers, etc.) often cost less. Many computer vendors provided such packages to their customers free of charge. But in June 1969, IBM announced it would no longer do that; thereby creating an instant market for competitors to sell software products against all computer manufacturers. Beginning in the 1970s, and continuing to the present, a new economic sector called the software industry emerged in the United States, selling utilities (such as database managers), programming languages (BASIC for example), accounting packages, spreadsheets and word processors, and games. With the arrival of the personal computer, the variety of software products expanded sharply, from hundreds to thousands. The first killer application for personal computers was the spreadsheet, such as VisiCalc. One IBM marketing manager commented to me in the mid-1990s that there were enough spreadsheet products to last the world for millions of years (there were some 3,000 such products introduced over the previous decade)! The software industry exploded with growth with the arrival of the personal computer and is now moving into the personal digital assistants (PDA) market. Sales for all types of software reach tens of billions of dollars just in the U.S. alone. Over time software became easier to use. In the 1950s one had to be able to program in the arcane language of the computer, often using a mixture of mathematical and alphabetic and engineering symbols to “talk” to the machine. Programming languages helped standardize how the dialogue was conducted with the computer. By the late 1960s, engineers at Xerox PARC—Xerox’s equivalent to AT&T’s Bell Labs—had started designing friendlier interfaces that we came to rely on with laptops and desktop machines, replete with pictures of functions one could click on (e.g., a trash can for deleting, a picture of a printer for the print command). In time these features dominated how people communicated first with Apple’s line of computers in the 1970s, and next with IBM and IBMcompatible personal computers beginning in the 1980s. That evolution from the arcane to the quasi-pictorial interfaces of today is an important process that helped make it possible, for example, for Microsoft to dominate the personal computer software market.5

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Just as hardware became easier to use and standardized over time, so too did software. Americans are a practical people; so their software, like their hardware, had to work better, cheaper, and easier. Over time, this is exactly what happened. To be sure, all users complain about their machines and especially their software. But the complaints increasingly came from a community of users who were working with systems far richer in function and easier to use than what they had in the 1950s or 1960s, and who had come to rely more on such technologies to get their work done than had been the case before. Success in adoption of computer technology was an outgrowth of continuous improvements in its base technologies (such as the computer chip), configuration of systems (e.g., what size computer with what kinds of peripheral equipment), and availability of software (from operating systems to application packages). Vendors always worked on integrating all three. Developments in one made improvements possible in another. For example, as the costs of memory dropped in a computer, large or small, or could hold more data, one could add more function to existing software packages, or bury in machines and software additional instructions that made it easier for a user. The history of the evolution of computers in America is largely a story of technological innovations and profitable commercialization of these machines within an economy in which Americans could afford to acquire and use these tools. What is most remarkable is the speed with which all pieces of the computer puzzle evolved and improved. We went from wires hanging out of the backs of plug boards, vacuum tubes that blew out all the time, and less than a dozen machines in the mid-1940s, to whole industries based on the manufacture, sale, service, and use of information technology, all in less than a half century. The history of the computer is one of the most remarkable stories of evolution of any device that you can find in the history of any nation. What made all of that possible, of course, were sound uses of the continuously evolving technologies. Americans were never shy about finding new ways to use computers.


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MILITARY USES OF COMPUTERS Looking at what Americans did with computers over the past half century is a useful case study in the use of information and its technology. We can easily see application of this technology occurring in three distinct ways: military/political uses as part of the Cold War, business tasks, and entertainment. The key observation, however, is that the form that computing took, and the speed and extent to which these machines were acquired and used, were directly linked to the ability of Americans to find practical applications for them. As a general observation, Americans were quick to find uses, and equally quick to apply them. It was no accident that the U.S. military establishment became the largest supplier of research funds for the refinement of computing technology in the 1940s and 1950s. Military leaders quickly bought into the notion that this kind of technology, along with further miniaturization of electronics, would help them execute the military agendas of national leaders. That was a lesson learned well during World War II. In 1939, Polish cavalry on horseback attempted to block Hitler’s aircraft, tanks, and artillery from occupying their country. Six years later, two U.S. atomic bombs ended the war in the Pacific. In between much occurred in the development of firing tables, improved aircraft, and important advances in electronics. All were applied; in the end most proved effective. All were seen as essential to enhance as the Cold War became reality. The Soviets also recognized the increasing value and role of technology, having learned the same lessons in World War II as American and British military commanders. They too went down a technology road. Historians are just now learning, for example, that the Soviets had a massive program in the 1940s and 1950s to acquire expertise in miniature electronics and to build computers suitable for military applications.6 There were several highlights in military applications. It began with ENIAC, supported by the U.S. Army during World War II for the purpose of developing firing tables for artillery,

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then later used for other applications. The onset of the Korean War in 1950, along with the nuclear arms race with the Soviet Union, led to the use of computers in the 1950s to guide aircraft, make rockets effective, and build nuclear bombs. To these ends all kinds of new machines were built at major universities, such as the Whirlwind at MIT, and at office appliance companies, such as at IBM and Burroughs. By the mid-1950s, air defense systems (SAGE) were coming onstream to begin the process of providing the early phases of an electronic umbrella to warn the nation of incoming Soviet missiles. A generation later, President Ronald Reagan resurrected and extended that idea with his Star Wars Initiative. By the end of the century, military engineers were predicting that his initiative of the 1980s would probably become a reality around 2010. Satisfying the complex requirements of the American military proved costly, but these expenses came at a time when America could afford them. The 1950s evolved into a period of enormous economic prosperity and national confidence. But the complexity of what the Pentagon wanted required extensive coordination among military, university researchers, and many companies. That complexity of coordination led to a variety of innovations. The one that would ultimately get the attention of the American public, initiated at the start of the 1960s, was the development of a network by which everyone involved in defense applications and research could communicate using their computers. The project, called the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET), connected engineers, scientists, manufacturers, and military personnel so that they could communicate and experiment with advanced computing techniques and forms of telecommunication. This network, crisscrossing the nation and used actively by thousands, became the Internet of today. A second major use of computers made by the military community lay in the command and control functions of a variety of equipment. Over the past half century, developers of weapons computerized them. They began by providing more computer power in aircraft and rockets in the 1950s, and they continue to do so down to the present, but they also extended


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technology to other equipment. First on the list of priorities was aircraft. Over time, pilots were given more information about navigation and the relative presence of other aircraft and hostile fire around them. Radar advanced and computing capability allowed both pilots and ground personnel to monitor traffic and eventually combat as it occurred. Over time, the “fog of battle” and the “friction of war,” while they continued to remain the classic ambiguities faced by all commanders, became clearer because of improved communications with those in harm’s way and through computer modeling.7 Over time, computer-based “intelligence” seeped into other military equipment, from tanks and artillery to the communications systems of ships, trucks, and radios. Today, for instance, military vehicles are frequently equipped with geo-positioning equipment that notifies drivers and officers in a command center where the vehicles are anywhere on the surface of the earth. Originally developed for use with aircraft, rockets, and satellites, the technology evolved to the point where it could be used in a vehicle. Today, a Boy Scout can use the same technology on a camping trip. In a constant effort to reduce the chances of American military personnel getting hurt or killed, and to improve the ability of the armed forces to win battles and wars, all the uniformed services and the Department of Defense tried automating warfare. Over the past half century, American military officers have collectively been enamored with injecting intelligence (computing) into all manner of equipment, even to the point where now they are deploying robotic devices that have no people in them. For example, in Desert Storm in 1991, drone aircraft flew over the desert battlefields, gathering intelligence and sending video images back to headquarters, without use of human pilots. Military engineers expect to have unmanned fighter aircraft in operation by the end of the second decade of the new century. These trends in military applications have reduced the number of U.S. casualties. The other objective—to be more effective—has been driven by two long-term strategies. The first involved use of computers to create within the military community the notion that one could control a battle or war, much the way we might

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see action in a video game, and in the process moved along the science of operations research and even artificial intelligence. In a brilliant book on the Cold War and the role of computers, Paul N. Edwards of Stanford University explained the effects of this system’s view of command and control with computers: Such systems constituted a dome of global technological oversight, a closed world, within which every event was interpreted as part of a titanic struggle between the superpowers. Inaugurated in the Truman Doctrine of ‘containment,’ elaborated in Rand Corporation theories of nuclear strategy, tested under fire in the jungles of Vietnam, and resurrected in the impenetrable ‘peace shield’ of Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative, the key theme of closed-world discourse was global surveillance and control through high-military power. Computers made the closed world work simultaneously as technology, as political system, and as ideological mirage.8

The challenge for a half century was to coordinate humanmachine integration while technology evolved extensively. But the mind-set, influenced by computer-based functions, led American military leaders to think in terms of vast improvements in control, while their confidence surged when they were allowed to apply technology to a military situation. The second strategy concerned making military equipment more effective. The most obvious attempts were the laser and “smart” bombs that emerged in the decades following the Vietnam War, deployed in Desert Storm and later, at the end of the 1990s, in Yugoslavia. Development of robotic soldiers has been underway for many years, suggesting yet another turn of the technology screw.

BUSINESS USES OF COMPUTERS As impressive as use of computing by the military came to be, Americans are more about business and nowhere did they apply computers more extensively than in commercial settings. Already familiar with the benefits of office appliances that ranged from the humble Burroughs adding machine and NCR cash register to the likes of IBM and other compa-


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nies that came along with computers, American firms adopted them. We went from a few computers going into commercial enterprises in the early 1950s to where, at the end of the 1990s, nearly 6 percent of the GDP is now spent on computing. The vast majority of that expenditure is for business applications. What did Americans do with so much computing? American business users of computers went through four stages of evolution, each influenced by ever-expanding functions and capacity of computers, growing awareness and then reliance on them to do work, and ultimately as the way American businesses responded to making and selling of goods and providing services. During the first stage, roughly 1945 to 1952, computers came out of the secrecy of wartime development and were introduced to the public as the giant brains I talked about in the previous chapter. Business managers learned what they were, remained a little puzzled about how best to use them, but recognized that they were still very expensive and not as reliable as other forms of information handling. The press hyped the arrival of the computer in hundreds of sensationalized articles, with extraordinary claims for what they could do. Then came the second period—1952–1965—during which corporations finally adopted computers. If you were to pick a moment, a “first” for commercial use, credit goes to GE at its home appliance plant in Lexington, Kentucky in 1952, when it installed the first computer system devoted solely to commercial applications. New uses were developed all during the 1950s, involving inventory control, shop floor data collection and work scheduling, and various other manufacturing and accounting applications. GE’s project received wide publicity; many American corporate managers watched and learned how they, too, could apply this new technology.9 As reliability improved, the fashion of having a computer as a symbol of being modern increased, and as costs and benefits were better understood, corporate America fell in love with the computer. Accounting and financial departments first used computers to speed up and automate existing accounting applications. Banks and insurance firms also used computers

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to track their only form of inventory—information—by automating existing uses of earlier accounting and office equipment. In manufacturing, particularly in such complex industries such as aircraft, automotive, electrical equipment, and telephone manufacturing, computers proved useful in tracking and scheduling activities and inventories. Engineers began using computers to help design better new products, such as aircraft. Firms hunted for ways to reduce labor content in work, often finding that computers were less expensive and more accurate than employees in performing such tasks as calculating, counting, tracking, and sorting information. They wanted to lower the cost of doing business, for example, by reducing excess inventory. They also sought more effectiveness by using modeling and scheduling capabilities that computers offered. Almost all the Fortune 500 firms acquired computers or rented time on someone else’s system in this second period. The third stage—covering the years 1965–1981—was the Golden Age of large, centralized computer systems in corporate America. During this period the proverbial “everyone” acquired a system. In this 16-year period, the computer became ubiquitous in mid-sized to large corporations, across all factories, divisions, and even in some stores. The dramatic improvements in performance, such as those provided by IBM’s System 360, and the rapid increase in the availability of programmers and software, finally made it possible for most companies with over 250 employees to use computers effectively. All industries adopted the computer. The early users of the 1950s became more extensive users. In the 1960s, utilities, transportation, retail, light manufacturing industries, process and chemical sites, and textile firms deployed computers to perform accounting tasks, schedule work, track assets, and move material and products. As one moved closer to 1981— the year we saw a large uptick in commercial acquisitions of personal computers—low-tech industries began adopting the computer: bakeries, coal mining, footwear producers, cement manufacturers, lumber and wood mills, and meat packers to mention a few.10


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During this third stage, budget outlays rose sharply. For example, in banking and insurance, in the mid-1960s expenditures on information processing were less than 1 percent of total budget; by the end of the 1970s, in some firms it inched toward 5 percent. It was not uncommon at the end of the 1970s for a large manufacturing firm to spend 1.5 to 1.8 percent of its budget on computing. All these numbers doubled by the early 1990s. While it is convenient to think of the post1981 period as that of the personal computer, the facts indicate corporate America continued to acquire mainframes, to build large telecommunications networks, and to deploy minicomputers in greater amounts throughout their enterprises. For example, instead of looking at GE installing a system in Lexington, by the end of the 1970s every division of GE was an extensive user of computing and telecommunications. The fourth period, and it is only a fourth period so that we can account for the PC, while it technically started in the early 1980s when corporations began to acquire desktop computers, really became a significant factor only in the late 1980s and continued throughout the 1990s. At first PC users were those who had specialized applications or felt that the central data processing organization could not support them cheaply or quickly enough. Applications for PCs in the 1980s included accounting (spreadsheets was the killer application of the early 1980s), word processing, database management, credit analysis, financial analysis, and purchasing. All of these applications could be done relatively independent of the big mainframe. Starting in the very late 1980s, and massively through the 1990s, users of personal computers wanted to be able to tap into the large electronic files that corporations had created in the 1960s and 1970s in their data centers. That desire led to extending telecommunications for online systems beyond the “dumb” terminals hooked to online applications to PCs, creating the enormous demand for e-mail and file exchanges that became the killer applications of the 1990s. Networking PCs made that technology so practical for communicating across large enterprises that corporate America got into the habit of buying tens of millions of PCs every year. As the cost of these

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little machines dropped and their function and reliability increased, ever-smaller organizations could acquire and use these. By the late 1990s, it was very common to see even little businesses with only one or two employees regularly using personal computers. Add in the Internet which, in effect, provided the communications that larger internal networks in corporations had to their employees in the 1970s and 1980s, and one begins to recognize how computing in business continued to expand, penetrating all industries, and almost all firms of any size. Computers fundamentally changed the nature of work. While a whole chapter is later devoted to the role of information in work, there is not enough space in this book to explore the profound influence of computing on work. However, I can summarize a couple of key points. Computers automated many tasks that had been done by people, such as providing telephone numbers or generating and mailing bills. Computers made it possible to do a great deal of “what if” analysis that informed all kinds of decisions in business, military action, and science. Computers made it possible to collect and analyze data in ways humans could not, making possible, for example, today’s marketing strategies and yes, all those catalogs one receives in the mail. Computers made it possible for customers to have the information they needed in order to know as much, for example, about the cost of a car as did the auto salesman, thereby changing the dynamics of the process for purchasing a car. Computers became part of many things, from automobiles and clock radios to cell phones and programmable TVs. This is a process, however, that is still so new that it would be difficult, indeed impossible, to conclude how it will all end. We are still on a journey when it comes to computers; of all the nations in the world, the United States is clearly further down that road. But we must return to the main focus of our story, the general role of technology. Across the second and third periods of the computer’s evolution in particular, new forms of technology made it possible for companies to use computing in novel ways. The most


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important of these trends involved building machines that did things specific to one industry. For example, in banking, Citicorp introduced the ATM so that customers could get money at any time day or night in hundreds of locations. Today, most working Americans use ATMs at one time or another. In retailing, point-of-sale (POS) terminals replaced the cash register as a device that could collect information on what was sold, extend credit, and reorder depleted inventory. In time, most industries learned how best to use this technology, while customers learned their own lessons too. Banks added the ability to perform such new functions as deposits and transfers among accounts through an ATM. Customers came to rely on these capabilities to do their banking at night and on weekends. POS terminals acquired additional functions, such as allowing end-users to deduct cash from their checking accounts to pay for groceries. Grocery stores continued to be major spots Americans went to for some additional cash. The technology helped reduce the incidence of bad checks through realtime credit scans. The mix of technology, users, and applications changed over time. Technically trained users, such as engineers and scientists, were always the first to use mainframes, then minis, and finally PCs. The rest of us came along several years later in each phase. By 1990, over 90 percent of American scientists and engineers used computers regularly in the workplace, often just simple accounting and financial software packages. By 1992, about 45 percent of the Fortune 1000 companies in America reported that their end users were systematically adopting PCs, while also using existing computers to do their work. When end users wanted to link to other parts of the enterprise for e-mail and other applications, computer managers of the day (in MIS departments, Chief Information Officers, etc.) imposed standards and controls so that machines and software acquired by end users could communicate with each other. That process of standardization contributed sharply to reducing the cost of computing and extending adoption throughout the 1990s.11

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COMPUTERS FOR ENTERTAINMENT Third in importance after military and business uses of computers was entertainment. Yes, Americans were entertained by computers. As we saw with military and business applications, Americans began using computers for entertainment but over time either drove the technology to offer more, or exploited it in increasingly varied ways. The two most fundamental applications were games and animation and both were incredibly profitable. Many societies have information-based games and the United States is no exception. Trivial Pursuit, created by Canadians, is only one of the latest information-based games popular in the 1990s. It is also an example of a low-tech game. But Americans were always quick to apply information technology to games as well. Almost from the first day IBM field engineers installed computers, they invariably came into the data center with a box of cards that made it possible to play Hangman or Baseball using a multimillion dollar system. We loved those games. Today, when you buy a PC, a few games are already imbedded in some of its software. Television provided the American expression “game shows” to describe a genre of programs in which the viewing audience could vicariously play along with Truth or Consequences, College Bowl, or Jeopardy. Prior to television, game shows were broadcast by radio. Even earlier, in the days of print, we had the crossword puzzle. But what is a compelling demonstration that Americans are information and information technology junkies is their enjoyment of computer-based games. We know them as video games. Over 50 million Americans— about 20 percent of the population—grew up with video games, such as those provided by Atari, Nintendo, and Sega. To them, “Mario” is a known figure. Children who watched television in the 1950s and 1960s were replaced by another generation of kids who manipulated their television-like screens with games. The first documented case of an online game was Spacewar, written by Steve Russell at MIT. Two people battled it out on dueling space ships. The combat game would become a staple of many future video games. But as


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computer power increased, response time sped up, and graphics became more lifelike, games improved. In fact, there are now observers of information processing who argue that the demands of entertainment today are pushing forward the boundaries of technology the way requirements of the U.S. military establishment stretched computer engineers in the 1950s.12 But it all began with mainframes. Besides Hangman and Baseball, there was Lunar Lander in which a player had to determine how much fuel to expend to land on the moon without crashing. Years later aircraft simulators, first used by the military, became mainframe games and, by 1982, began appearing on personal computers. But the historically big event came in 1972 with the arrival of Pong, the first product from Atari, the firm founded by Nolan Bushnell. In the world of video games, one can speak about pre- and post-Pong eras because with the arrival of Pong we entered a period when many Americans first began to play computerbased games in video arcades, bars, and later at home. In 1974, one could even buy a copy of Pong to play at home. All through the 1970s, the demand grew for new and more sophisticated video games. In the early 1980s, Japanese game manufacturers—Nintendo and Sega—began exporting their products to America, now the world’s largest market for video games. Americans had their native champion too—Pac-Man— the single action, brightly-colored animated game that captured the attention of children from kindergarten through high school and cost their parents millions of quarters! During the 1980s video games were housed in stand-alone machines dedicated to the purpose of presenting one game, much like pinball machines earlier offered only pinball games. However, as the decade progressed, games were put on more portable devices, such that today, for example, handheld GameBoy is a dedicated computer, devoted only to games. Others were put on Apples, IBM PCs, and various microcomputers. As computer chips became more functional, acquired greater capacity, and dropped in cost, Americans bought more sophisticated games. This trend made it possible, for example, to invent new ones, such as Super Mario (1986) which became the “hot” video game in America in 1986 and 1987. By

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the end of 1988, Nintendo’s management could look with great pride at the fact that their product was the bestselling toy in North America. Nintendo’s GameBoy debuted in 1989. With the arrival of CD-ROM technology in the early 1990s, games began to reside on the new medium. Americans eagerly bought CD-ROM based games, such as Mortal Kombat.13 While it is too early to understand the effects of such technology on the habits and thinking of the nation, several tentative observations can be made. First, video games taught tens of millions of children how to work with computers, and to view them as normal parts of their lives. Prior to the Internet and its interactive quality, video games provided a similar opportunity to converse with technology. In other words, in the two decades prior to the wide availability of the Internet, Americans began interacting with computers either through online systems at work or through primitive video games at home. Americans were a nation preconditioned to accept the interactive nature of the Internet. Second, the limited evidence we have suggests that video games, and later computer-based games, were not restricted to one generation over another. Video games first appeared in the 1970s, often in bars, where adults played them and where they still play such video games as Poker. Thus, while we have Americans who may not have used online systems at work, they nonetheless were exposed to information technology in a primitive way through high-tech video games. These were high-tech because often the latest graphics or the most advanced computer chips went into them. The evidence is not clear that children were the most aggressive users of the Internet, but today’s young Americans are regularly exposed to computer-based information through television, personal computers, and electronic games. In short, screens are a common item in their lives. In one of the most recent important studies done on children and computing—reflecting the experiences of some 80 million Americans—Don Tapscott observed that this generation was “the first to grow up surrounded by digital media. Computers can be found in the home, school, factory, and office and digital technologies such as cameras, video games, and CD-ROMs are


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commonplace. Today’s kids are so bathed in bits that they think it’s all part of the natural landscape. To them, the digital technology is no more intimidating than a VCR or toaster.”14 His own evidence suggested that the percent of households that had video games—the only device we know that was used 100 percent for entertainment—went from about 50 percent of households with children in 1990 to 80 percent by 1999. His evidence found that those same households (those with children) with PCs—which often were also used for entertainment—exceeded 50 percent by the end of the 1990s.15 It is hard to conclude that he is overstating the case. Then there are graphics, animation, and computerdesigned movies. Nowhere in the world was the appetite greater for use of information technology in movies than in America. To be sure, part of the issue was one of affordability. Only American movie studios could afford to acquire Cray supercomputers, for example, to make such animated moves as Jurassic Park (1994) and Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace (1999). These studios also operated in an economy heavily populated with information technology experts and computers on the one hand, and on the other, a sophisticated audience that had a good eye for technology-enhanced entertainment. Demand for the use of information technology began with the moviemakers themselves. Read what one of them said: One of the nice things you can do with the technology as it’s advanced now, on your own desk top, you can take a videotape of a laser disk of a film, and you can send the signal to the computer and watch the film on the screen. You can stop it, reverse it, put in slow-motion and so on. . . . The computer gives you the power to shift everything around in the film.16

Presentation of films relied on all available media, beginning with film itself, then video for use with television, personal computers, and from disc and video mediums to CD-ROMs and now to DVD CDs that even play on laptop computers—such as the IBM 600E laptop on which the book you are reading was written. Movies were put on new formats almost as soon as a new media became available, often at the same speed as what occurred with games. The economic

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results were unmistakably positive statements of public support. Jurassic Park, Titanic, and Star Wars Episode 1 were huge successes at the box office, sustained by the entertainment quality perceived by the public and not just by outstanding marketing. Americans always wanted their film technology pushed forward. Sound in the 1920s was soon enhanced with color in the 1930s. In 1953, they saw their first 3-D flic, Bwana Devil, and by 1990 we had IMAX, yet another attempt to engage the viewers and get them closer to the action. IMAX and other innovations came at the same time as audiences were becoming involved with other information technologies, from terminals at work to PCs and video games at home. With computers we have the initial phenomenon of programmable special effects. Perhaps one of the first, if not the first use of special effects done with a computer came in 1979, when director Ridley Scott made Alien. Only four American studios in the early 1980s could use computers this way, but by the end of the 1990s, studios either had that capability or subcontracted out such work to specialized firms. Even computer vendors, for example IBM, had staffs of hundreds who did this kind of work. Over time, computer usage increased. For example, in 1988, background scenes for Who Framed Roger Rabbit were all computer generated. But by the early 1990s, all American sci-fi movies relied extensively on computer graphics not just for backgrounds, but also for special effects and computergenerated characters. By the time you read this book, you may have seen your first serious movie that had no actors, only a computer creating all the images, motion, and sounds. Computer-generated cartoons were already old news in the United States by the early 1990s. Computers also became American movie stars. Who hasn’t heard of HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey? HAL was probably the first mega-digital star in America. T2 in Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991) was very big. So was the computerlike crowd in all of the Star War movies. Of course, they also reflected a nervous concern about their humanlike qualities or the lack of human qualities in others. Sci-fi movies of the 1950s with their robots were not always stories about kind


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machines. Terminator 2 might have been one of the first to suggest that evil cyborgs do not necessarily have to rule the American image of computerlike creatures. Yet the theme of control—the great promise of Cold War computers—remains obvious in films. We have the contrast with the hugely popular TV and movie series of Star Trek to suggest a growing comfort with anthropomorphic digital creatures in American films.17

CONSEQUENCES OF THE COMPUTER Much of this chapter focused on the diffusion of computer technology throughout the American economy over the past half century, moving from large expensive devices in universities and government agencies to calculators and pagers in middle-class children’s backpacks. It is important to understand that process because the availability of computing technology in its many forms throughout the economy is the creation of a digital infrastructure necessary to be in place before consequences of such technology could be felt. As with earlier innovations in American society (e.g., arrival of the telegraph, telephone, or radio), these devices had to be installed, used, and appreciated for what they could do before Americans would alter previous habits of work and play. This is a unifying theme not only for this chapter, but also for all that follow. Three extraordinary features of information in assorted forms characterize American society, and are also evident with earlier technologies and formats of information. These are: ■ speed with which this technology was developed and improved, ■ extent to which Americans acquired these devices and found new ways to use them, and ■ rapid response of manufacturers in creating even more varied devices to meet the nation’s collective appetite. The richness in variety ultimately sticks out the most. Fortune magazine sensed this when, in June 1998, its reporters documented the variety of applications that Americans used digital devices for in one day. As one would expect,

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the article had the usual examples of engineers, doctors, and scientists using digital equipment, and reporters commenting that “the microchip is without a doubt the most remarkable invention of the 20th century.” But the ubiquitous nature of the technology really hit home when they cataloged all the digital devices in one house in northern California. The picture accompanying the article made it clear this was a middleclass home—nothing pretentious, just quite normal. Reporters found microprocessors all over the house. Table 3.1 lists most of these. What is most interesting is the fact that today such a list seems unremarkable because it catalogs what so many Americans increasingly have in their homes. In short, it was mundane. The list in Table 3.1 is not the complete catalog Fortune printed; no need to waste space in presenting an even larger table because the message is so clear. We could make such a list for a typical office and reach the same conclusions about variety and commonality in the use of information appliances. Either list would indicate, however, the practical use of information. I list devices with the digital built in, but what we are always seeing is the practical use of information. The trend with all these devices is their evolution toward products that provide services, rather than being distinguished as computers. Digital cameras will someday just be called cameras that happen to use digital technology to capture and present an image. The device is part of a system of photographic software on one’s PC, computer paper of sufficient quality to reproduce a color photograph of the same quality as a local photo development lab, and built-in instructions in the camera so our photos are always of outstanding quality. Americans are already buying information appliances in quantities running from tens of thousands to millions of units. The list is ever-growing: electronic reference books, address books, calendars, language translators, encyclopedias, trip guides, navigational systems in cars, portable printers, test equipment for almost every industry and large machine, including industry-specific devices such as MRIs for use by doctors in assessing human medical problems, portable stock quoters, statistical calculators for engineers, and others for real estate agents and lawyers. Despite their popularity, Americans want more. Consumers report that all of these

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TABLE 3.1 Digital Devices in One American Home Car Global Positioning System Compact disk player Digital controller Digital console PC Washer and dryer Digital thermometer Dishwasher Calculator Camcorder Color video printer TV Microwave oven

TV satellite VCR with remote

Breadmaker Pager

Game console Voice-activated toy Stove Mixer Laptop computer Refrigerator Telephone/fax DVD player Stereo Toaster Juicer Telephone answering machine

Coffeemaker WebTV with remote WebTV keyboard Robot toy Clock radios Digital bathroom scale Boom box Digital camera Hand-held TV Cordless telephone Portable minidisk recorder Digital signal transfer system

Source: “One Digital Day,” Fortune, June 8, 1998, p. 100.

devices are, at best, still primitive. One conservative forecast predicts a larger variety of such devices with lower costs, more uses, better information, quality and higher enjoyable content: The successful family of information appliances will be built around the people who use them and the tasks to be performed. Products in the world of information technology have suffered too long under the existing technology-centered designs. People are not machines, they have very different requirements.18

Americans have a rich history of being interested in gizmos—gadgets and devices that can be applied to something. Who these Americans were varied over time. During the 19th century, white men, normally in the ranks of the working class or farmers, made up the majority of these Americans. That segmentation continued throughout the 20th century but, as the middle class expanded sharply in the middle

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decades of the 20th century, interest in these technologies expanded across all professions and ages, and began to include women. Women in American society have normally had a different relationship with information technology than did men.19 Yet as the 20th century progressed, they too embraced information technologies. As we shall see in the next chapter about the Internet, by the end of the 20th century, female users of this information infrastructure numbered about the same as males. Differences in attitudes toward information technologies from one gender to another were disappearing. Increasingly, as information-based gizmos became less expensive and easier to use, they also diffused across all ethnic, economic, social lines, and ages in American society. The diffusion across social lines is especially a late 20th century phenomenon, but one that reinforces my theme that information technology has and continues to permeate ever deeper into American society.20 A reason for including the word “gizmo” in the title of this chapter is to call attention to a subtle fascination so many Americans have with new technological devices, an almost childlike adoration for them. Of course it varied over time. Boys and young men enjoyed building their own radios in the 1920s and 1930s, and their own microcomputers in the 1970s. Boys overwhelmingly loved digital and video toys, although today girls do too. Women and girls took to the telephone as quickly as men throughout the 20th century. But patterns changed too. For example, while historically boys enjoyed electronic games more than girls, girls enjoyed GameBoy in the 1990s almost as much as their male peer groups. Explaining why this fascination exists is more difficult to do. This nation has a tradition—a heritage—of personal independence rooted in the pioneer spirit. This spirit called on individuals to fix problems they encountered because there usually did not exist the social and political infrastructures on the frontier that more established societies had. Immigrants learned quickly that they were on their own too, and thus took initiative to solve problems, promote their own welfare, and take charge of their destinies. Adoration of the practical, of those things and information that solved problems or


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moved their personal agendas forward, may go far to explain why Americans embraced so many information technologies such as the computer so quickly. Identifying motives for any action, however, always proves complicated. For example, a common reason, rarely admitted, for a company to acquire a computer in the 1950s was to appear modern while having the opportunity to tinker. Data processing managers put tape drives with their whirling tapes near a window so visitors to their building could see that their companies were “advanced,” and “obviously” applying stateof-the-art technology to remain “modern,” “progressive,” and “contemporary.” Image was fine, curiosity stronger, and fascination the true love affair with computer equipment. However much image and fascination were present, it was also an affection conditioned by practical considerations. There were always consequences. One example suggests a variety of these. In the mid-1990s, a regional utility company in Indiana—NIPSCO—decided to make a fundamental change in how it worked with customers. Taking advantage of the lowering cost of computers, growing ease of use of PCs, and effectiveness of new software tools, senior management decided to build a large customer support center near Gary, Indiana. They filled it with telephone operators and state-of-the-art telephonic equipment and computers. Then they closed their storefront offices scattered across small towns in northern Indiana. Instead of walking into a local office to pay a bill, turn on a service, or talk to a NIPSCO employee, customers now called a central location where a database had a history of each household and business. They could also pay bills electronically. What NIPSCO did, thousands of organizations have also done, across all industries, and for sound business reasons tied to cost reductions, more comprehensive coverage, and increased accuracy and equity in implementing company policies and practices. Some towns saw the change as a threat, marginalizing a community at the same time that banks, telephone companies, and other service providers were reducing the number of their brick-and-mortar sites and instead were moving into new quarters on the digital frontier. This transformation was symbolic of a timeless process in America—the

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move to new territories, always with new technologies, usually with some misgivings. In time, as at NIPSCO with its customers, the change turned out just fine and expected benefits materialized. Customers got fast answers, were treated more fairly with standard policies applied equitably to everyone, and NIPSCO gained the benefits of economies of scale. Thousands of articles and hundreds of books have been published on the consequences of the digitalization of America.21 One conclusion we can draw from these studies is that America is changing again as it continues its historic embrace of new information technologies. If history teaches us anything, it is that the commitment will be intense, complete, and very efficient in America. Berkeley sociologist Manuel Castells’ studies of the Information Age also clearly point out that the evolution to such an age is increasingly being experienced globally, growing into historic proportions. After surveying the expansion of information-based technologies and cultures around the world, Castells concluded that the United States had the most technologically advanced economy in the world at the end of the 20th century. He noted that it was the first nation to experience “the organizational transformations characteristic of the network society, at the dawn of the Information Age.”22 He cautioned that national social problems, such as racism and increased poverty during the last two decades of the century were not being resolved because of information technology. He made the same observation about other information technology-intensive societies. While economic productivity rose, and these tools helped those who could afford them, traditional social problems remained in such places as Great Britain and Western Europe.23

CONCLUSIONS Just counting the number of mainframe computers installed in various countries accents the focus on early American deployment, pointing to the U.S. as an example of the future arriving earlier to the Information Age than others. In 1955, the U.S. had 240 computers installed, Germany and France each had 5, and Britain 13. Ten years later, the U.S. had 24,700,


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France 1500, Germany 2300, and the UK 1582. The numbers are very lopsided in favor of the U.S.; the three other leading users of computers combined were far behind.24 Similar disparities of numbers could be cited for the 1970s and 1980s. In short, the Computer Age was coming to America sooner than anywhere else. Ultimately, we can conclude that this nation linked the use of computers to its wider exploitation of information in general. Every technology bowed to this broader mission. Computers, therefore, were subjected to the same role and discipline as the Bible, a good business-oriented newspaper, or a cost-effective adding machine. What an information-laden America is beginning to look like is the subject of the rest of this book. To sense how America’s longstanding love affair with information and its uses is playing out, we have to understand the unique role being played by the Internet. For that reason, Chapter 4 rounds out our rapid tour through the high points in the evolution of America’s creation of information infrastructures.

ENDNOTES 1. Thomas J. Watson, Men—Minutes—Money: A Collection of Excerpts from Talks and Messages Delivered and Written at Various Times (New York: International Business Machines Corporation, 1934): 99. 2. “One Digital Day,” Fortune, June 8, 1998, pp. 84–134. 3. For an excellent example of a modern, positive, sometimes too-enthusiastic statement about America’s digital future, see Michael Dertouzos, What Will Be: How the New World of Information Will Change Our Lives (New York: HarperEdge, 1990). 4. The reader may have programmed without knowing it, for example, when initially establishing settings on the VCR at home. 5. Good marketing over the years by Microsoft was at least of equal importance, along with the firm’s initial connection to IBM as the larger company’s provider of choice for an operating system to run on the Personal Computer. Microsoft’s story is well

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explained in Stephen Manes and Paul Andrews, Gates: How Microsoft’s Mogul Reinvented an Industry—And Made Himself the Richest Man in America (New York: Doubleday, 1993); Charles H. Ferguson and Charles R. Morris, Computer Wars: How the West Can Win in a Post-IBM World (New York: Times Books, 1993): 66–83. 6. Why now? Soviet archives are being opened to American scholars. Historians are conducting research into these. To keep current on this emerging development, one can contact the Charles Babbage Institute at the University of Minnesota. Telephone number is 612-624-5050; their e-mail address is CBI@tc. umn.edu; Web page address is http://www.cbi.umn.edu. 7. The quoted phrases refer to classic military conditions faced by commanders in war. “Fog” refers to the fact that a senior general commanding a battle is often physically away from the actual fighting, back perhaps hundreds of yards (as was normal during the U.S. Civil War) or thousands of miles (as was the case in Desert Storm), and thus does not always see exactly what is going on. So they make decisions with imprecise information. “Friction” refers to the actual fighting that takes place that causes casualties, destruction of equipment and material, and alteration to the battlefield. In both circumstances, all military commanders want to know exactly what is happening so they can improve their own decision making. Computers and communications in the 20th century have helped enormously to provide this kind of information. For a useful explanation of the role of computing in military operations, see David Bellin and Gary Chapman (eds), Computers in Battle: Will They Work? (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Janovich, 1987) or Fred C. Ikle and Albert Wohlsletter, Discriminate Deterrence: Report of the Commission on Integrated Long-term Strategy to the Secretary of Defense (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1987). 8. Paul N. Edwards, The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996): 1. 9. See, for example, Roddy F. Osborn, “GE and UNIVAC: Harnessing the High Speed Computer,” Harvard Business Review, 32, no. 4 (July–August 1954): 99–107. 10. I have written in more detail about the business applications of computers in “Commercial Applications of the Digital


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Computer in American Corporations, 1945–1995,” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 18, no. 2 (1996): 18–29. 11. For example, in corporate purchasing processes. 12. One of the points made by Michael J. Wolf in The Entertainment Economy: How Mega-Media Forces Are Transforming Our Lives (New York: Times Books, 1999). 13. J.C. Herz, Joystick Nation: How Videogames Ate Our Quarters, Won Our Hearts, and Rewired Our Minds (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1997): 13–23. 14. Don Tapscott, Growing Up Digital: The Rise of the Net Generation (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1998): 1. 15. Ibid., 4. 16. Victor Burgin, “Realising the Reverie,” Digital Dialogue, Ten-8 2, no. 2 (1991): 8. 17. For a fascinating discussion of these issues, see Edwards, The Closed World, 353–365. 18. Donald A. Norman, Invisible Computer: Why Good Products Can Fail, the Personal Computer Is So Complex, and Information Appliances Are the Solution (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998): 261. 19. For a discussion of how this relationship existed between women and office machines, see Lisa Fine, Souls of the Skyscraper: Female Clerical Workers in Chicago, 1870–1930 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990) and Margery Davies, Woman’s Place Is at the Typewriter: Office Work and Office Workers, 1870–1930 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1982). 20. There is an enormous discussion underway about the “digital divide,” the extent of access available to poor residents. For details on this topic, see Economic and Statistics Administration, Falling Through the Net: Toward Digital Inclusion. A Report on Americans’ Access to Technology Tools (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Commerce, October 2000); “Test, Inform, Protect: Exploring the Digital Divide,” Consumer Reports (February 2001): 6. 21. The most comprehensive study of the sociological consequences of computing on both American and other societies is by a professor at the University of California—Berkeley, Manuel

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Castells. See The Information City: Information Technology, Economic Restructuring, and the Urban-Regional Process (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), and his massive three-volume presentation, The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996–1998). Each volume contains a rich bibliography on the consequences of information technology. 22. Quoted from ibid., volume 3: End of Millenium, pp.128–129. 23. Ibid. 24. Paul Gannon, Trojan Horses and National Champions: The Crisis in Europe’s Computing and Telecommunications Industry (London: Apt-Amatic Books, 1997): 134.

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AMERICA’S LOVE AFFAIR WITH THE INTERNET

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Americans have definitely crossed into a new era of economic and social experience bound up in digitally-based technological changes that are producing new ways of working, new means and manners of communicating, new goods and services, and new forms of community. —ROBERT J. SHAPIRO

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oward Rheingold homesteaded on the Internet as early as the 1970s, and in the pages ahead we will read his account of those early days. Users in the 1970s were a mixed lot of government employees, defense contractors, and members of the university community, such as students and professors. Rheingold needed to understand how telecommunications and computing worked to use what came to be known as the Internet. He had to type in nonintuitive commands on his microcomputer keyboard. Finding people on the “Net” was not simple; there were no user-friendly tools. A quarter of a century later, we have a situation where more than a third of American homes regularly access the Internet. Tools are available that allow one to find other people, buy goods and 97

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services, and communicate. All of this is done by users typing in English-language commands. In fact, the Internet is sufficiently intuitive that a user does not have to know anything about computers to use it. The cyber frontier that Rheingold remembers is now a bustling society filled with millions of residents on what so many now like to think is a crowded Information Highway. How did these changes occur so quickly, within one lifetime, and to so many people? Let’s begin by stating the obvious importance of the question: Nothing in recent years has had more of an effect on how Americans use computers than the Internet. No technology— information or otherwise—received so much attention in the 1990s or today, or has been the subject of greater misunderstanding and hype than the Internet. Yet no technology may prove more important for American computer users over the next two decades than the Internet. That is why this chapter is so long and detailed. The topic is just so important. I started this chapter with a quote from Robert J. Shapiro, Undersecretary of Commerce for Economic Affairs at the U.S. Department of Commerce, which he made in June 2000, to suggest what is happening.1 This development begs the question why? We can almost reach an understanding of what is happening by using the analogy of a love affair. This love affair with the Internet is an honest and faithful one, nurtured over a long period of time, embraced with emotion and commitment, and poised to be an important feature of American life. What makes any discussion of the Internet difficult, of course, is the roar of noise, comments, and speculations about it to which any reading or television-watching American is exposed to today. It is hard to believe that the Internet, otherwise known as the “Information Highway,” is relatively new. Yet in just a few short years (it became available to most Americans in the 1990s) often the debate is about how many Americans are on the “Net,” and how the Internet will change everything, finally bringing us into the Information Age. In this chapter I review the arrival of the Internet onto the American scene, then explore what in time historians may come to view as the second generation of computing to appear

CHAPTER 4 • AMERICA’S LOVE AFFAIR WITH THE INTERNET

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since the Internet, small devices that link to the network doing specific tasks. These include pagers and cell phones, although I do not discuss machinery that is not yet widespread, such as refrigerators that automatically call repair people (they are just now coming out on the market). My first key message is that the reaction of Americans to the Internet is consistent their previous behavior. Information infrastructures have always been endorsed, despite fits and odd starts. Because it is embraced, it will become as central to American life as is the automobile or television. My second point is that, unlike other information infrastructures of the past that Americans often implemented and embraced years before people in other countries, the Internet, while yet another American first, is rapidly being deployed around the world. I begin discussing the implications of that development in this chapter and continue the theme later in this book.

CREATION OF THE INTERNET Now for some quiet history. The U.S. government set up ARPANET in the 1960s for its own communications with the academic and defense establishment within the United States. In 1971 four supercomputers at universities were linked together via that network so scientists could share data. During the 1970s the technical infrastructure continued to expand with a series of incremental enhancements and additional users. By 1984, computer hobbyists were becoming active on the system, and some people were beginning to use the term Internet.2 The National Science Foundation (NSF), the government agency most responsible for doling out government R&D grants, took over responsibility for managing the backbone network in 1987. But the big event came in 1990 when the World Wide Web (WWW) came online, making it much easier to access and use the network. The next turning point came in 1993 when the University of Illinois introduced a browser called Mosaic that made it possible for people to access and use (browse) the Internet much as they do today. During the second half of the 1990s, tools that made it easier to get onto the “information highway” continued to be

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developed, such as browsers from American startup firms (e.g., Netscape, Lycos, and Infoseek). Students of the Internet are debating the extent of usage, but all would agree that Americans made up the largest population accessing the Net, until late 1999. In that year, for the first time Americans made up slightly less than 50 percent of the entire population of global users. While Americans still were the largest national community of users, the statistic suggested how quickly the rest of the world was getting on the Net, particularly in Western Europe and in East Asia. The best estimates suggest that by 1989 some 80,000 computers were attached to the Internet, 1.3 million in 1993. With the arrival of the World Wide Web, making it so much easier for Americans to get connected with their personal computers, one could see the effect just in the numbers. In 1994, 2.2 million computers linked to the system, following the kinds of growth we saw with the PC once it acquired relatively easy operating systems (Microsoft’s in the early 1980s, Apple’s a few years earlier). Growth for the Internet continued at the torrid rate that we saw with PCs. By late 1996, 14.7 million computers (big and small) were accessing the Internet, and a year later the number exceeded 26 million.3 By early 2000, the most reliable estimates of the number of users of the Internet documented the continued expansion in the use of the Internet. Some 304 million people around the world had access to the Internet, of which 137 million lived in the United States or Canada. To put that in perspective, economists believe that in 1994 only 3 million people around the world had access to the Internet, and most of those were Americans.4 They estimated that usage around the world had climbed by 80 percent between early 1999 and mid-2000! Comparative data on the extent of Internet usage around the world clearly demonstrate that Americans are nearly six times as likely to be users than people in other industrialized nations. One organized effort in the U.S. to expand usage occurred in schools; it became a major program of the Clinton administration. In 1994 less than a third of American schools had some sort of access to the Internet; by the end of 1997 that number had reached 78 percent.5 The U.S. government


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expected by the end of 2000 that some 95 percent of American schools would have access to the “Information Highway.” One can only marvel at how rapid and extensive the deployment of the Internet into schools has been. It is nothing less than stunning. Users followed a pattern similar to what we saw with personal computers nearly two decades earlier, as communities of users grew in number and variety. First, those for whom the ARPANET had been designed were the only ones with access to it. Then individuals introduced to ARPANET began to use it, especially after the NSF took over management of the network, essentially making it available to all academic communities, including students and staff, and not just to researchers tied to defense-related projects. These communities became global with a high concentration in the United States during the 1980s. Hobbyists were active all through the 1970s and 1980s. One of these cyber pioneers, Howard Rheingold, commented in his memoirs about the “good old days” of pioneering on the Internet: The idea of a community accessible only via my computer screen sounded cold to me at first, but I learned quickly that people can feel passionately about e-mail and computer conferences. I’ve become one of them. I care more about these people I met through my computer, and I care deeply about the future of the medium that enables us to assemble.6

Rheingold recalled that his initial contact with the growing hobbyist world on the Net “was like discovering a cozy little world that had been flourishing without me, hidden within the walls of my house; an entire cast of characters welcomed me to the troupe with great merriment as soon as I found the secret door.” He found a “full-scale subculture was growing on the other side of my telephone jack, and they invited me to help create something new.”7 With the arrival of browsers in the early to mid-1990s, home and business users began using the network for everything from e-mail to collecting information. Beginning in the mid-1990s, the Internet began to catch on quickly with the business community in the United States. Companies first

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started by putting their “page” out on the Internet, much like adding their address and advertisement in the yellow pages of old. They next used the tool for their own internal communications, making in-house e-mail and then business-to-business communications over the Net major applications by the late 1990s.8 Simultaneously however, individuals began to use the Net as additional information became available. Consumers began routinely to buy PCs that had those telecommunications features (a modem) necessary to use the Internet. By the start of the new century, more than a third of American homes had gone online. These users crossed all income levels and genders.9 The room for expansion in the number of users is still enormous. If the Internet extends to all homes that have telephones in the U.S., then we should expect to see another 150 million potential users over the next decade. It is not an unreasonable projection, because telephone lines are in place today in nearly all American homes and these can be used to access the Internet. Many businesses have not yet started to use the Internet on as regular a basis for routine business transactions as they use telephones. One study by the National Association of Manufacturers suggested that as many as two-thirds did not, although that number now appears to be far too conservative.10 Companies are getting on the Net faster than individuals. One of the sharp changes that occurred in the very late 1990s involved business uses of the technology. As with earlier technologies, first came government applications (ARPANET era) and then commercial uses. Between about 1994/1995 and 1998, the Internet became a new, practical, and attractive channel to distribute products in the United States. Hundreds of thousands of new Internet sites sprang up. There was a huge rush of IPOs on Wall Street for Internet companies like Netscape and eBay, and it seemed that every new firm had a XXX.com name. Traffic expanded rapidly, going from a miniscule number of business transactions over the Net in the mid-1990s to the point where economists were calculating that over 8 percent of U.S. retail business was being transacted over the Internet. The most dramatic case of


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a new brand coming into existence was facilitated by the Internet: Amazon.com which, within a couple of years, had fundamentally changed how millions of Americans bought books, and later, music and prescription medicines. In 1999, Sony began to distribute music to its customers over the Internet, signaling the start of the end of the music industry’s bitter resistance to the Internet, caused by people downloading music without paying for it.11 Each year, the percent of retail business done in the United States over the Net experienced double-digit growth. At home, a similar expansion in use of the Internet occurred, driven by practical considerations. Much of the retail business cited previously was with individuals, people purchasing books from Amazon, shirts and slacks from Lands End, buying and selling stocks as day traders, and making travel reservations. Americans of the middle and upper classes were the initial users of the Internet. Yet, as the number of Americans going online increased and the costs of PCs dropped, lower-income families started to use the Internet for shopping by the end of the century. Often goods and services were less expensive over the Net because providers could cut out the middlemen such as stores and travel agents, passing some of the savings on to their customers. Amazon.com, for example, routinely sold books over the Net for nearly a third off retail price, and even after adding shipping costs, an order still proved less expensive than a trip to the local bookstore. It could also offer every American book in print—usually several million, and many others of British origin—while even the largest bookstores in America normally stocked only just over 100,000 volumes. Many of the information-based activities Americans became involved in during the last decade of the 20th century, and which are the subject of a great deal of the rest of this book, they accessed via the Internet. As with PCs in the 1980s, online games were popular, along with other forms of entertainment at the end of the decade, including music and movies. An extraordinary growth in the use of information is, perhaps, the undocumented real story of what happened in the late 1990s. At the end of the 1990s, it would have been difficult to imagine any

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sizable organization—public, nonprofit, or private—in the U.S. that did not have a Web page. These were loaded with information, white papers, facts, misleading data, useful data, and an assortment of names and phone numbers. The biggest complaints about the Internet among users in the late 1990s did not center around e-business transactions (although there were privacy concerns related to the use of credit cards), but rather about the quality, volume, and ready access of information. There were concerns about: ■ accuracy of information on the Web, ■ access children had to pornography or to “hate sites,” and ■ the poor quality of search engines for finding the information they really wanted. Businesses began to notice a rapid, profound shift in consumer behavior caused by the availability of so much data, and a willingness of Americans to access it. Increasingly, consumers could enter into a business transaction understanding almost as much as a vendor about what potential terms and conditions could be. The most dramatic example of this shift occurred in the second half of the decade with purchases of automobiles. By 1997, an American consumer could find out what a new car should cost, determine what features he or she wanted on the car, how much profit a dealer could or should make, and walk into a dealership with printouts of this kind of information in his or her hot little hands. By 2000, over ten percent of them did not even bother with the dealer, they simply bought their cars online. Online buying had expanded so fast that by the end of the 1990s the U.S. government began measuring the growth of this new form of commerce. In 2000 alone, more than $25 billion in business was done over the Internet in the United States, or nearly 1 percent of the total commerce done within the U.S. economy. While that number may seem small, the rate at which Americans were buying over the Internet was growing faster than the economy as a whole. In the fourth quarter of 1999, e-commerce represented 0.06 percent of all business done that quarter; in the same quarter in 2000, the


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percentage had climbed by two-thirds over the comparable period in 1999.12 Consumers using the Internet learned very quickly that they could use the technology to find the best deal around. The best deal could be in their city or across the nation; it did not matter. The best deal meant the lowest price, and often substantial comparisons of quality, features, and functions, using software tools to do the analysis for them. One could shop for home mortgages, looking for the best rates from the comfort of one’s home, and have solid offers within hours. Market-based power shifted rapidly to buyers because of their access to information and competitors anywhere in the United States. The extent of this shift in power is only just now becoming evident. It is part of the great love affair that Americans have with the Internet. “Freedom,” “flexibility,” and “control,” are words historians and sociologists have always used to describe why Americans had their love affairs with the automobile. They apply the same words to the Internet. Americans always admired results, and today the Internet allows them to achieve many: acquire goods, pay a fair price, and have it all work reasonably well, just like automobiles did by the late 1930s. Is the analogy of the Internet with the automobile justified? One could argue that at least at this time—at the start of the 21st century—the Internet has not yet been as uniformly beneficial as the automobile. My account of the Internet is clearly a positive one, driven by the historical reality that useful technologies tend to get used. That they are sometimes misused or create negative consequences cannot be denied. People are killed in automobile accidents for speeding faster than a horse and buggy can go. The Internet can be accused of denying poor people access to many activities beginning to be done primarily over the Internet, such as increasing number of government–citizen communications. In the early years of the Internet, online commerce was poorly protected and so there existed the risk of cyber thieves charging purchases on someone’s credit card. Despite enormous strides in fixing that problem, issues with security remain. Then, there is the whole discussion about privacy; data in a system can be tapped into

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by a skilled computer expert and we live in a country that has very weak privacy laws when compared, for example, to the laws enforced in Western Europe. That information could be used to deny insurance coverage or a job, or to rob one’s savings account. So I would be the first to agree with those who would argue that freedom and flexibility carry a certain social price.13 While those are caution lights posted on the Information Highway, it is very clear that Americans are not slowing down. What about the theme of progress? There is a huge debate underway about whether or not information technology is a form of progress. The debate has been engaged by historians, sociologists, political scientists, and economists. Commentators on the American scene have long cautioned that technology sometimes is not progressive. We have only to think of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World or E.M. Forster’s The Machine Stops to know about the cautionary tales. Even in the Age of the Internet, such voices have warned us, such as Neil Stephenson in Snow Crash and William Gibson in Neuromancer.14 We could spend the rest of this book focused on these points but the fact remains, we would not resolve anything. What we can quickly get to, however, is the fact that Americans are rapidly adopting the Internet, and for reasons they believe beneficial to themselves. So, while historians and sociologists will argue for decades about the nature of American use of the Internet, we can consider the argument that as the Internet became more practical (that is to say, had more useful information and offered increasing numbers of services), more Americans flocked to it. Robert Metcalf, the creator of a popular networking protocol (Ethernet) postulated what become known as Metcalf’s Law: The value of a network increases as the square of the number of users. His rule of thumb about the value of networks applies very well to the Internet. The more people were connected to an e-mail network in a firm, the more they used that e-mail system, and therefore the greater its value to them and to their organization. This was a lesson many business people learned in the 1970s and 1980s, and relearned in the 1990s on a national basis. So as the Internet acquired more users and


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content, and as it increasingly became easier to use PCs and software, usage climbed in all age groups.15 Americans made up a public economically preconditioned to use the Internet. They had to have the economic power to afford a PC—the tool of choice so far for most accessing the Internet—or at least a television set that could be connected via WebTV, paying a monthly access fee. That is the primary reason why the per capita number of users of the Internet in poorer sections of the world remains so low. Often the economic price of admission was a $2,000 system in the late 1990s; under $1000 by the end of the decade, then a monthly telephone access fee. These are sizable costs for people in poor economies, for example the majority of people in China, India, or Africa. Thus, any accounting for the rapid adoption of the Internet has to factor in the affordability of PCs, monthly access charges, and so forth. It is no accident that utilization remained the highest in those countries where the per capita income of its citizens was the greatest (e.g., northern and western Europe, Canada, and the U.S.A.). New users are coming from emerging prosperous economies, such as across most of East Asia, and parts of Central Europe. Second, Americans had also become used to paying monthly fees for information services. They began with monthly fees for the ability to have a telephone at home. Next they became accustomed to paying for a huge source of information and entertainment—cable television. By the start of the 1990s, over 95 percent of all homes had telephone service and over 50 percent subscribed to cable service.16 So the notion of paying for access to the Internet by purchasing a TVlike device (e.g., PC) and then a monthly access fee was not a huge leap. The pattern of paying for information services had been set a long time earlier. In fact, Americans had paid for regular delivery of information for over two centuries, first for newspapers, then for magazine subscriptions, and later for a wide array of electronic products. These ranged from the telephone to pager services and the Internet. As Americans increased their standard of living from the 1840s forward, they could afford to acquire increasing supplies of information on a regular basis, a practice I illustrate in future chapters.

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Simultaneously, as I argued in early chapters, the costs of information technology also dropped, providing additional incentives to acquire information and to make it affordable to even lower-income Americans. Newspapers and telephones were the first to drop their costs, followed by television, PCs, pagers, and cell phones, and most recently by long distance telephone providers in the late 1990s. By the start of the new century, millions of Americans were simultaneously and routinely paying every month for telephone services (often for more than one line into their homes), Internet access, cable service, pager service, cell phone service, one or more newspapers, and several magazine subscriptions. Most of these Americans were also buying books and videos, both fiction and nonfiction. There is a third, equally important consideration, namely the technological and sociological conditioning Americans had undergone all through the second half of the 20th century that prepared them for the Internet. They were surrounded by information technologies of an extraordinary variety when the Internet arrived. At work, more than 50 percent of office and factory workers, and between 15 and 25 percent of retail workers, had been using computers in one fashion or another. At home, technology was everywhere: programmable VCRs, stereo equipment, radios, and the television all provided the familiar look and feel we would associate with personal computers. Increasingly over the last two decades of the 20th century, these devices appeared in homes of all income levels and racial makeup. Deployment extended to telephones, televisions, and radio. While the PC remained the kind of information technology purchased by the middle and upper economic classes, as the cost of such devices dropped they began to appear in less-prosperous homes. Even the poor were being exposed to PCs at work, in school, and in a variety of public settings, such as in public libraries, welfare and unemployment offices, even in homeless shelters. Their exposure was relatively similar to their introduction to telephones and TVs. In short, one did not need to own an information appliance in order to use it.


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Usage of various technologies that ultimately became part of the Internet is a crucial preconditioning that quietly took place in the home and involved television, which had a screen. But there were other preconditioning technologies in use. Keyboards connected to personal computers by which one communicated with the Internet were exactly the same as typewriter keyboards. With over 95 percent of households wired for telephone and over a third with cable, the concepts of the Internet—a smart TV connected to some sort of a cable or telephone line, talking to a computer with the kind of software we use at work—made sense very quickly. The conceptual jump from what they were doing before the arrival of the Net to what they could do afterwards was less revolutionary than the press would lead us to believe, and closer to a natural evolution to a more effective use of information technology tools. Given the practical bent of mind of the American public, it is not hard to understand why so many people would jump on the Net. In fact, they rushed to it almost faster than they did to television. The revolutionary quality of the Internet was less an issue about Americans embracing the technology than over the consequences that emerged as a result of their adoption. The shift in purchasing balance of power is an example. Now that is revolutionary! What is extraordinary about the arrival of the Internet is the speed with which it became ubiquitous. To be sure, it went through a long gestation period (1969 to mid-1990s) comparable to what happened with computers, and before that with tabulating equipment and the radio. Once it exploded onto the scene, the rate of adoption proved nothing less than phenomenal. It would be difficult to exaggerate the speed with which the Internet raced through American society and the psyche of the nation. The race to adopt was not a new pattern of behavior. Americans had embraced the postal system in the early 1800s, telephones in the early 1900s, radio in the 1920s and 1930s, and television in the 1950s and 1960s—all at rates far faster than occurred in other countries. Later, places like Western Europe and Japan caught up with

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the extent of deployment with some of these technologies, but not all. Americans generally adopted all these technologies quicker than other societies.17 It appears that we are witnessing the same process at work with the Internet and related technologies and tools. I used the word generally because these technologies appeared in other places. Some counter examples include the extensive use of cell phones by Scandinavians (about which I will have more to say later, France’s pre-Internet telephone directory system, the Minitel system, and even Great Britain’s teletext services. But that is my point; these are exceptions. To a large extent the discussion above minimizes the pure economics of the Internet and the cost of its components, such as the price of a PC. However, we need to give the economists their fair due, because while they minimize the socially conditioning factors, they are right about the numbers, especially when it comes to the consequences of the Internet. They point out that overall the cost of computers declined at a rate of 26 percent per year from 1995 through 1999. Second, this enormous decline in the cost of computing had a profound effect on keeping inflation down in the United States (some argue by 1 percent, although a more conventional opinion is 0.5 percent) because so much of the capital expenditures in these years went into computer technology. The information processing industries as a whole occupied up to 8 percent of the U.S. economy, and contributed 30 percent of all economic growth in the nation since 1995. Increasingly, economists are realizing that at least half of the acceleration in U.S. economic productivity growth experienced since 1995 can be attributed to computers, and a large portion to the Internet. A leading economist of the information technology industry, Robert J. Shapiro, observed yet another phenomenon at work, “a dynamic of cascading or continuous innovation has characterized the development and deployment of information technologies in this period,” forcing companies to rethink how they do their daily work and what they make and sell.18 In short, the Internet was beginning to change how Americans worked just as mainframe computers had started a similar process in the 1960s, and the telephone had at the turn of the century.


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It is becoming increasingly evident that another factor influenced the rate of adoption of the Internet and the extent to which people use it—the cost of telephone lines. Looking at the experience of other advanced economies illustrates what was happening. OECD nations on average have less than half as many users per thousand inhabitants than the United States. Second, the cost of Internet access by the hour is higher in Europe than in the U.S. The less telephone access charges are, the more usage there is. In fact, in Europe a digital divide is emerging based on that issue; those with relatively meterless access have higher usage than those that charge. One OECD study of patterns of usage in the U.S. and Europe over the period of late 1999 and early 2000 also uncovered the fact that Americans are adopting the Internet at faster rates than anyone else in the world. OECD’s economists concluded that cheap access accounted for the differences. Australia, Canada, and New Zealand also have relatively unmetered access and they too showed higher levels of use than in the metered economies of Western Europe.19 National telephone monopolies mean little or no competition, and hence few incentives to lower costs of telephone services. On average, it costs a European two to three times as much to be on the Net. As a result, Europeans spend less time on the Internet and, in turn, do less shopping online. A German using the Internet will, on average, be online for less than 5 hours per week. Contrast that with an online American who spends closer to 8 hours per week on the Internet.20 The consequences for Europe are serious, and highlight the contrasting situation in the United States. One economist at the OECD made the obvious point: The pricing structures in countries with unmetered access are allowing users to experiment with electronic commerce, ‘toshop-around,’ to disregard the time of day, and to have certainty in their monthly communications costs. Moreover the pricing structure enables something approaching an ‘always-on’ mode of use.21

So Americans are learning to exploit the Internet sooner than Europeans, and, as a consequence, are fundamentally altering the nature of some aspects of modern economic life.

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OECD’s study led its economists to point to telephone costs as the single biggest inhibitor to use of the Internet in Europe. In those countries where the costs of telephone service were dropping, as in Finland, Internet usage was rising rapidly. The implications are clear: Europe will remain behind the U.S. in usage if it does not make access relatively inexpensive, and the American economy will continue to evolve in productive ways faster than Europe’s, making the latter a less competitive economic environment. The implications are also borne out with what has been happening since 1998 or early 1999. Unlike in Europe, where the cost of access is paid by users, in the U.S. and in Canada, these expenses are rapidly shifting to Internet Service Providers (often just called ISPs). ISPs are now funding access by electronic commerce and the sale of advertising on their sites. While it is too early to tell if that model is sustainable over time, it is there because there is enough economic traffic on the Net to motivate this very new development. Those who charge for access, therefore, are having to drop their prices in the United States. For example, AT&T has a service which, in January 2000, cost $19.95 per month. In March that same service cost $14.95. The following month Microsoft, a rival of AT&T in this market, began offering free service for six months. Prior to this new offering, using Microsoft’s service cost $22 per month. In those countries where prices were dropping, they were falling fast. Between October 1999 and March 2000, they declined by 15 percent for 20 hours of use per month, and by 17 percent for 40 hours of use.22 The moral of this story is that if a nation wants to encourage electronic commerce—and so far every major industrialized nation has publicly stated that it does—then this problem has to be fixed. Now let us look at some other issues related to the Internet. While Americans are treated in this book largely as one shared community in order to discuss the highlights of the role of information, we know that usage varies by gender and age, as demonstrated in subsequent chapters. The Internet and related technologies, such as electronic games, reflect distinct patterns, many of which are only just now being identified. We know, for example, that boys were the first to


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embrace electronic toys. When the PC initially appeared, it was overwhelmingly the preserve of white men, particularly those with technical backgrounds. Over time, with electronic games, PCs, and now the Internet, the first entrants were joined by girls, women, nontechnically skilled males, older Americans, and various ethnic and economic groups. If there is a generalization to be made, it is that the earliest users of a new technology, including the Internet, were later joined by other groups as the new tools deployed across the economy and society at large. Males were the first automobile drivers, now women drive as much as men. However, there are differences in how technologies are used. When the Internet first became widely available to the American public, white middle- and upper-class men were the primary users. In fact, one of the most popular first Web sites visited by American men in the mid-1990s was Playboy’s! That quickly changed as increasing amounts of material appeared on the Net. In 2000, the U.S. Department of Commerce estimated that there existed around the world over one billion Web pages, and that an additional three million new ones were added daily. As the number increased, the variety of interests that could be served did too. In 2000, on a global basis, there were over 260 million computers attached to the Internet.23 What about gender differences? Women were not the first users of the Internet, but by the end of 1999 they were rapidly getting online. It has been estimated that over 9 million women used the Internet for the first time in late 1999 or early 2000. In a study conducted by the Pew Internet and American Life Project, researchers reported that in 1995, only 9 percent of all Internet users were women, but that by 2000 they made up half of all American users. Women are extensive users of e-mail, while men searched for information. Women reported that they used e-mail to strengthen their ties to family and friends. When asked if they would miss having that function on the Internet, 65 percent of women said yes as opposed to 55 percent of males asked the same question. The Pew reported that more women today were playing games over the Internet than men (37% women vs. 32% men). Men, however, did more online shopping (80% vs. 32% of women).24

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The same report pointed out that age matters. The younger the user, the more both sexes did the same thing: downloading music, using instant messaging, keeping up with trends in popular culture. The study’s director, Lee Rainie, observed that “age is more of a divider than gender.” His study showed that about 55 million Americans were using the Internet each day in early 2000, and that half of all users did that from home.25 Historians and sociologists who like to study racial, gender, and economic differences among users of technology now face the fact that many of their attempts to segment users of this technology may represent artificial constructs because the Internet is becoming ubiquitous. We have reached the point where how the Internet is used and why are the more important issues to discuss. It appears that we are witnessing the same process at work with the Internet and related technologies and tools. This is a familiar pattern of behavior that we should recognize as very American and that has long characterized this nation’s appetite for information and its technologies. We may also be seeing the same phenomenon just emerging with much smaller digital gizmos, to which we now turn our attention.

DIGITIZING AMERICA THE SMALL WAY Americans have personalized, and made portable, great amounts of information that they carry around with them. The most obvious case is the laptop, which has become almost ubiquitous among business executives, students, consultants, engineers, and information processing workers. Those machines have more horsepower and memory than the big boxy systems of the 1940s and early 1950s. Their capacities grow each year by roughly 40 percent or more, making it possible either to carry more data around in a bag or to perform more complex applications than ever before. With the advent of speech recognition at the end of the 1990s, the demand for more capacity on these little machines simply skyrocketed. Satisfying that demand became easier when, beginning in 1998, IBM, Intel, and others began a round of new technical introductions that made it possible to carry ever-increasing


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amounts of data. These introductions ranged from really small disk drives from IBM that, in theory, could put a PC on your watch in a few years, to more powerful Intel microprocessors, such as the Pentium III. But the story of the laptop is simply a direct extension of what people had done with terminals connected to large mainframes since the 1960s and 1970s, and with the applications that were brought over to personal computers in the 1980s and 1990s. New applications were also put on these machines, but so far it remains essentially a story about making existing types of uses more portable. The real news now lies in a whole class of devices that rely on information technology for very specific uses. Increasingly in technical circles, these are being called information appliances and their uses pervasive computing. They are gizmos that have embedded in them things like computer chips and panels on which information is displayed. Some are passive and tell you whatever they are generating in the way of information, while others are interactive and present results of instructions you have given them. The concept is an old one. An example of the first is a digital alarm clock, of the second a handheld calculator. Examples of new ones are, for the first, ovens reporting the temperature of cooked food, of the second, digital language translators. What is important to realize about these new devices is the fact that Americans are buying and using them in quantity. They work, they are inexpensive, and are useful in adding information that Americans find useful. Most important for our story, they represent a very large part of the future of computing, because over the next generation we will see computing power embedded in a vast number of existing and new devices that will make them interactive, intelligent, and functionally more diverse. Many are already designed to link to the Internet to receive and transmit information. For that reason, understanding America’s love affair with such devices is an important story to tell. Because of their variety, we can illustrate this pattern of affection and use by looking briefly at several case studies of devices widely familiar today: handheld calculators, digital watches, pagers, and personal digital assistants (PDAs). It is

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almost easy to ignore these little devices because so many Americans have them; indeed many have old ones in bottom desk drawers that died due to their owners not replacing batteries! There are many others in wide circulation, such as fax machines, digital cameras, and programmable breadmakers. But looking at the first four mentioned demonstrates the pattern of adoption and use in the United States. Handheld calculators came onto the American market in the early 1970s. Texas Instruments—one of the two firms that first patented the integrated circuit—produced the most popular and least expensive hand calculators of the decade. Their devices did simple mathematical calculations (adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing). Later they acquired the ability to store information and to perform higher mathematical functions. These were the devices that first came into the hands of business professionals for as little as $45 each. In the early 1970s, Hewlett-Packard—an American firm with a long history of working with advanced electronics—produced devices more suitable for their customers—scientists and engineers—that could perform a large variety of engineering and mathematical calculations. To put these in perspective, they cost up to $700 each, when TI was selling simple-function devices for $45. Both product lines were American in origin and did extraordinarily well. Over the next 20 years, TI broadened its product line to include models that did engineering, scientific, and other advanced calculations (even programming), while H-P came out with devices that did simple math functions. Other vendors from all over the world entered the marketplace, particularly East Asian consumer electronics manufacturers. Over time, the cost of these devices shrank dramatically and their size diminished, while their capacity to do more complex work and store information rose. We went from a situation where only scientists, engineers, accountants, and salesmen of large capital goods used these devices in the early to mid-1970s, to the point by the early 1990s where schools were allowing children to rely on the same tools to do math homework. Teachers, school boards, and parents debated and argued about the value of using such tools in class. Many feared children would stop learning the


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basics of mathematics, but eventually the critics succumbed. The Luddites lost, kids use calculators today, just like they increasingly rely on personal computers to do research on the Internet. Calculators are now ubiquitous in most age groups, from middle school students to senior citizens. They almost instantly became the things to have. The first wave of small calculators were the size of a paperback book, used integrated circuits, and arrived on the American market in 1970. But they were still very expensive—over $400 each and thus toys for the rich—but for the Christmas season in 1971, Bowmar Brain offered a device for less than $250, magically crossing what marketing experts call a “price point” where the number of Americans who could afford the product rose sharply. By the end of 1975, one could buy a hand-held calculator for less than $50; today for less than $10. They had moved from being the toy of the rich, to a practical device, to a stocking stuffer, and all within less than two decades. However, Paul Ceruzzi, a historian of computing at the Smithsonian Institution, has reminded us not to forget the programmable version of these machines because they were “ingenious pieces of engineering.” The HP-65, introduced in 1974 for sale at what now would seem an outrageous price of $795, represented an enormous increase in portable functionality that appealed to technical workers such as engineers and software programmers. Within this little device, which could fit in a shirt pocket, you could compute logarithms and trigonometric functions; these are the same calculations a high school student could perform on their $49.95 engineering calculator in the mid-1990s. Calculators were the first American mass-consumer products to include logic chips. The huge demand for these gizmos made it possible for manufacturers to recapture R&D and manufacturing costs, learn how to mass produce such devices, and thus drive down the cost for consumers in response to intense competition. So the productivity bumps that users experienced, suppliers also shared. Ceruzzi uncovered a second, just as important, effect on users, particularly with the programmable models: they “unleashed the force of personal creativity and energy of masses of individuals. This force had already created the hacker

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culture at MIT and Stanford.”26 For at least that community, the programmable calculator introduced the concept of portable computing, independent of the rules imposed by a university or corporate data center. The personal computer came within a few years afterward and again the hacker community enthusiastically embraced the new technology on both coasts of the United States. Digital watches originated in the United States for the same reasons as hand-held calculators. To make a watch digital required a profound knowledge of integrated circuits and how to manufacture chip-based devices. That knowledge remained an almost American exclusive during the first decade of its existence, despite the fact that a few European and Japanese firms had licensed or developed some chip technology on their own. But American consumers were not terribly interested in this special body of knowledge housed in such firms as Texas Instruments, H-P, or Fairchild. First, let’s review the basics. A digital watch or clock is a device that displays time as numbers on a screen, unlike our analog watches that simply show an arm pointed more or less at a number to roughly indicate the time. A digital watch tells you it is exactly 11:01 AM, and some even the seconds as they go by. They are an information processing machine because they give us data. Almost everyone today has a watch of some sort, with digital watches more popular than the old analog ones. It is a mature technology, despite the fact that it has a computer chip running it, and is subject to the marketing and buying whims of Americans. They are sold as jewelry, as a tool essential for daily activity, and as items of fashion. They can cost thousands of dollars, or as little as $10. Both will be accurate to within 10–20 parts per million, which is an elegant way of saying to within one or two seconds a day. The most expensive watches are mechanical, the least expensive are digital. In time, Americans could buy digital watches that had additional functions, such as alarms to remind them of appointments, keep track of calendars, even telephone numbers. Now we are on the verge of having personal computers on our wrists, and the first of these devices are just appearing in the United


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States, which is also the initial market for these new computational products. The first digital watches were a gamble; firms bringing them to market had no clue if they would sell. Even worse, as TI would quickly learn, it did not know how to make profits from these because with rapid introductions of new devices by competitors, prices often fell faster than manufacturers could react. This problem had many of the same characteristics that had plagued the calculator business, only more intense. The first watches were developed and sold by manufacturers of semiconductors; eventually manufacturing spread to many other types of producers around the world. Initially, the vast majority of electronic watches were invented and sold in the United States, nearly 250,000 of them in 1973 alone. In that year such a watch would have cost roughly $250. Two years later, production climbed to 3 million watches per year, each selling for about $150. The next year, TI and National Semiconductor offered watches to the American public for $20 each, $10 the following year.27 This extraordinary drop in costs, along with very high reliability, almost knocked out the Swiss watch industry, radically changed the market for watches, and altered how Americans treated their time pieces. Walk into a watch repair shop today and look around. Half the clocks for sale are digital, the other half analog, most are decorative pieces for use in offices and homes. Now look at the watches in the glass cabinets. On a rack similar to the type used to sell postcards are quintessential American manufacturers like Timex, offering really outstanding watches for between $10 and $75. To repair a digital watch is almost not worth it, you throw it away and buy a new one. Ask the watch repairperson what they work on and they will tell you predigital watches from family heirlooms to collector pieces. In the 1980s the digital watch went global. In that decade, even elementary school children had watches; their parents normally did not get their first time pieces until they were in high school and even then, often only as a graduation present and usually only in middle or upper class families. Pagers, like cellular phones, crept up on the observer of the American digital landscape. They both appeared on the

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market at about the same time, each in their own way helped people on the go to “stay in touch,” mostly with their offices (early 1990s) and now with family members and friends as well. A pager is a device that broadcasts and receives radio signals, using a computer chip to handle telecommunications traffic. They are smaller than a pack of cigarettes, and often are clipped to one’s belt. The first ones, which appeared in the mid- to late 1970s, simply let out a noise to let the owner know to call their paging service for a message. By the mid1990s, they also could transmit information that appeared on a one- or two-line display screen. As the telecommunications infrastructure matured over the last two decades, along with the increased supply of radio channels provided by the U.S. Government, the amount of data that could be transmitted increased. Doctors, police, firemen, and other emergency personnel were early users. Executives, consultants, and managers became a second wave of users by the late 1980s, and today it is not uncommon to see children, homemakers, and retirees with them. Like the digital watch, they dropped in cost over time, increased in function, and became more reliable. Unlike the watch, however, they also required a paging service that could take messages for someone and then relay them to the pager. By the late 1990s, even that function had been automated with computer-based message switching systems and phonemail software. The new device became very popular, especially in the 1990s. In the United States alone, in 1994 over 19 million Americans had one, and used over 2,000 paging services. Of the 19 million, about 9 million were mobile workers.28 In those same years, sales of paging services expanded across the entire industrialized world. Just to give a sense of size, in 1995 the paging business reached $9 billion, the lion’s share of which went to monthly service fees, not to the inexpensive little devices. Growth rates in the use of pagers all through the second half of the 1990s exceeded 15 percent each year, moving from annual U.S. revenues of some $3 billion in 1993 to more than double that figure by the end of the decade. Americans clearly like to “stay in touch.” In short, pagers reflected the same pattern of diffusion into the American economy that cellular phones enjoyed in the second half of the 1990s.


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But staying in touch meant acquiring ever-increasing amounts of data. The original “beep” to let one know that they had a message in time became a low-cost device for transmitting textual messages, like “call me at 744-5357.” As the number of users increased, it became more cost-effective to exploit simultaneous innovations in computing technology to provide the additional function. In turn, these developments generated more demand to replace older devices with new ones. Today, one can get stock quotes sent routinely to a pager, along with short textual messages such as news headlines and notices that there are voice and e-mail messages waiting for you. By the mid-1990s, the cost of the paging services had also hit a magical price point—between $20 and $50 a month— making it very affordable for many Americans, about the cost of the regular monthly phone bill they had been used to paying for decades. Along with other telecommunications improvements, American manufacturers on the one hand, and users on the other, began to learn how to use such portable technology to access and transmit ever-increasing amounts of data no matter where they were. Pagers are now beginning to merge with computers, as their integrated circuits and memory systems become physically smaller and richer in function, and at costs equal to or less than what Americans are spending on existing technologies. What all this suggests is that the humble little pager may become the vehicle that brings us Dick Tracy capabilities in what economists like to refer to as the “convergence of technologies.” Finally, we have the case of the personal digital assistant, better known as a PDA. This is the latest of the low-end computing devices that allow people to carry a great deal of information, perform some of the functions that they do on a personal computer, and which bring people very close to personalized computing in their pockets. It is also an example of a technology that is converging rapidly with hand-held calculator functions, capabilities of the PC, and the pager. A PDA is a hand-held computer that today is used to organize and carry information (e.g., telephone lists, appointment calendars), and serve as electronic books and notebooks. Also called palmtops because they fit in the palm of one’s hand,

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they have little screens, often a small keypad like a hand-held calculator, and pen-based data entry to scribble notes. They also have wireless cellular phonelike transmission capabilities. People increasingly use them to access the Internet while “on the road.” The simple ones are pagers with a great deal of function, the most advanced models are like miniature PCs. Americans use these devices in many industries and jobs, from trucking and consulting industries to fire protection and police work. These gizmos first appeared in the early 1990s and by the end of the decade began acquiring communications capabilities, allowing them to link home offices to the Internet. They can weigh as little as a handful of credit cards to more than a pound, be as small as a credit card or as big as an old-fashioned TI hand-held calculator of the 1970s. We are also on the verge of having voice-activated PDAs. Early providers were American firms with deep experience in computing and its base technologies: Apple and Motorola. Today there are dozens of providers all over the world. It is a device that has quietly jumped out of almost nowhere. In 1994, the year these gadgets really made their first big splash, 815,000 were shipped into the U.S. economy. Shipments jumped to over 1.1 million in 1995. Annual sales quadrupled by the end of the decade.29 Consumer behavior fit a now-all-too-familiar pattern. The first devices were bulky, expensive, and had little function. Over time, as they dropped in cost and their electronics miniaturized and function improved, demand increased. Corporate employees were typical initial users, but in time these were bought by other groups of consumers. Technologies converged so that the border between what a PDA is and a small laptop does blurred. These were high tech toys in the early to mid-1990s; now you can buy them at Best Buy and at WalMart. Leading vendors included Casio, Tandy, Sharp, Motorola, and Apple. There were dozens of suppliers. The granddaddy of the early devices was Apple’s Newton, introduced in 1992.30 Reach into the pouch of the seat in front of you on most airplanes in the United States and you will inevitably find, in addition to the airline’s magazine, a catalog for a wide variety


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of items. These can be purchased through the airline by using the GTE phone bolted onto the back of the same seat in front of each passenger. Delivery is promised for the next day at one’s office or home. The catalog has a variety of clothes, golfing paraphernalia, and so forth, but also an enormous collection of digitally based computational devices. They sell well, and it seems that about every six months these catalogs have even more devices than before. These information appliances represent the next wave of gizmos being bought by Americans. Table 4.1 lists some items taken from an American Airlines catalog in 1999. What is remarkable is the variety of these digital devices being sold to a mass market. Every device listed has at least one computer chip in it and each is advertised to do only one or few things. Each is sold as being small, light, or compact, and is being bought under the same selling conditions as shirts, alarm clocks, decorated mailboxes, and bathrobes. So America’s appetite for information appliances continuous unabated and widespread (at least with adults who use air travel). Let’s summarize the emerging trends for small devices. First, as Table 4.1 suggests, manufacturers are finding an extraordinary variety of uses for computer chips, ranging from digitizing existing devices (e.g., clocks) to inventing new uses (e.g., onboard automotive GPS tools). Second, these are now beginning to link to the Internet to receive instructions and information and later, probably to report results of actions taken (e.g., temperature changes in a house). Third, new functions are being merged (e.g., e-mail and cell phones and pagers). We saw the third trend displayed in the 1980s with another digitally driven set of tools: copiers, which could also serve as printers and fax machines. Go to any large consumer electronics show and ask the exhibitors what they have on the drawing board and you walk away convinced that we are extending computing power all over our homes and work places, and linking them to the Internet is just getting started. Many of these devices are being developed outside of the United States, primarily in East Asia and more specifically in Japan. In the 1980s and 1990s, the Japanese won mastery of the global consumer electronics business, along with all its insights (including how to apply digital technology to little

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TABLE 4.1 Contemporary “High-Tech” Consumer Products, circa 1999 Skagen sport watch Radio-controlled weather forecaster Home weather station Personal audio system Star Trek digital recording communicator Tech-7 Ultrascopic video camera system Six-language translator Jeep TV boom box Sony PMC-D305 micro component sound system Meeting timer Business card file Voice announce caller-ID Electronic vehicle compass Phone manager outbound call

Mini FM scan radio Thermometer cuff links Talking calendar clock Phone-Fun special effects machine Sony Z5-D7 personal audio system AM/FM/SW radio Accu-Thumper foot massager Video transfer system Alpha-7 pocket camera Zeit-Arcon atomic desk clock Micro recorder Telephone information recorder Map Mate Pocket TV

Source: American Airlines, American Voyager’s Collection (November 1999).

devices profitably). We are now seeing the results of that success in the form of massive imports into the United States and Western Europe of Japanese high-tech products. This development did not slow down American purchases of these devices, beginning with television sets and stereo equipment in the late 1970s and all through the last quarter of the 20th century. There appears to be no letup with the new consumer information appliances.

THE SPECIAL ROLE OF GLOBALIZATION Over the course of American history, it was often easy to see the adoption of new information processing tools occurring most quickly in the United States. Americans were quick to apply the telegraph, telephone, radio, and computer. In some


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cases, as for example with the computer, the lag time between the start of widespread American adoption and that of other nations ran to a half dozen years or more. However, the Internet is a clear example of where the historic pattern is the weakest. Despite development of the Internet in the U.S., because of the fact that once it was made available to the public at large there were no real technical inhibitors to others using it, people around the world began to get on the Net. All they needed was access to a phone line and a PC. As those items dropped in cost and became increasingly available in other countries, more people gained access to the Internet. In time, governments in Western Europe and East Asia encouraged citizens to leverage the Internet. Today no self-respecting national leader would be caught without a national policy to move his or her nation into the Information Age. Every major forecast of future use of the Internet published since 1998, either by Americans or by the OECD, predicts rapid adoption of the Internet by individuals and companies around the world. Every time there was a major new forecast, the rate of adoption and total number of participants had to be increased over prior forecasts. Because of the Internet, geography increasingly is not an issue. If you are in Madison, Wisconsin, it takes just as long to order a product from Chicago as it does to place a similar order with a firm in Germany. E-mail travels just as fast, and cost is becoming less of an issue. Time zones matter more. If you are in Chicago and you e-mail a friend in Paris and want a quick response, you have to remember that there is a seven-hour difference in time. You would send the note out in the morning, knowing that your friend is reading it in the late afternoon. Distance is disappearing when it comes to Internet-based transactions but time zones remain. Governments are struggling with the issue of the Internet and, therefore, I have more to say about the subject in subsequent chapters. The problem is that they are losing control over the flow of information and business within their borders. Chinese dissidents can get information on what their government is doing off the Internet from ABC News or CNN. American popular music can be downloaded off the Internet in Iran,

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in direct violation of local laws designed to prevent the pollution of local culture with Western influences. Then there is the real matter of taxes for goods bought over the Internet and now crossing borders. This last item alone is one of the greatest motivators influencing public officials in Western Europe to develop more transnational economic policies for the European Union.31 While the sociologists and economists will have to study the question of why the Internet spread around the world so fast, I can suggest that many of the conditions evident in the U.S. were also at work elsewhere, particularly in more economically advanced societies. These conditions included experience with television, telephones, and PCs (or at least terminals at work). Literacy rates are high, and in highly industrialized countries large segments of the population can afford PCs and telephones. Where they cannot, you see low rates of adoption of the Internet (e.g., China and India). So economics does count, but so does preconditioning. Portable information appliances, because they cost less, are also making their way quickly through various societies around the globe. International policies that facilitate use of cell phones in Europe make it easier for the Finns, or West Europeans in general, to adopt cheap cell phones and other Internet-based tools than Americans. Other forms of information technologies are nearly as ubiquitous in economically advanced societies as in the U.S. In the case of books, for example, there are more of those per capita in Western Europe today than in the U.S. TVs and telephones are widespread, while in some societies that are slightly less advanced economically than the U.S., newspapers per capita exceed those in the United States. What these various trends suggest is that America’s unique feature of having the most the soonest in the way of information technology may be a statement of how it was rather than what it will be. While globalization sounds like a wonderful idea for businesses wishing to export goods and services, they are learning that markets change quickly as a result. Just as American culture was an important North American export, it becomes just as easy to bring new cultural forms into the U.S.


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(such as Cuban music in the late 1990s even though the U.S. government still maintained a trade embargo with Fidel Castro’s government). Americans will have to begin thinking about the implications of a globalized use of the Internet, a medium so rich in content and potential effects that one would have to go back to the invention of the book or the modern international monetary exchange systems to find anything of equivalent effect on the course of nations.

CONCLUSIONS The rapid deployment of the Internet turned out to be one of the most important developments of the 1990s. Once its features made it relatively easy to use, Americans took to it rapidly in their work and private lives. As the costs of the technology to use the Internet dropped, ever-increasing numbers of Americans could afford to use the network. As a result, more than a third of the population has used the Internet. That rate of deployment, and the increase in regular usage of the Internet by those already on it, is impressive. While it yet does not match the rate of use of telephones and television, usage is more extensive for the short period of time it has been available (really since the middle years of the 1990s) than for comparable early periods of all other information technologies. Deployment of the Internet across American society is not yet complete; various forecasters think we are only somewhere between a third and half done. The measure may become meaningless if the number of individual machines and information appliances that connect to the Internet rises sharply over the next decade. The traditional measure of deployment has been access to the Internet by an individual using a PC. But with other ways of using the Internet increasing, that definition may no longer hold. Millions of Americans can access the Internet through other people’s PCs, for instance college students in the basement computer labs so common in dormitories today, and workers in all fields using intelligent beepers, to mention just two already common examples. We are reaching a point where how many Americans are online is about as relevant as counting

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how many people have used electricity today. In the early decades of the 20th century, counting how many homes had electricity was important because that data defined potential markets for electrified goods and helped government agencies determine what kinds of programs they needed to foster deployment of this new form of energy. To a large extent we are going through a similar process today with the Internet. In the second half of the 1990s the federal government became very interested in e-commerce, the extent of usage of the Internet, and in defining digital economic activities. Social policy makers worried about “digital divides,” and about what it will mean if someone does not have access to the Internet. Many of these concerns are reminiscent of those discussions held early in the 20th century on electricity, radio, and telephones. If there is a consistent pattern of behavior on the part of public officials at the national level, it is that once a new form of information flow emerges, they want to foster access to it by the largest possible percentage of the American public. That concern motivated many of the initiatives taken by the federal government to provide Internet access in classrooms. As the European experience with expensive Internet usage demonstrates, the desire of American government officials to drive up the use of electronic commerce makes sense. Expanded use—driven by high-quality, low-cost availability—is a competitive advantage for the U.S. that is not lost on public officials or the private sector. As occurred with other electronic forms of information handling, the rest of the world is slower in adopting this technology. The consequence is serious for them because the United States, already the Internet hub of the world, may dominate electronic commerce. That is the good news for the U.S. The bad news is that Europeans and East Asians have figured this out and are beginning to lower their costs of access to the Internet. Lack of competition, high access fees, an inclination to manage the flow of information, among many issues around the world, suggest that Americans will once again adopt this latest technology faster than others. The concern over the Internet shown by individuals and public officials, and by those who track the Internet’s growth, clearly are proof positive that this new infrastructure is


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significant and has become an important part of life in the 21st century. Social and economic historians will probably look back on the 21st century and describe a society in which the Internet is as ubiquitous as electricity became in the 20th. A generation of children is growing up not knowing a time when digital things did not exist; only their grandparents live with the memory of most of their lives without such tools. Parents, on the other hand, are the transition generation, in which the first few years of their lives were without PCs and the Internet. However, they had so many other information tools around them: TV, radio, telephones, telegraph, postal systems, newspapers, books, magazines, CDs, tapes, and phonograph records. The antique stores of the 22nd century will probably sell the digital discards of our century as rare and early examples of a new world. However, the Internet is not as novel as we might be led to believe. As I have tried to demonstrate in these first four chapters, Americans have a history of creating and deploying massive networks of information tools. The pattern is too extensive and too visible to ignore. Regardless of century, political and economic circumstances, or state of science or technology, Americans built these networks for a variety of reasons. Their political belief in the free flow of information was one reason. Practical applications for economic advantage were always important motivators. It is hard to tell whether or not Americans had a proclivity to tinker with technologies in excess of other societies. My guess is they did not. But Americans are a people willing to use technology to solve a great number of their problems. We will see that specific pattern of behavior at work in the next four chapters. The use of the Internet illustrates some darker features of American behavior that raise issues that as a nation we should not ignore. Perhaps the most important is the lack of privacy laws and practices that protect individuals from the misuse of information. The digital technologies developed in the late 20th century are very effective in collecting and analyzing data, doing it rapidly and inexpensively. That can be a noble purpose, but it can also mean intrusion into our private lives, or the usurpation of our credit cards by thieves bent on

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charging their purchases to our accounts. West European nations have been more diligent in dealing with these problems of data security than Americans because of their fundamentally different attitude toward the flow of information in society. Whereas Americans have hard-wired into their constitution and laws many safeguards to ensure the free movement of information in support of their democratic form of government, Europeans have historically been more willing to manage the access and movement of information. Recall that, for example, the French government thought the telegraph of the 1800s should not be allowed to carry just any kind of information, and that it should be used primarily to serve the state. That kind of attitude, while it might seem anathema to Americans, meant that public officials would consider issues of privacy (constraint of information flows) sooner than Americans. In fact, their privacy protection laws and practices are far more effective than those in the United States. Another aspect of the Internet that we should not lose sight of is the fact that it is quickly becoming a global network similar in scope to the globally available supply of electricity, television, and telephones. Historically, the United States often surged ahead of many other nations in the deployment of some new information technology, such as the telephone, television, and computers. Deployment of a new technology sooner than others often provided this nation with certain competitive economic advantages. The productivity increases the American economy experienced in the 1990s, for example, thanks to returns on investments in computing, is a clear example. The Internet has played an important role in that surge of economic strength. However, with the rapid deployment of the Internet underway around the world, albeit slower than by the U.S., the initial advantages gained in the late 1990s by Americans may neutralize. As so many other societies either exploit the Internet as effectively as Americans or even do a better job of it, our momentary euphoria over the Net may change. Already the Finns are producing better quality cell phones, while the Europeans have established clear and consistent telecommunications standards that have led to wider use of cell phones than in the U.S. In short, the


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Internet may just be part of the common infrastructure in existence in any typically advanced economy. This situation would not be so terribly different than what occurred in other periods. Our postal system, which grew so rapidly in the early 19th century, basically replicated what existed in Britain. In other words, Americans did with the postal system what East Asians and Europeans are doing with the Internet—we installed a proven information infrastructure. The surge in development and deployment of electrically based information technologies by Americans, beginning with the telegraph and continuing down to and including the PC and the Internet, may prove to be a momentary aberration in what has clearly been a global pattern of adoption. Is there anything unique about the American experience with the Internet? The new infrastructure does suggest two unique features. First, Americans have a history of developing and adopting new information infrastructures very quickly. The relatively free flow of knowledge required to develop new technologies on the one hand, and the environment of minimal government control over free market economic activity on the other hand, have facilitated the rapid development and exploitation of new information tools. Second, these efforts have been rewarded in a variety of ways, which in turn encouraged further uses of technology. Most of the rewards have been economic, such as the creation of major firms (e.g., IBM and Microsoft), and the use of these tools to lower the costs of operation (e.g., distribution of goods by canal, train, and trucks, managed with information networks such as the postal system and the Internet). Americans have been relatively successful in exploiting many technologies, not just those involved in information handling. The account I present in subsequent chapters is a relatively positive one of how one class of technology—information tools—was used, and this account comes at a time when many Americans are questioning the benefits and costs of technology. Pollution, loss of privacy, restructuring of work, and other issues are being debated. Negative descriptions of technology are quite common today. One of the leading historians of American technology, Carroll Pursell, documented a

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rising tide of criticisms that emerged in the last two decades of the 20th century. Pursell observed that “technology has been criticized from both ends of the political spectrum, and, of course, defended from the middle.”32 But this historian also observed that the American experience with technology demonstrates that it “can only be understood and used to best advantage when seen as the very embodiment of human behavior and purpose.”33 The conclusion we can draw is that whether or not any technology is good or bad, if it is used we must deal with it. The American experience clearly demonstrates a willingness to work with technology. That ultimately it is a reflection of human behavior and purpose can further be demonstrated by looking at how information technologies have been used in America in very specific circumstances. Since the vast majority of adult Americans have always worked, and spend most of their waking hours at work, what better place to begin a more detailed look at how they used information and its tools? For that reason, the next chapter is devoted to the role of information in the workplace.

ENDNOTES 1. U.S. Department of Commerce, Digital Economy 2000 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, June 2000): xiii. 2. The term Internet was created in the early 1980s to describe the collection of existing networks that were brought together into one inclusive telecommunications system. 3. Andrew Zimmerman, “The Evolution of the Internet; Internet/Web/Online Service Information,” Telecommunications 31 (June 1997): 39. 4. U.S. Department of Commerce, Digital Economy 2000 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, June 2000): v. This report is available at the Department’s Web site: http://www.ecommerce.gov. 5. Global comparisons are drawn from Christos J.P. Moschovitis et al., History of the Internet: A Chronology, 1843 to the Present (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 1999): 274–275; on the


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schools, U.S. National Center for Education Statistics, “Internet Access in Public Schools,” Issue Brief (February 1998). 6. Howard Rheingold, The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1993): 1. Even the title of his book conjures up typically American images and mythology: the West, pioneering, frontier life. One could imagine Davy Crockett with a PC! 7. Ibid., pp. 1–2. 8. I have explored this topic in more detail in 21st Century Business: Managing and Working in the New Digital Economy (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall/Financial Times, 2000): 135–168. 9. Lee Rainie and Dan Packet, “More Online, Doing More,” press release, February 18, 2001, The Pew Internet and American Life Project, http://www.pewinternet.org. 10. See press release from the National Association of Manufacturers, February 22, 2000 (http://www.nam.org/News/Releases/ Feb00/pr0222.htm). 11. The problem for the music industry was that an individual could download a copy of a song to a computer without paying royalties. For example, it had become a widespread practice among high school and college students by 1997/98 as they became equipped with PCs that could play and record music in digital formats that were, in effect, excellent copies of the original recordings. 12. “Retail E-Commerce Sales in Fourth Quarter 2000 . . . ,” U.S. Department of Commerce Press Release, February 16, 2001, http://www.census.gov/mrts/www/current.html. 13. The point well made by sociologist David Lyon, The Electronic Eye: The Rise of the Surveillance Society (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994). 14. Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (New York: Harperperennial Library, 1998), E.M. Forster, The Machine Stops: And Other Stories (London: Trafalgar Square, 1998), Neil Stephenson, Snow Crash (New York: Bantam Doubleday, 1993, 2000), and William Gibson, Neuromancer (New York: Ace, 1994). The role of technology in progress is a complicated, highly nuanced subject. As an antidote to a positive view of technology, see John Staudenmaier, Technology’s Storytellers (Cambridge, MA: MIT

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Press, 1985) and two classics on the subject: Leo Marx and Merritt Roe Smith (eds.), Does Technology Drive History: The Dilemma of Technological Determinism (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1994) and Donald MacKenzie and Judy Wajeman, The Social Shaping of Technology (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1985). Also important is Wiebe Bijker, et al., The Social Construction of Technological Systems (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1987). 15. For a clear explanation of this new era in the private lives of Americans, see Lee Sproull, “Computers in U.S. Households, 1977–1999,” in Alfred D. Chandler, Jr. and James W. Cortada (eds.), A Nation Transformed by Information: How Information Shaped the United States from Colonial Times to the Present (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000): 257–280. On the Metcalf effect, see Carl Shapiro and Hal R. Varian, Information Rules: A Strategic Guide to the Network Economy (Boston: Harvard Business School, 1999): 184. 16. Bruce M. Owen and Steve S. Wildman, Video Economics (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992): 165. 17. Japanese adoption of personal computers, for example, remains the lowest of the highly industrialized nations, in part due to economics but also to technical difficulties presented by the complex Japanese alphabet. There is emerging one exception to this statement: cell phones. Northern Europeans are adopting them faster per capita than North Americans and are simultaneously generating more innovations in the technology than we are seeing in the United States. But it also appears that the reason for this development, particularly in Finland, is due to the same reasons other technologies always did so well so soon in the U.S.: perceived need, compatible social fit with local customs, access to technologies to innovate, and a supportive regulatory environment. 18. Quoted in U.S. Department of Commerce, Digital Economy 2000, p. xiv. The statistics in this chapter come from various parts of the same report. 19. My discussion of Europe’s experience is drawn entirely from the OECD study, OECD, Local Access Pricing and E-Commerce, July 27, 2000, available at its Web site: http:// www.oecd.org/dsti/sti/it/cm/stats/newindicators.htm. The key findings can be found on pp. 4–8.


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20. Ibid. 21. Ibid., p. 22. 22. Ibid., p. 42. 23. World Information Technology and Services Alliance, Digital Planet 2000: The Global Information Economy (Vienna, VA: WITSA, June 2000): 3, available on its Web site: http://www. witsa.org. 24. For a summary of the report, see Karen Thomas, “E-mail, Family Ties Lure a Surge of Women to e-World,” USA Today, May 11, 2000, p. 1D, 11D. 25. Ibid. 26. Paul E. Ceruzzi, A History of Modern Computing (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1998): first quote, p. 213, second quote, p. 215. 27. Ernest Braun and Staurt Macdonald, Revolution in Miniature: The History and Impact of Semiconductor Electronics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982): 192. For a history of the watch industry, see Amy K. Glasmeier, Manufacturing Time: Global Competition in the Watch Industry, 1795–2000 (New York: Guilford Press, 2000), especially pp. 203–229. 28. Price Waterhouse, Technology Forecast: 1996 (Menlo Park, CA: Price Waterhouse World Technology Centre, 1995): 160. 29. IDC press releases, 1995–1999. 30. For a brief account of the evolution of PDAs, see Anita M. McGahan, Leslie L. Vadasz, and David B. Yoffie, “Creating Value and Setting Standards: The Lessons of Consumer Electronics for Personal Digital Assistants,” in David B. Yoffie (ed.), Competing in the Age of Digital Convergence (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1997): 227–264, especially pp. 230–240. 31. For a fascinating insight into these transnational issues, go to the OECD Web site and you will find dozens of lengthy documents describing these concerns, national Internet policies, and results of numerous conferences. 32. Carroll Pursell, The Machine in America: A Social History of Technology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995): 299. 33. Ibid., 319.

R E T P H

A

5

HOW INFORMATION IS PLAYING A BIGGER ROLE IN AMERICAN WORK

C

The future never just happened. It was created. —WILL AND ARIEL DURANT

W

orkplaces are as varied in America as anywhere in the world. Traditionally, they were farms, factories, and offices. In all probability, your great-great-grandfather was a farmer. He could read, although not as well as his children. Jobs in factories and offices became the norm by the early 1900s. Workers spent long hours in buildings which, by the time of the Spanish-American War, already had a large variety of information and tools with which to collect, organize, and use data. Manufacturing shop floors had manuals and three-ring binders; offices had file cabinets and adding machines. The telephone made its way into offices in the years prior to World War I. Our grandfathers would have also been exposed to typewriters, company manuals on procedure, and three-part forms. 136

CHAPTER 5 • ROLE OF INFORMATION IN AMERICAN WORK

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Now, contrast with our situation today. Farmers use the Internet and a PC to keep track of accounting. Manufacturing plants are crammed with production equipment that look more like computers than devices for bending metal. Much of our office work consists of interacting with PCs, as we try to keep ahead of the ever-growing amounts of e-mail or the temptations of cruising the Net. Then, as now, however, the workplace was always filled with information and informationhandling tools of many types. The tools have ranged from paper to electronic forms now for over a century. Work practices changed, however. Think of the humble business letter. In 1800, one would have acquired an expensive piece of paper, next would have written a letter using a feather pen and ink, and would have taken the document down to the post office to mail. Hopefully, in several weeks the addressee would receive the letter. In 1900, our letterwriter would have used very inexpensive paper, possibly typed the document, and put a 2-cent stamp on it. There might have been a mailbox in the building or on a street corner if in a big city; within a couple of days the addressee would have received the mail. In 2000, we swiveled our chair over to the PC, logged on to the Internet, typed our note, and hit the enter key on our typewriter-looking keyboard. Before we could even stretch back for a second, that note arrived at the addressee’s inbox anywhere in the world. There was no cost for postage, it took a fraction of the time required of our 19th-century letter writer to accomplish all the tasks necessary to write and mail, and it was done for a fraction of the cost of the letter of 1700. From the earliest days of the republic, Americans have relied heavily on information with which to optimize their productivity at work. Farmers used an assortment of almanacs and merchants exploited trade data in the earliest newspapers published on the continent. Today they use the Wall Street Journal and the Internet. News and economic facts in newspapers, books, and user manuals have cluttered tabletops and bookcases for nearly 400 years. There is no sign that the reliance on information and its technologies is abating. As the first four chapters demonstrated, Americans are stocking up on ever-increasing amounts of information and supporting

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technologies. As use of information and its technologies increase, work changes to rely on that data and is influenced by it. The key message of this chapter is that Americans have already started to arrive at the Information Age, with many having been on the trip to this new era for some time. Most important, the nature of how they do their work, what their jobs entail, and the basic structure of their economy clearly have strong information-centric features. How do we know that? To begin with, we have a large body of economic data, produced by the largest supplier of information in the history of the world—the Government of the United States, author of some 20 million reports currently available from federal agencies, and millions of others published over the past two centuries—that documents the details. A quick review of some of this economic data, plus the work of sociologists and economists, confirms the high infocontent of American work. We know what is happening because the future has already arrived. The future always comes in an uneven manner, with transformations occurring in some professions faster than others, hinting at what other industries would do at some later date. For example, a programmer working at a software company in Silicon Valley clearly experiences characteristics we think represent life in the Information Age. These include extensive use of computers, manufacturing informational products (e.g., software and user manuals), working in small, flat organizations, moving from one firm to another on a frequent basis, and relying on telecommunications to work at home or with colleagues around the world. In other professions and industries, the future has barely arrived, or not at all. Take a bricklayer, for example. His profession (and most are still men) functions much the same way as in Thomas Jefferson’s day, when Jefferson had bricklayers build Monticello and the serpentine wall at the University of Virginia. But work is changing for most workers such as to be noticeable. The changing nature of work has caught the attention of many economists and business commentators over the last quarter of the 20th century. Their publications call out how everyone will work at home, or how work will disappear, or


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they comment on how everyone will be mobile, that leisure time will increase or decrease, or that everyone will become a PC jockey. These prognostications about the future of work may be accurate, probably miss much of what will happen, and generalize way too much, all because the future arrives unevenly and unpredictably in many situations. We are also influenced by serendipitous events, such as breakthroughs in the development of information technologies (e.g., the arrival of the Internet, which caught almost everyone by surprise who was not part of the defense establishment). We are also affected by world events that tip the scale of change toward us more in one period than another (e.g., winning World War II and thus coming out on top with the strongest economy in the world).1 Some commentators are positive, others pessimistic, a few very detailed in their analysis, others glib yet influential.2 It is also not a surprise that most of this literature is American in origin. Look at which publishers produced the contents in the notes at the end of this chapter. So, characterizing the total U.S. economy as entering the Information Age is misleading, but seeing the already extensive reliance on information and its technologies is not. There are enough sensational facts to go around about what is already happening because for some, the future is here now. In this chapter I look at the American economic landscape, and then at several industries that are supplying a great deal of the information we use. Finally, I discuss several general patterns of work and how e-business and e-commerce fit together, often the subject of all that literature mentioned in the previous paragraph.3

SOME REALITIES ABOUT THE AMERICAN ECONOMY The American government is the quintessential producer of information, and has been right from its beginning. Besides fighting wars, picking up candy wrappers in national parks, or providing health services, its single largest activity is the production of information. Midwife to the Internet, owner of the world’s largest publisher (Government Printing Office), and

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the biggest library on our planet (Library of Congress), no other organization in the entire history of the world has played as extensive a role in the creation, dissemination, and use of information and its technologies as this government. While we will have occasion to discuss the role of the U.S. Government in more detail in Chapter 8, suffice it to point out that it is a very American institution, from its politics and policies to its work activities. One of the byproducts of the work of this public institution is a vast array of statistical data on the American economy. Hard-wired into the fabric of the nation’s work, workers and their companies routinely provide information to government agencies on their economic activities, from filling out an income tax return to the plethora of reports all corporations submit regularly to multiple government agencies. Let’s see what some of that data tells us about American work. First, most economic data is organized around industries, for example, the publishing industry, agriculture, different types of manufacturing, insurance, banking, and so forth— hundreds of them. These are clustered together into a half dozen segments such as agriculture, manufacturing, and services. Beginning during World War I, then methodically all through the Roaring ’20s, and especially during the Depression years of the New Deal in the 1930s, government agencies began routinely gathering information to inform national leaders about economic realities—collecting facts upon which to base national policies. Providing national leaders with economic information had started in the 19th century, but this function broadened extensively in volume and variety during the century that just ended. Second, over the years when national topics surfaced, additional information would be gathered and published, particularly on subjects of political interest to the government. For example, the Clinton administration made exploitation of information technology, and especially of the Internet, an important policy theme during its eight years. That interest spawned a series of initiatives (e.g., providing Internet access to schools, R&D funds for computing, Web sites for dozens of agencies) and a mountain of published material on the role of information


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technology.4 Much of this information is also conveniently clustered together by industries, describing people as employees of industries, and projections of where they will be employed based on surveys of firms. That employment data are very useful to us in understanding how people make a living. During the past century, American workers went from working mostly on farms to factories and offices. The major historic shift from farm to factory began in the last three decades of the 19th century and culminated just after World War II. The historic shift from factory to office—of great concern to us because office workers work with and produce information—began in the late 1800s, represented a littleknown but profound new wave in America’s economy by the 1930s, and became the flood tide economists speak about today. The move to the office occurred in both manufacturing and services industries, so that economic transformation lay buried under industry information until the 1950s. Since then, we have learned more about the office worker (also known as knowledge workers) and additionally about what information they created. Now let’s look at what may seem to be a series of dry economic statistics because they demonstrate that the focus of the nation’s workers, and how they are described, is quite traditional. Someone is in retail trade, works for a manufacturing company, or is a government employee. Professions that grow and shrink are spoken of also in very classical, pre-Internet terms: systems analysts, paralegals, and so forth. The point is that this nation views its economic activity in the same terms today as it did a half century ago. Because the press, television, and speakers talk about the Information Age, or the Information Economy, we can quickly lose sight of the obvious: Information and information technology are being subsumed into traditional parts of the economy. E-business, for example, is not a unique industry; it is a collection of activities and technologies within preexisting professions and activities of a firm. E-commerce is another way to sell and distribute goods and services. Computers are being used to increase manufacturing companies’ productivity (as we saw with the decline in labor expenses as a percentage of the total). Information, as

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had always been the case in America, was a handmaiden to more central activities within the economy. As we approached the end of the 20th century, the rate of growth in jobs clearly tied to generating and using information and information technology rose. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS)—the primary source of most labor projection data used by Americans—pointed out that in the ten year period between 1996 and 2006, jobs in computer and information processing services would grow by nearly 110 percent. As of this writing (early 2001), this forecast had almost already been fully realized. Other types of work, growing at rates approaching 60 percent in that same period, included health services, management and public relations, some transportation services, and residential care, rounding out the top five fastest growing types of work in the nation.5 Between 1986 and 1996, manufacturing jobs remained essentially flat; that is to say, the number did not grow. By contrast, the services sector grew by 2.4 percent. Forecasts for the next ten years (1996–2006) anticipated that manufacturing would remain essentially flat, but the service sector would grow nearly another 2 percent.6 In reality, the economy improved far better than anticipated, with both growing, but with services still the fastest. When the BLS looked at occupations within industries, its economists found a whole slew of information-based jobs that would grow between 1996 and 2006 at a faster rate than manufacturing and services in general. Ranked by speed of growth, number one on the list included database administrators, computer support specialists, and computer scientists, with a 118 percent projection—in other words, more than doubling. Computer engineers beat that impressive record with a 235 percent growth rate. Systems analysts—the folks who design new uses for computers—were projected to grow by 520 percent! These are extraordinary rates of growth, all in knowledge-based jobs. But it does not end there. Medical professions, such as personal and home care aids, also had strong projections (171%), including physical therapists (66%), and medical assistants (166%). Others did too, such as paralegals (76%); special education teachers (241%); human services workers (98%); adjustment clerks (183%); engineers and


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computer systems managers (155%); bill collectors (112%); financial planners and sales (100%).7 Even if the BLS were grossly inaccurate, say by even 50 percent, the shift to knowledge-based jobs cannot be ignored. Historically, the BLS has usually been quite accurate, even if a tad conservative. Those are projections, but where did people actually work when these forecasts were being made? In 1997, the latest year for which we have excellent detailed information, there were more than 105 million workers. Of these, 17.6 million were in manufacturing industries,8 services claimed 34.2 million, finance (with insurance and real estate) accounted for 6.5 million, wholesale and retail trade for another 32 million, transportation and communications 5.8 million, construction 5.6 million and finally, mining a half million; miscellaneous others numbered 3.2 million.9 Let’s dig just a bit deeper into these numbers to enrich our appreciation of what is happening. If we look at the gross products generated by this workforce, that is, the value of all products and services developed within the economy, we can identify some very interesting trends at work. First, the economy did just fine, growing by about 2.6 percent on average each year in the years 1992–1996, even more during the second half of the decade, with the first slowdown in years not occurring until the last quarter of 2000. Second, private industry grew at a faster rate (over 3.2%) while the public sector remained flat. Third, investments in manufacturing automation and other technologies had, since 1980, driven down the percentage of a manufacturer’s cost of labor, from 74.6 percent to 63 percent by the end of 1996. Manufacturing and services dominated the economy but services (the home of a great deal of knowledge work) had grown quickly. Table 5.1 summarizes the gross domestic product for key industries, telling us where the activities of the economy were distributed. Where information fits is often confused, making it a cartbefore-the-horse issue. Many commentators on the Information Age, in their enthusiasm to focus on information technology, forget that most people go to work to make things, sell them, or provide a service. In the process, they use

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TABLE 5.1 Gross Domestic Product of Major Industry Groups as Percent of Total, Selected Years, 1992–1999 Major Parts of the Economy Agriculture Mining Construction Manufacturing Transportation & Utilities Wholesale Trade Retail Trade Finance, Insurance, Real Estate Services Government

1992 1.8 1.5 3.7 17.0 8.5 6.5 8.7 18.4 19.2 14.0

1996 1.2 1.5 4.0 17.4 8.5 6.8 8.7 19.0 20.2 13.0

1999 1.3 1.2 4.5 16.1 8.4 6.9 9.2 19.3 21.4 12.5

Source: Sherlene K.S. Lum and Robert E. Yaskavage, “Gross Product by Industry, 1947–96,” Survey of Current Business (November 1997), Table 7, p. 28; Sherlene K.S. Lum and Brian C. Moyer, “Gross Domestic Product by Industry for 1997–99,” Ibid (December 2000): 29.

information and all its byproduct technologies to do their work. It is important to keep that reality in mind as we go through the rest of this and the next chapter where I focus on information and its technologies as either providers of data and tools, or demonstrate how they were used. This economic data are also a useful backdrop for when I discuss how industries are being remade first in the United States as a result of information technology. The most publicized phenomenon of the late 1990s was the rapid convergence of telephone companies, cable providers, wireless communications, and what business professors like to call “content providers.” An example of a content provider is Turner Television, which owns a large library of old American movies that can be piped into our homes through a cable service. This perspective also helps us understand why, for example, AT&T rapidly acquired cable companies and providers of technology, wrapping these together to become an important purveyor of electronically delivered information, services, and entertainment into the American home and office. AT&T is acting out a historically familiar pattern in the United States. It did it with Theodore Vail in the


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late 1800s when he extended the Bell System across the nation, and now with Michael Armstrong at AT&T with today’s technologies.

INFORMATION WORKERS AND KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT Don Kolenda is a knowledge worker. He is also a consultant, an employee of IBM’s consulting organization. He has an undergraduate degree in chemistry and biology from Valparaiso University and an MBA from Northwestern University. By management consulting standards he is quite typical of a contemporary consultant, but by the norms that we described above, also quite different. The government economists we relied on for economic statistics would argue that Don Kolenda works in the manufacturing sector and as a member of the computer industry because he is an employee of IBM, a firm still coded and called a manufacturer by the U.S. Department of Commerce. Yet, here is an employee who does not design or build computers, probably has a poor working knowledge of IBM’s hardware products, but is an expert on sales, customer relationships, and the design of processes to run complex sales operations. This master craftsman’s tools are Freelance, Microsoft Word, Lotus Notes, 1-2-3, and an IBM laptop computer. He is very comfortable navigating the Web for information and to stay in touch with family, friends, and a network of colleagues and clients. His clients applaud his ability to convince organizations how to change and are impressed with his presentations and the data that go with them. His income is greater than that of presidents of many small firms. He travels by airplane several times a month, yet does not have an office provided by IBM. In fact, his bag is his office, with everything he needs to do his work, and he is mobile, going to wherever the work is. What is going on here? Kolenda works in that part of the future economy of the United States that has already arrived: knowledge work. His products are information, thought leadership, organizational abilities, excellent communication skills, and an ability to work with software tools and networks that is as casual and

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easy for him as it was for workers in the 1940s and 1950s to use hand tools from Sears. We are led to believe that our children are the ones who are most facile with technology; Don Kolenda is no child. Nor are the thousands of other management consultants at IBM, or their thousands of rivals who compete against this American firm. Put in purely economic terms, Kolenda is an example of the emerging paradigm of the modern office worker. John Woods lives in an upper-middle-class neighborhood in Madison, Wisconsin. Madison is home to the University of Wisconsin, the state capital, and is crawling with knowledge workers. A faculty and staff of 13,000 work at this university, tens of thousands at the state government, and the city has one of the highest per capita populations of PhDs in the world. In the 1990s Money Magazine rated it the number one city to live in within the United States. The publishing industry reports that the per capita sale of books is one of the highest in the nation in this city of some 300,000 residents. John Woods is a Berkeley graduate of the 1960s and the Free Speech Era, and is a veteran of the Peace Corps. He is typical of many Americans: three children (two already through college, the third there now), three automobiles, several TVs, and lots of telephones. He has three PCs in his house and all the kinds of digital devices I discussed in Chapter 3. Woods is also an information worker, or a knowledge worker. He runs a business that provides production services to the publishing industry. He recruits writers, designs books, and gets them ready for publication. His clients include Oxford University Press, McGraw-Hill, and AMACOM. His workshop consists of state-of-the-art personal computers, which he routinely replaces with newer models every two years. His tools are the telephone, the PC linked to the Internet, fax machines, copiers, and an impressive assortment of desktop publishing software tools. Woods majored in political science in college, then spent nearly 20 years in traditional publishing sales and editing positions, before striking out on his own. Like Kolenda, he makes his living with his intellectual skills and knowledge. He shares with Kolenda a reliance on


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computing and telecommunications tools, makes a handsome living, and would be mislabeled by the BLS as perhaps a consultant, a manufacturer, a member of the publishing industry, or in some other category. Woods writes books too, so he is not simply an editor or a book packager. He gives speeches about management topics, so he is also a researcher and public speaker. So how should we categorize his profession? Stumped? The problem is that his is a new profession, one not easily described with such traditional labels as editor, author, or speaker, and yet these are all tasks that make up what he sees as his job. What is going on here? Woods is creating economic value for himself and his family, while developing a small firm that has employees, pays taxes, contributes to Madison’s economy, and to the nation’s intellectual treasure. Is he in the services sector of the economy? Woods is the future arrived. His commute to work is about 15 seconds, from the kitchen to his in-house office. He logs on to his PC, turns on some music that comes out of his computer while he works, and spends a great deal of time on the telephone putting authors and editors together, designing books, and sending material electronically around the country. UPS and Federal Express stop at his home every day, and the local bookstores must know by now that he is a great customer. His house is full of books, magazines, diskettes, zip disks, tapes, and CDs. I could cite many other examples of the emerging knowledge workers. Some, however, have been with us for a very long time: ministers, lawyers, medical professionals, and teachers who roamed North America as early as the 1610s. In the late 19th century they were joined by clerks, secretaries, managers, engineers, and a swell of professors. In short, knowledge workers have been a part of the American landscape for hundreds of years. We only just started recognizing that fact during the past half century. In the late 19th century, the number of secretaries and clerks entering the U.S. economy began to suggest that a fundamental shift was underway, from the nation having just teachers, lawyers, ministers, and so forth as its knowledge workers, to creating another new class of employees: office

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workers. It kept its teachers and lawyers, adding many more to their professions and insisting on college and advanced degrees for those as the 20th century aged. But the new news was the office worker. The new tools of the day—typewriters, telegraph, telephones, adding machines, and calculators— made possible new professions and different levels of productivity. Between 1900 and 1910 the American workforce grew by 26 percent, that of managers by 45 percent, clerks by a whopping 127 percent. In the next decade, the general workforce grew by another 23 percent, management’s ranks by 14 percent, but clerks came in with a 70 percent growth rate.10 Those rates of growth continued for decades. If we take a broader definition of information workers to account for the kind of activities performed by Kolenda and Woods, along with clerks and other knowledge workers, we can say that in 1900 nearly 11 percent of the American workforce fit this category. In 1940 that same group accounted for 18.4 percent of the workforce, and by 1960, more than 28 percent.11 By the 1990s, some were arguing that the number was more than 60 percent, and still forecasting this population to continue rising as a percentage of the total.12 In conducting research for an earlier book, I was quite surprised by the investment American firms made in office furniture, a clear signal that the amount of information-based work was rising. My first hard data came from 1879, when investment amounted to several millions of dollars (in 1929 valued dollars), and it grew constantly every year for the next half century. By 1948, American organizations were spending close to $550 million each year on office equipment and furniture. When I compared spending levels for capital dollars in general to rates of expenditures for office equipment and furniture, I found that normal spending rates for furniture grew faster than budgets for industrial equipment during the same period.13 Economists who have studied the expanded role of information workers during the 20th century discovered that the number of these kinds of workers grew largely because they substituted for other types of workers within the economy. People moved from farming to factory work, while some factory workers became office employees. As towns and cities grew in


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size, more workers were needed to provide services that were done in offices, such as accountants and clerks. One team of economists observed that, in the 1960s and 1970s, these new workers accounted for some 70 percent of the growth that occurred in the earlier decade and 84 percent in the next one.14 During the period 1960–1980—the years when computers appeared all over the U.S. economy across all major industries and organizations that had more than a couple of hundred employees—the percentage of knowledge workers rose. A few examples suggest the extent of growth: In the finance, insurance, and real estate sectors, it hovered at 10 percent. No surprise here since we would expect to see people whose only business is information to have high percentages. But now look at durable goods manufacturing, the folks who make big things like clothes dryers and refrigerators. They went from 32 percent of the total to more than 38 percent. Services in general went from 46.2 percent to 58.9 percent. As a whole, the working population in the American economy increasingly became knowledge workers, moving from about 42 percent to nearly 53 percent of the total. The economists who calculated these numbers also acknowledged that their statistics were very conservative, perhaps understating the real situation.15 One more set of statistics is worth sharing. Clerical workers and others low in the hierarchy of corporate America, but whose work involved the creation, movement, and handling of information, grew in number across the United States by almost 500 percent between 1900 and 1930, and by another 220 percent on top of that by 1960. Professional and technical worker populations grew by 270 percent between 1900 and 1930, and by another 220 percent by 1960.16 Then came the Information Revolution that newspapers and social commentators like to talk about. We have already discussed the technologies that facilitated the increased use of information and knowledge in the workplace. Everything from typewriters to PDAs became part of the story. Another aspect of the tale, however, involved the supply side of the story. These were the producers of information who found the American public an expanding market. By looking at several of these, beginning with the book publishing

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industry, we can begin to understand the demand the American workforce placed on information and its products. While they bought many novels, children’s books, and religious tracts, their first and most enduring requirement was for nonfiction publications. Books are wonderful testimonials to the information side of the American work ethic and general curiosity about facts of all kinds.

BOOK PUBLISHING: AS SOURCE OF INFORMATION During the last quarter of the 20th century, commentators on the future of America have frequently and boldly predicted the end of books or, at a minimum, their dramatic decline. They cited the use of PCs and other digital technologies joined with television to chase away readers. Nothing could be further from the truth. Books are enjoying enormous popularity in the United States, illustrating once again that Americans do not completely drop older technologies for new ones; they simply add them to the pile, enhancing their repertoire of information technologies. Indeed, books are so popular that we will have to discuss them further in the context of leisure activities, the subject of the next chapter. We were told libraries would move to online sources of information (they have many databases) and books would be scanned into databases. To date, so few have been scanned, due to the still enormous cost involved, that we are left with millions of titles that will not get converted into digital form for a very long time, if at all.17 Enthusiasts of the digital future, such as MIT’s highly respected Nicholas Negroponte, wax eloquent about hypertext books, while we all walk about reading paper-based volumes.18 Yet, we are still told that books are on their way out, their influence “dulled” by digital technologies.19 During the past decade, however, even these commentators have had to recognize that the book is not going away anytime soon.20 The reasons are many, but they boil down to three. Paperbased books are easier to use right now than portable PCs,


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PDAs, or e-books. Second, there are only a few books in digital form, and we have 500 years’ worth of books that are not yet in some computer. Third, books are cheap, light, and provide the contrast of text on white paper, making them easier to read than most screens. Even Alvin Toffler, the author of Future Shock (1970), came to understand what really is happening. He argued that the issue is not about whether the book is disappearing; rather that Americans “continually crave more information and the entire system begins to pulse with higher and higher flows of data.” His argument is that we needed (his word, but probably he meant wanted) all forms of information in larger quantities.21 I think his view is accurate, because every form of information handling is making more text and data available than ever before. Let’s take a look at the book as an example. Books have been a part of the American landscape since the 1600s, satisfying various needs. By the end of the 1700s, there were several million books in North America, primarily dealing with religion, law, history, philosophy, and some commercial themes. As better printing techniques developed during the 1800s, particularly after the Civil War, the cost of books dropped steadily while the public’s appetite for them grew. The number of new titles, and the total number of books sold, expanded all through the 20th century, sometimes in proportion to the growth in population and at other times faster, as for example, after World War II. In the decade before the availability of the Internet, Americans had available to them some 40,000 new titles each year, with over 1.5 million titles in print. They annually paid out $19 billion to buy these books. Between 1988 and 1992, purchases increased by a third. Furthermore, the rate of new titles kept growing. Between 1880 and 1989, American publishers brought out 1.8 million new titles. Of that total number, almost half (49.56%) came out just between 1970 and 1989! The total number of new titles in the first half of the 1990s dipped, caused more by a slowdown in the economy than by an assault from the Internet, because the online access to information did not become widespread, of course, until the second half of the decade. American publishers sold nearly 15.5 billion books between 1989 and 1995, while annual unit sales (copies of books) kept

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rising in the middle years of the decade, with sales always above 1.5 billion copies each year.22 In the millennium year of 2000, sales of books in the U.S. economy climbed to over $25.3 billion, providing the book publishing industry a compounded growth rate in sales during the decade of the 1990s of 5.2 percent.23 And what were Americans reading? In the mid-1990s, the top category of titles consisted of books on economics and social issues, followed by nonfiction, children’s books, and then medical volumes. These four categories accounted for about 38 percent of all titles. Other popular categories included biography, literature, religion (alone responsible for 5% of all purchases), and history. Of all the books sold, roughly 61 percent were adult books; we were buying a great number of children’s books too!24 The more money one made, the more books one bought. Part of that was due to affordability, the more one made the more one could afford to spend. Another aspect related to rising educational levels. Americans with graduate degrees tend to buy more books than those without advanced education. No surprise here. The occupations that statistically led the way in purchases in mid-decade were professional and managerial; while those least inclined to buy were clerical, craftsman, and unskilled labor. My generation—the baby-boomers—today accounts for nearly 40 percent of all sales of books in America. This generation loves to read nonfiction (44 percent of all books sold), but also likes to snuggle up to a good novel (43 percent of all sales). Novels, of course, can be far more than frivolous entertainment; they reflect and teach the values of a society. There are some authors, like James Michener and Tom Clancy, who communicate substantial amounts of historical or technical data in their novels. People also buy a lot of textbooks (mostly for their children), which accounted for a distant third place at 11 percent of sales.25 So the trend to watch for is the expanding pool of knowledge workers, because they are still extensive users of books, even though they also are more likely to have access to the Internet. Has there been a significant shift since the arrival of the Internet? We know that television and radio cut into book


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reading all through the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, particularly as cable TV began offering a vast array of specialized channels (e.g., History Channel, C-SPAN, sports, cooking, etc.). We don’t yet have as much hard data for the end of the 1990s as we do for the first half of the decade, however, here is what we know. First, sales of books continued to increase as measured by the number of books sold and dollars spent on them. Second, this was also true for textbooks, technical and professional volumes, religious tomes, and so forth. The vast majority of Americans still buy books at bookstores, despite the enormous hype we have been exposed to about online purchasing (e.g., from Amazon.com and Barnesandnoble.com), which also rose sharply (especially among professionals and managers). Public libraries are not going out of business; in fact, they are embracing the Internet and continue to add books to their collections. Professional or business titles, for example, are also purchased through book clubs, direct sales from publishers, and through associations. Yearbooks and reference guides by industry or profession are very popular. But we still buy most of our novels, history books, and biographies at a neighborhood store, suggesting that perhaps many readers still need to examine a book before buying it. To give this story some perspective, I should note that the per capita production of books published in the United States far outpaces what is going on in Africa and Asia. However, it is less than in Europe (where electronic sources of information lagged behind the U.S., hence the greater reliance on printed media). Europeans outpublished Americans on new titles by a ratio of more than 2 to 1. Developed economies outpublished Americans with new titles in the 1990s by just over 50 percent, while developing nations published at a rate of 15 percent of America’s running average.26 What we can draw from this information is that there remains, as it has for centuries, a global imbalance in the availability of books, with Americans well endowed with new titles and others catching up or not yet as reliant on electronic alternatives for information. What lessons can we draw from all these various experiences with books? To be sure, books provide far more detailed

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information than magazines, newspapers, television or radio programs, or Internet databases. So in order to delve deeply into a topic, the tool of choice is still the book. To a similar extent for serious nonfiction topics, so too is the journal article. Big, complex, fictional stories remain the purview of the book world, although mini-series on television and movies continue to take a bite out of fiction book reading. Religious themes are still presented most frequently in books, although the topic pops up everywhere, from software and Internet sites, to newspaper and magazine articles, to tapes and videos. Americans increasingly turn to the Internet for hard data (as you can see in the notes in this book on economic statistics) because readers want to be more current than what a book normally provides. So, in declaring the book on the way out, we have to conclude that some topics are under the gun (e.g., statistical presentations), but others are booming (e.g., how-to, business, novels, and history), thriving side-by-side with the digital information world. The book is not so important as the fact that it is still a major carrier of information.

ROLE OF NEWSPAPERS AND MAGAZINES: AMERICAN INFORMATION LANDMARKS Newspapers and magazines have filled the homes and offices of Americans from earliest times. They still do, but without the same vitality that we see with books. Let’s begin with newspapers, a type of publication that the founding fathers wanted specifically to protect with the U.S. Constitution to ensure that Americans would have the information they needed to make informed political decisions. Newspapers made their appearance in the American colonies in the 1700s. Before then they were not in great demand because there were so few colonists. Settlers lived in small communities where they could talk frequently to each other, making conversation their preferred way to disseminate information. By the early 1700s, colonists were conducting commerce with each other, requiring information in a more organized form about commercial, political, and legal topics. As early as 1692, the American colonies began to


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appoint postmasters who quickly became centers of news. So it should be of no surprise that the first publisher of a newspaper was a postmaster—John Campbell in 1704 in Boston. Called the News-Letter, it carried official news, data about community activities, and news from other colonies and from Europe. Its circulation reached about 300 in Boston, at a time when the city’s population hovered at about 7,000. Other postmasters began to publish papers. The first publisher not a government official was James Franklin who, in 1721, published the Courant. This New England paper began publishing the first criticisms of government policies in America. The first paper published outside of Boston came from Philadelphia, the American Weekly Mercury, begun in 1719. Benjamin Franklin took over the Pennsylvania Gazette in 1729. He made it one of the most widely read papers of its day during the 1730s. The first daily published in America appeared in 1783: Evening Post, also published in Philadelphia, although first as a weekly. Newspapers began appearing in all major East Coast cities for local consumption. The New York Tribune claimed credit for becoming the first national paper; it began publishing weekly in 1841 and became the first major paper Americans could buy on the West Coast, in the Midwest, and up and down the East Coast. In the early 1860s, demand for news about the Civil War skyrocketed. In response, circulation of all major newspapers rose. Historians routinely credit the New York Herald as the first to sell 100,000 daily copies (1862). By the end of the century a few newspapers such as the New York World and the New York Journal, had achieved one million circulation rates. The ability to print broadsides and later newspapers appeared early in the colonies. The first known printing press in America was brought to Mexico by priests to print religious training materials in 1539. Historians credit Cambridge, Massachusetts, with having the first press in English North America; it arrived in 1638. In the 1700s, newspapers published government announcements and opinions. Social and political dialogue consumed the majority of the papers because many of these publications were the personal communications vehicles of

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politicians or publishers with political and social agendas. These were elites communicating with other elites. During the 1830s, newspapers for the mass public became far more common. Stories concerned politics, economics, and entertaining news, entertaining because these papers had to sell copies and advertisements to make ends meet. After the invention of the telegraph in the 1840s, newspapers began to report more rapidly on emerging political, economic, and social events across the nation. By the end of the century, sensationalism, social problems, and dramatic stories were the order of the day. It was the sensational coverage of Spanish colonial practices and the sinking of the USS Maine in Havana harbor in 1898, for example, that forced President William McKinley to ask Congress for a declaration of war against Spain contrary to his better judgment. As the American public moved to the suburbs after the invention of the automobile, and especially after World War II, new sections appeared in papers to meet their needs: sports, entertainment, and social columns. That trend of adding new sections continued to the end of the 20th century. As with books, many pundits declared the newspaper a dying medium, thanks at first to the radio, then television, and now to the Internet. To be sure, these alternative sources of information made important inroads, but like books, a deeper look at how Americans approach newspapers suggests that they are a healthy component of the nation’s information landscape. They are still the primary outlet for detailed coverage of news. Word for word, one finds more coverage about a topic in newspapers than on television, radio, or even the Internet. They carry more commercial information than any other medium. Newspapers are still the primary source of advertisements—themselves information useful in everyday life and also a source of revenue. Newspapers are also cheap, available in every major and small community in the nation, and offer more local news than local TV or radio. Newspapers remain a relatively big business, about the same size as the textile or lumber products industries and larger than the tobacco industry. Americans spend more than $40 billion on newspapers each year, buying more than 60 million papers every day.27


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Between 9,500 and 10,000 newspapers are published in the United States; less than 15 percent are dailies. What about the decline in newspapers we are constantly told has been occurring? From 1950 to 1980—the great period during which TV penetrated the American economy—the number was fairly stable, only 2 percent shut down. The ones that did, and, in the process grabbed headlines, were competing secondary newspapers in mid-sized to large cities where Americans were moving out to the suburbs. Out in the “burbs” new papers came into existence to meet the needs of the new residents. In the 1980s, however, many large dailies shut down—8 percent of the total by 1992. Most of these were second editions of other existing newspapers, so communities were not left without coverage. Afternoon editions bit the dust the most; the majority had been published by firms that also produced morning editions and those did just fine. Afternoon editions, which commuters often read on subways and buses, no longer were popular because these people now drove cars to and from work. The damage could have been worse, because about 80 percent of all newspapers in mid-century were afternoon editions. At the end of the century nearly two-thirds remained afternoon publications. Sunday editions were available from about half the large dailies and, since 1960 that number has grown by an additional 50 percent. Busy Americans like these as a way of catching up on the week’s news, and they read these more casually than papers during the workweek. That explains, for example, why there are huge advertising sections in these large weekend editions.28 Between 1950 and 1990—again the glory years of TV— daily circulations actually went up by nearly 16 percent, with the greatest expansion occurring between 1950 and 1970. Circulations went up in part because there were fewer newspapers, and because the American population continued to grow. What has declined is the per capita reading of newspapers. For every 1,000 Americans in 1950, 356 subscriptions were the norm; that number dropped steadily all through the second half of the century to under 230 per 1,000 by the late 1990s.29 This is where the real shift is occurring. We have many newspapers but the percentage of the population reading them has been declining, in part because they are relying

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on TV and now Internet-based news. What Americans normally read today are local newspapers, often with circulations of under 40,000. These heavily emphasize local news, features, and advertising by local and regional merchants. During the 1990s, newspapers added a great deal of information to their content. Rather than just offer news, for example, they now included articles on how to improve health, remodel homes, cook, select travel destinations, and so forth. They began to distribute information, not just news. They also moved rapidly to the Internet with online editions. Now every major national newspaper has Internet versions that carry both text from printed versions and additional information. Over 500 newspapers are now online and that number is rising fast; the same is true for magazines. Some papers, like U.S.A Today, offer online research services and information for a fee. Online newspaper articles are updated in an ongoing fashion all day long as stories break. Business news, such as stock quotes, are now updated continuously or, at the least, every 15 minutes. So newspapers are finding their new role in the Internet market, while Americans still read a great number of newspapers at home. Newspapers function the way other sources of information have, changing from old formats to new ones as novel, popular information technologies come on stream. In comparison to the rest of the world, West Europeans publish almost twice as many newspapers per capita as Americans, but Americans have a higher per capita than the world at large (143 vs. the world at 96 as of 1992). The global number of newspapers actually increased by about 15 percent between 1970 and 1992 while for the U.S. it went down by a small number). The data for online papers around the world to not yet exist, so we cannot determine what is happening at the moment. What we do know is that American consumption of newspapers is massive when compared to the rest of the world.30 Magazines are another important piece of the American information mosaic. They provide a very complicated story, but the nation is full of them. Today, Americans have the richest variety of specialized magazines than at any time in


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the history of their nation. Like newspapers that emerged during the age of paper, in time magazines also went electronic. They are wonderful icons of American culture because they cover everything from those meeting the needs of the new craze of bicycle riding (which, by the way, first struck this nation in the late 1860s) to others devoted to personal computer users in the 1980s. Every political movement in this nation had its magazines, from Frederick Douglass’s Douglass’ Monthly (1858–1863), which dealt with the issue of slavery and the need for its abolition, to publications of the religious right in American politics in the 1990s.31 Women’s magazines always proved popular, from Lily, A Ladies Journal Devoted to Temperance and Literature (1849–1856) to today’s Ms. Some of the nation’s published icons include magazines: Life, Time, and Newsweek are quick examples. They are narrower in focus in what they cover than a newspaper, are more frequently published and more current than a book, and in general offer greater amounts of detail than television programs. In the 1990s Americans could buy about 22,000 different magazines. Some 2,000 are the leading ones we all know about (TV Guide, Modern Bride, Business Week, etc.). There are about 8,000 trade magazines, about 4,000 consumer publications, and some 10,000 public relations magazines.32 In short, the majority deal with issues important in the work place. Most have small circulations, as one would expect from highly specialized niche players, but about 160 account for 85 percent of the revenue generated by magazines. Americans spend about a third more on magazines than they do on newspapers, making them a very popular source of information. The specialized nature of magazines was established early in American history. The first American magazine, published in 1741 by Philadelphia printer Andrew Bradford, American Magazine, or A Monthly View of the Political State of the British Colonies appeared three days before this publisher’s arch rival, Benjamin Franklin, began publishing General Magazine, and Historical Chronicle, for All the British Plantations in America. Within six months, both folded; neither could draw a big enough readership to make a go of it.

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In the 1830s magazines began to appear with distinct American themes: political, signed stories, commercial data, and articles on American topics. After 1885, when rural free delivery of mail went into effect, the number of magazines began to expand, from about 3,000 in 1880 to over 7,000 by 1900. By then they had differentiated themselves from newspapers, providing assimilated bodies of information, not just news stories. As newspapers evolved into publications that avoided expressing opinions as news, magazines provided an increasing spectrum of opinions. McClure’s, for example, over many decades carried articles about abuses in employment and commerce. Collier’s represented the views of Americans who wanted to repeal prohibition. More than newspapers, they published illustrations and photographs, particularly as printing technology evolved in the late 1800s and early 1900s making that kind of publication possible and cost-effective. After World War I, Americans were more drawn to news and illustrated publications, such as Life, Time, Newsweek, Ladies’ Home Journal, and the Saturday Evening Post. All became national with huge (over one million) circulations, sustaining such large readerships for decades. More so than book publishers and even most newspapers, magazine editors exploited advances in information technology very rapidly. Printing innovations in the late 1800s and early 1900s made it possible to publish more pictures and later, during the 20th century, to publish them in color. With the arrival of electronic publications and communications, whole new markets became possible to reach. Electronic magazines began competing with printed rivals in the early 1990s. Two things now happened. First, like newspapers, magazines began to offer electronic versions of their printed editions, sometimes exactly the same, often as variations with more or less material. Today, almost every national magazine has a Web site with material from their paper versions. Second, new magazines appeared only in electronic versions. Thus you could buy Wired—a magazine targeted at the young adult Internet and PC user—at a newsstand, but HotWired only online. Many of the first electronic magazines were aimed at PC users, but later more traditional publications appeared too,


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such as Playboy, which offered online all its celebrity interviews going back to the first issue released in the mid-1950s. Online magazines in America are acquiring a look of their own, different from what the paper versions had. The use of hypertext approaches have made it possible to blend together color, graphics, text, sound, video, and animation to tell a story. Only one copy has to be published electronically since readers can then download it or read the text online using their PCs. Electronic distribution avoids all the costs of physically manufacturing and distributing them. Stories are updated continuously, much like online newspapers are also doing. We do not yet know how many online magazines there are. Best estimates suggest there were over 500 in the mid1990s, centered in the United States, and that in every subsequent year several hundred additional titles became available. Many business-to-business publications are now online, such as IDG’s publications so critical to information technology managers; Ziff-Davis with its PC Magazine is now online and not just in paper. Even the stodgy National Law Journal is online, along with the Progressive Grocer, long the industry magazine of the supermarket business. Business audiences started out as the first audiences because they were the most ready. They had Internet-connected terminals and they needed fresh, timely information the most. Then came a second wave of readers, who read out of their homes as penetration of PCs into homes extended during the second half of the 1990s. People and Time are thus now on the Web. New magazines also appeared for the consumer market that never were in print before, such as Yellow Silk, Mother Jones, and Out. Clearly we are in the midst of a transition from paper to electronic magazines even if it is not clear how far this trend will extend. What we already understand is that Americans are receptive to electronic versions of magazines. There are now several thousand out on the Net that are American based.33 Work needs are driving demand, or at least the perception that businesses publishing magazines have to be present on the Net. Again, however, the key motivators for change concern the practical use of information, leveraging new

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technologies that accomplish this objective, drive down costs, or provide entertainment.

EVERYONE AN INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY WORKER? A PEEK AT OUR FUTURE? There was a time not so long ago when an IT worker was easily understood as someone who worked in the computer industry, designing, building, selling, servicing or using computers. They were programmers and machine operators, or people who designed new uses for systems. In short, they were professionals in the industry, experts in computer technology. One could stretch the definition to include clerks who entered data on computer cards or through terminals. But that was it. They all belonged to several neatly defined job classifications conveniently categorized by the U.S. Department of Labor. These people were physically isolated from the rest of us in data processing departments behind secure doors, requiring identification badges and passwords to open. Then came personal computers, and recently the Internet. Now everyone, it seems, is a data processing professional, an IT worker, a member of the digital workforce. While this last statement is a real stretch, the point is not. By looking at what the IT professional is up to, we gain some additional insights about the changing nature of work and jobs in the American economy. As computing diffused into the American economy it invaded the daily work of employees, changing what tasks they performed. The injection of IT into the economy, as measured in traditional economic terms, went from 4.9 percent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in 1985—just as the PC was kicking in—to 6.1 percent in 1990. Beginning in 1993, when the Internet made its tentative appearance in the economy at large, until 1998, the IT share of the economy went from 6.4 percent to 8.2 percent. Put in simple terms, the IT portion of the economy grew at twice the speed as this healthy economy as a whole expanded. This process did not end in 1998, but kept expanding right into the new century. There were interesting, even pleasant consequences. One of the most important involved its effects on the cost of goods and services. As the cost


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of computing continued to decline, while the percent of the GDP coming from IT increased, computing helped lower, or keep flat, inflation during the second half of the 1990s, dampening it by about 1 percent per year. Low inflation meant solid economic gains, causing American goods to be more attractive in a global economy. It also drove down interest rates, which meant the U.S. government had a smaller bill to pay for its debts, while making money available to American companies to modernize, improve productivity, and expand.34 Four fundamental information trends involving accumulation, distribution, and use that affect what work is done and how it is performed are now evident. The first trend, already suggested in Chapter 4, is the expansion of the Internet not only through the American economy but also around the world, becoming an integral tool used by workers. While projections about how many people will be on the Net are just guesses, even conservative forecasts speak about one billion users sometime late in the first decade of the new century. That means a lot of computers and phone services are going to be sold in short order, because half of the world’s population had not even made their first phone call as of the mid-1990s! Second, business-to-business (B2B) electronic commerce will expand beyond what it has been so far. This form of e-business was one of the most important uses of computers ever devised, because almost immediately upon implementation companies found they increased their productivity. This occurred, if for no other reason than that electronic commerce drove down the cost of communicating with each other and sped up transactions, from delivering a bill to supporting a customer. The key immediate benefits included lower purchasing costs of goods and services, reduced inventories by having the right products in stock more often than before, faster turnaround times in designing, building, and shipping goods, more efficient and effective customer service, lower sales and marketing costs, and new markets both at home and abroad.35 It was an impressive list of benefits. No wonder that by the turn of the century over $400 billion of business was being done this way.

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The road to a more digitized economy will not be smooth because companies face the same problems in how they will function with the Internet in the economy at large as they did with earlier technologies. There is uncertainty, for example, with the lack of a predictable, supportive legal environment. What role would the government play in taxing Internet-based business transactions? And finally, how well will the Internet work? Those who use it are painfully aware of its slowness, and the incredibly difficult task of finding the information they really want. The third trend is delivery of goods and services via electronics. We already saw some of that at work in our discussion about publications, newspapers, TV, and other forms of information exchange. The trend already is expanding. Most of the research for this chapter came off the Internet, even though I could have obtained paper copies of most of the government reports I used. Airline tickets are electronic, our children pull music off the Internet onto their PCs, we buy books online. In the late 1990s we saw many other services go digital: consulting, distance learning, brokerage services, and information agents (e.g., like those who find you the best interest rate nationally available for a home mortgage).36 The other customer-related trend is the retail sale of tangible goods. By the end of 1998, approximately 20 percent of all automobiles in the United States were either bought off the Internet or their prices and features were researched electronically by customers. There is a serious debate underway in the American automotive industry about what will be the future role of car dealerships. Internet-based sales as of 1998 had already surpassed 1 percent of all sales in the U.S. economy. These were primarily for computers, software, books, CDs, videos, flowers, stocks and automobiles. By the end of 1999, prescription drugs, clothing, and small electronic appliances had joined the list. So a conservative conclusion we could reach is that one could expect to see a great deal more electronic dialogue between customers and people making, shipping, selling, and servicing goods. Examples of the information effect of the Internet on work suggest tasks and economic benefits. Beginning in the mid-


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1990s, airlines began selling tickets electronically to consumers. By the end of the decade, a traveler could buy directly by accessing a computer belonging to the airlines, thereby saving the carrier the cost of having a clerk work with a customer. The Air Transport Association of America reported in 1997 that to use a travel agent and a computerized reservation system to process a ticket cost $8. Yet, if a customer directly booked a ticket using the airline’s reservation system, it cost the carrier $1 to process the same ticket. Southwest Airlines led the way in 1996 by making it possible for customers to buy their own tickets. Then came the Internet-based reservation systems quickly after: Microsoft’s Expedia.com and SABRE Group’s Travelocity.com, for example. Agents were being squeezed out of day-to-day transactions, increasingly focusing on complex travel arrangements like tours.37 The number of bank clerks is declining as well for exactly the same reasons: cheaper electronically, can do business 24 hours a day, and it is easy. A third example of the same process is day trading, in which people buy stocks online, paying as little as $8 for a transaction, thereby bypassing brokers who might have charged them as much as 100 times more for the same work. Consumer support for digital shopping is also fundamentally changing the work of companies. Choice is expanding fast because the Internet offers more options. The national and international marketplace is now open to any consumer online; we are no longer restricted to what is physically available in our neighborhoods. While we can expect this phenomenon to integrate the national economy more, providing national markets for regional firms, what it means for consumers and employees is that they have choices on what to buy and where to work.38 We saw an example of choice with online book buying; online systems, such as Amazon.com and Barnesandnoble.com, offer millions of products, while large brick-and-mortar stores offer only about 100,000 to 110,000 volumes. Convenience is a second factor. Consumers can buy fast, when they want to, and it is now relatively easy to do. A consumer can model a dress, design a garden, or see a simulation of a desired car quickly before committing to a purchase. Tied

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to convenience are lower costs, because every vendor knows that others are also offering goods and services online. In fact, the reason why the Internet has so far helped keep the lid on inflation in the United States is because of the competitive pressures enhanced by the Net. Convenience is also enhanced by mass customization, allowing customers to design what they want before a vendor manufacturers and delivers it. It costs very little to allow a Ford Motor customer to pull up an image on a screen of a green car, a red one, and finally select blue. What was happening with workers? Just as they had to learn new skills to take advantage of all the new manufacturing, communications, and computing technologies that came during the first three quarters of the 20th century, once again they had to repeat the learning process. This time it involved PCs, the Internet, and today’s software tools. All through the second half of the 20th century, the economy needed more programmers and other IT professionals than normally were available. Between 1986 and 2006—the same period during which the Internet and the PC are expected to work their way fully through the U.S. economy—the demand for skilled IT workers is expected to go from about 875,000 to more than 1.8 million. Most will have to be college graduates and some will need graduate training. Demand for low-level IT skills like data entry clerks (very necessary in the 1960s and 1970s) is declining. In this same period, these will probably be cut in half.39 Workers in general need more IT skills than in earlier decades. Today, the ability to use Microsoft or Lotus Notes products like Word, Freelance, or 1-2-3 is almost a given for office workers. In the mid-1990s, those were very attractive skills a worker could leverage for higher salary. Today, knowledge of those tools and the ability to navigate on the Internet is almost the price of admission to the job market for professions from clerical and secretarial positions to consulting and engineering. We are finally beginning to see credible data on the use of the Internet in the workplace, evidence that documents the growing importance of this technology, and taking us past


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press hype to the sobering facts. A Pew Foundation survey done in 2000 in the U.S. determined that 37 percent of all fulltime workers and 18 percent of part-time employees have access to the Internet at work. Two-thirds accessed the Internet daily, and most reported using it for work-related activities. Seventy-two percent said that the Internet helped improve their performance on the job. Just over half spend an hour or less on the Internet in any given day. Those with the highest salaries, positions, or complexity of jobs are most likely to be extensive users of the Internet.40 Downsizing and flattening of organizations stabilized the flow of jobs out of the economy while new ones were created. The majority of downsizing initiatives resulted from mergers of companies, in part made possible by the ability of information technology to make such mergers financially productive because work could be automated or computer systems consolidated. Failures of companies still occurred, of course, but we have not witnessed the demise of a great number of familiar corporations in recent years; normally they are swallowed up in some merger before they die. While downsizing continues on a regular basis and actually increased in early 2001, the doom and gloom projections economists put out in the mid1990s have now been replaced with concern about the lack of a sufficient number of workers. Unemployment in the United States at the end of the century was at an historic low—less than 5 percent—and, even accounting for the underground economy and for jobs that paid too little to sustain a minimum standard of living, the fact remains that downsizing is currently not the critical issue it was a decade earlier. Meanwhile, as workers acquired skills that they could take from one firm to another, pension programs became more portable. During their extensive downsizing days of the early 1990s, many firms essentially broke their promise to provide lifetime employment. All these circumstances made workers more mobile. Allegiance to a profession and to what skills one had increased over loyalty to an employer. Teams of empowered employees worked increasingly as the decision makers in what used to be hierarchical command-and-control business structures,

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leaving the firm if they were not allowed to do their “thing.” Flexibility also meant being able to do work in many places. Don Kolenda can do his consulting out of his home office or in a customer’s conference room. He is not alone; the U.S. Department of Transportation now reports that some 15 percent of the American workforce is mobile and their ranks are growing in number. Corporations prize knowledge workers more than unskilled labor. For those with only a high-school education and no technical skills, the future in the American workforce is expected to be harsh. Entry-level jobs that such folks went to in the past are now technical. Today’s automobile mechanic is a skilled technician who uses computer-based diagnostic tools. Walk behind the counter of a McDonald’s restaurant today with folks who worked at the firm twenty years ago, and the amount of technology will impress you and them. It begins with the point-of-sale terminal that captures information on cash flows, product demand, inventory on hand, and continues all the way to the back of the store where cooking is programmed and structured. The demand for technically trained employees plays out on payday. IT industries today, on average, pay almost a third more salary than other industries. Salaries for all workers in the U.S. in the 1990s grew at about 3.8 percent annually; for IT professionals closer to 5.2 percent. Statistically, in 1996 an IT employee received $48,000 in salary while workers in other industries averaged $28,000.41 A college graduate, certified as a Microsoft customer support professional, could make $50,000 one year out of college in 1998. Software experts in that same year averaged over $60,000 in salary. Certain industries are also more sensitive to the need for highly skilled IT personnel. For instance, the financial sector today hires about a third of its workforce from this high-skill pool. In retail that figure is closer to 12 percent. Not everyone needs to be a technical genius. But increasingly, many jobs are acquiring technical content, which means more and continuously changing information is required by the workforce. To be sure, the number of these jobs remains small today. Across the entire U.S. economy the percent of the workforce


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totally dedicated to IT activities is tiny, 1.18 percent of the total at the turn of the century, but growing.42 However, all the forecasts from the U.S. Government and the European Union speak of substantial and steady growth for those jobs that have a high IT content to them. Today that demand is mostly driven by software development. The U.S. Government expects that the biggest changes will come in distribution and trade, where the promise of computing is already beginning to be felt with e-commerce. In the dry language of a government economist, “Electronic commerce is driving demand for IT professionals but it also requires IT expertise coupled with strong business application skills. Therefore, it generates demand for a flexible, multi-skilled work force. . . . E-commerce is likely to accelerate existing upskilling trends,” continuing America’s reliance on more and newer forms of knowledge and information than it experienced through the past 150-odd years.43 But back to an earlier point—unskilled workers will find the job market more hostile toward them. Already their future is here. In the U.S. banking industry, for instance, the extensive increase in the use of computers made it possible to reduce the number of clerks, enabling the huge mergers that occurred in the late 1990s. During the first half of the 1980s, employment in the industry kept rising, from 2.3 million in 1983 to a peak of 2.6 million in 1989. Then, technology began to influence productivity as banks offered digitally based services such as ATMs and online banking. Beginning in 1990, employment in the industry began to drop rapidly, to below 2.4 million by 1992 and on the way down to 2 million expected by 2006.44 The insurance industry, adopting computerbased services later than banks, is experiencing the same kind of shift in employment. The flip side to this pattern is already evident too. Employment in information-laden industries like computer programming, radio and TV, advertising, motion pictures, records and tape, is growing. Between 1977 and 1995, these industries went from employing 1.5 million workers to 3.7 million, and are expected to have 5.1 million by 2006. As a percentage of the total workforce, these accounted for 1.6 percent in 1977, reached 3.08 percent in 1996, and should reach 3.7 percent

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by 2006.45 The numbers are suggestive of the changes we are experiencing, even though today they remain relatively small. Related new types of jobs are simultaneously being created around the world, not just in the U.S.A. Consultants expert in entrepreneurial startups are in great demand as new businesses are formed based on the Internet. They also are guiding existing firms into Internet-based forms of business. Application developers are needed to design new systems that take advantage of the Internet and e-business. Information brokers using online tools who can match customers to providers represent one of the fastest growing job areas. Network security specialists and e-business analysts are increasingly in evidence, particularly in large organizations. A whole slew of Internet experts are needed: Internet architects, Web designers, network analysts, and programmers familiar with such new software tools as Java, Windows NT, and TCP/IP. All base their value on new forms of information, most are college graduates or went through extensive training, none make less on average than $50,000 a year, while the best average is over $100,000.

PATTERNS IN WORK AND WORKPLACES Given that my peek at the future is more an observation of what is already happening, what can be said about the supply of information, information technologies, and most especially about e-business, and their effects on work and workplaces? There are many views about America’s current economy. For example, Richard K. Lester, a highly respected economist at MIT, suggested recently that the American economy has a rosy long-term future, thanks to its very strong performance during the second half of the 1990s. After numerous case studies of recovering industries, policy considerations, and so forth, he concludes that at the core of America’s future is the nation’s continuing investment “in knowledge and skills.”46 He also complains that we have too much information about the American economy that tends “to confuse more than inform!”47 But after presenting a great deal of data, he suggests workers can become even more successful if their employers invest in their training and development,


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because to increase productivity and economic success, “you have to have knowledgeable front-line workers with the skills, motivation, and the authority to solve problems on the line as they arise.”48 Like many other commentators on work, he notes that hierarchies are shrinking, departments are becoming more integrated, and successful organizations are acting less like the silos of old, while bonding more closely to customers and suppliers. The growing reliance on organizing work into processes has now become a way of life in many firms, with the information needed to operate them, such as statistics.49 Downsizing made employees nervous, cautious, and more self-reliant. Companies have had to work hard to reestablish trust and build internal mechanisms for communicating and sharing information—hence a major source of incentive for implementing knowledge management systems. However, as one of the most important studies on American employee attitudes of the late 1990s pointed out, workers increasingly began judging their own success by what they could do rather than for whom they worked.50 Lester ended his book with a list of activities the American economy must participate in to sustain progress in future years. It is such a typically American list, one that could have been published in the 1930s, 1960s, or 20 years from now. Out of his eight items, over half rely on the effective use of information: best practices, process management, investing in skills, knowledge, ideas, and organizational capabilities.51 In one of the most important studies done on the American workforce during the 1990s, Peter Cappelli of the Wharton School of Business and his team documented the increase in process management and the case for employee development emerging as major elements of modern work. Like Lester, they documented the expected importance of both information and knowledgeable workers to be effective in today’s workplace.52 IBM’s internal studies on the nature of work bears out many of the same observations. To be sure, the heavy hand of technology appears everywhere, particularly in applications that help workers do their tasks, in networks that permit

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e-mail and access to databases full of information that can be used to select, ship, and invoice products and services. But members of the consulting arm of IBM have also observed a number of emerging patterns, normally earlier in the United States but nonetheless globally as well. Simply listed, they include: ■ Work is done independent of geography (your manager is in New York, you are in California). ■ Customers communicate with you around the clock (while you are asleep in Tennessee, the client in Japan is sending you e-mail). ■ Databases are routinely accessed more than ever (call your local utility and the clerk you are speaking with has accessed a detailed file on you and your history with the company). ■ Flexibility of terms and conditions offered to customers, in employment conditions for employees, and in variety of customized products is increasingly normal daily fare. ■ Balance of power between customer and merchant is rapidly shifting to the customer, caused by access to the same information as a vendor (hence the need to understand customer needs and wants more intensely than ever before).53 Now let’s look at our two Information Age workers— Kolenda and Woods—to see what their world of work looks like. Both survive on their intellectual wits, neither can perform his work without a PC or knowledge of how to navigate its systems, the Internet, and databases. Each logs on every day for e-mail or suffers the consequence of having to read hundreds of messages days later. Both have the majority of their clients living outside the communities in which they live. They have to travel to other nations to do their work, although more often they let their electrons do the traveling for them. Their clients live and work in many time zones; years ago both gave up trying to work 9-to-5 schedules, or even just Monday through Friday. Both could be put out of business within weeks or months if a rival from another country or city comes along with a better price, technology, or body of


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information. In fact, Woods tells the story about how a rival attempted to publish a yearbook on the same subject on which Woods was focusing. Woods put that individual’s project out of business almost instantly because he published a yearbook with information considered better by customers, for a fraction of the cost offered by his rival, and marketed through more effective channels. Now let’s compare future workers with today’s, using a case study involving your author and his 18-year-old college freshman. When I have to perform a mathematical calculation, such as update the checkbook, I grab a piece of paper and a pencil and perform the math or do it in my head. My daughter brings out an $89 TI calculator that could probably guide a space ship and executes her math problems. When I need to do research, my first step is to go to the University of Wisconsin library to find books and magazines; her first instinct is to cruise the Web, and she finds what is needed quicker than I do. When I write, the first draft is done on a laptop and then copyedited and polished, using a printed copy; she copyedits online. When I went to high school and college students took four years of English, history, mathematics, and science, and two years of a foreign language. At her high school she could also take sciences I did not have available (e.g., aeronautics), languages new to the curriculum (e.g., Japanese and programming languages like C++). Instead of just European and American history, she also had various ethnic history classes. Yet much is the same. Both schools took sports very seriously. Both had dances, plays, and school outings. Students behaved the same, worried about their social position, and paid less attention to their future than to what they were going to do next weekend, or tonight. In both worlds, students had part-time jobs; although several years ago I had an intern working at our office whose sole job was to help people use their PCs more effectively. The amount of science and mathematics that my daughter has to learn far exceeds what I was required to master. She walked out of high school very comfortable with computers and other digital gizmos, while I graduated having mastery of the humble typewriter. Both of us

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learned to drive cars, fly on airplanes, and speak more than just English. So much is similar, so much is different. The future of work is already here while others are about to transit into the emerging world. We see it in the work habits of teams of children collaborating on school projects, in their access to computers and the Internet. We see it with colleagues who manage processes, rely on building institutionwide core competencies, and in their heavy reliance on a variety of digital technologies to speed up work, organize information, and tasks. The future comes unevenly, and nothing appears to have made that statement truer than the effects of the Internet on American society. Let’s take a little closer look at its current role—as a vast resource of information—understanding that all the prognosticators are arguing that its future lies in doing work, not in just being a digital library.54

THE INTERNET AS A SOURCE OF INFORMATION Throughout this chapter and in the others to follow, the notion that the Internet is part of a larger American pattern of developing and using technology-based tools to collect and use information will remain a constant theme. We have already seen jobs, and work itself, being influenced by yet another information technology infrastructure—the Internet—but is the Internet really a source of information? Or is it just a media? Since many Americans have used the Internet to find information about something, the question almost seems silly. However, given the fact that Americans were some of the most aggressive early users and are retaining their lead as some of the most extensive on the network, the question is appropriate. The first major surveys of how people used the Internet began to be conducted in the mid- to late 1990s. They point out that almost 90 percent of all users go to the Internet for news and information; about 80 percent conduct research there as well. Almost all of the 20 most-frequented Web sites provide news, information, and entertainment.55 The list is a familiar one: Time Warner’s Pathfinder, Disney, CNN, USA Today, ABC, C/NET, HotWired; 60 percent of all U.S.


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newspapers also have a site on the Net. It is the story I reviewed in the previous chapter. Some of the key information retrieval services familiar to Americans are Dialog Information Services, Lexis-Nexis, and Westlaw. These are used by workers, such as lawyers with Westlaw, and engineers with Dialog and Lexis Nexis, to find information pertinent to their work or integral to the services they provide. Today, for almost every conceivable subject there are Web sites. Yahoo! reported in 1998 that over 25 million Americans used the Net to search for information regarding automobile sales, to read magazines, to get stock quotes, read press releases, check out movie schedules, and to find restaurants in major cities. The top 25 newspapers in the United States are online, and include the ones most Americans are familiar with, such as the Boston Globe, The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post. The Wall Street Journal launched its online version in April 1996, and today you can get its various global versions of the paper at its site. The New York Times, in addition to its online version, has loaded 50,000 book reviews onto its site, going back to 1980! Every major news organization has extensive Internet presence: AP, UPI, and Knight-Ridder, to mention a few. Many specialized journals and magazines are present on the Internet, over 4,000 as of the late 1990s, including the top 50 as measured by size of circulation. Technology and entertainment magazines got on the Net early and experience high levels of traffic. Often, these publications appear simultaneously in electronic and print versions, while electronic editions usually have additional information. Americans thus have the option of going with one format or another for Reader’s Digest, TV Guide, or PC Magazine. For games they can go to the Imagine Games Network, and Online Gaming Review and for music SonicNet, Dotmusic, and Billboard Magazine. Other than Billboard’s, the games and entertainment journals are only published online. Most content on the Web comes from existing printed versions or goes online as printed versions are created. There is a growing debate among publishers about what should go online and what is better in published form. This is the same debate

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that occurred every time a new information technology or format came along: manuscripts to books, broadsides to newspapers, text for radio and television. The questions being asked now are about what will be on the Internet and in what forms. Television firms in the U.S. are also on the Net; in fact, over 800 of them. Both the major networks and cable providers offer their programs over the Internet. As of the late 1990s, over 150 U.S. cable channels were on the Internet and included such widely used services as CNN, HBO, MTV, and the Weather Channel. News channels include a great deal more material than is normally presented on television, at a level of detail similar to a major newspaper, augmenting stories presented on television. CNN, Discovery, and PBS are excellent examples of this convergence of traditional text-level detail with the briefer television versions merged together. Radio programs can also be picked up on PCs across the Net if they are equipped with software and speakers to do the job. Over 30 million copies of RealPlayer, used to pick up audio and video, have been sold. Currently, best estimates are that over 500,000 copies of the software are being downloaded to PCs every week.56 That is more than just every teenager and college student trying to get free music! The practice is spreading to the population at large. The last major source of information on the Internet, one that we cannot ignore, is what companies provide. Every major corporation puts out information about its products on the Internet, normally includes press releases, speeches by their CEOs, and how to get employed by the firm. Intranets house information accessible only to employees, such as process data, prices, and intellectual capital used to do consulting and product development. Business information providers who have been around for decades are all on the Internet, from Reuters and Dun & Bradstreet, to specialized industry-specific sources (e.g., Quicken InsureMarket for term life insurance). Insurance, securities, and manufacturers have long had a presence on the Internet. They also make it possible to order and pay for products over the Internet (e-commerce). Many of these sites are free, others charge to use their material. Advertising on the Internet is finally taking off.


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Advertising and subscription fees in 1997 approached $520 million, but a leading business forecasting firm, Forrester Research, suggested that by the second or third year of the new century, that figure should exceed $8 billion. Other research firms have made similar forecasts.57 By 1999, a new influence of the Internet began to surface: the melding of newspaper and magazine missions and formats. Online newspapers added sidebar stories in information that increasingly mirrored the level of detail and themes typical of printed magazines. Conversely, online magazines began to offer shorter articles, similar in content and format to what we normally expect to see in a newspaper. Ironically, this pattern of melding actually began with newspapers in the 1980s and 1990s as they added more in-depth informational articles and sections that were not news per se. That melding appears to have sped up on the Internet because of the convenience of presenting lead articles with pointers to larger, more detailed essays for those interested in digging deeper into a topic. This capability is frequently now married to another one available on the Internet since the mid-1990s—automatic searches for and presentations of specific types of news and information to readers. Today it is quite common for an Internet user to instruct his or her search engine to search constantly for only certain types of information and to present that material at a predetermined time (e.g., daily or every hour). What do Americans do with all this information? Forrester Research conducted one of the first surveys to help answer that question. Americans take action, often buying goods and services over the Internet. The earliest and most extensive purchases were of computer products, obvious since the initial users of the Net were technically proficient and had access to the Internet. In descending order of popularity in the late 1990s came books, travel, clothing, music, subscriptions, gifts, and investments. The most popular gifts were flowers.58 By the end of the 1990s, the newest popular buying patterns displayed by Americans involved day trading for stocks and online auctions. Purchase of automobiles quickly became very popular, with half of those accessing auto sites trying to identify existing

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inventory, a third to schedule appointments to see cars, and about 20 percent to actually buy one. Nearly a third now apply for auto financing over the Internet. Major auto sites today include Auto-by-Tel, AutoVantage, AutoWeb, and CarPoint. Some, like Auto-by-Tel, generates over $6 billion a year in auto sales. Consumers overwhelmingly say the Internet is convenient, increasingly easy to use, and offers good prices.

CONSEQUENCES AND IMPLICATIONS FOR WORKER PRODUCTIVITY The continued injection of information and information technology into the work people do is spinning off important results and implications for the future. Already we can see that the productivity of American workers has been rising since the mid-1990s, in large part due to the ability of corporations and government agencies to get more work done using computers. The ability of companies to merge, such as we have seen recently in the banking and communications industries, is a clear consequence of how computers can be used to improve productivity. The ability of firms to do new things because of information has led to business opportunities that would not be possible without heavy reliance on information technology, such as the merger of communications, entertainment, and cable companies. A central theme throughout this book is that information generally is attractive to Americans if it can be applied to some useful purpose. Useful is often defined as generating some economic benefit. Americans have long recognized that utility is frequently enhanced by significant investments in the creation and maintenance of information delivery infrastructures. Economists have recently begun to document whether or not such practices did generate economic advantages. Sanjeev Dewan and Kenneth L. Kraemer, two economists, have recently compared the return on investments for modern information infrastructures by 35 nations. They uncovered several facts. First, highly developed nations consistently invested more in IT than economically underdeveloped countries (up to 53% of annual GDP growth came from IT capital). Second,


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investments in digital infrastructures (machines, software, telecommunications) accounted for some 41 percent of the growth in U.S. GDP during the period 1985–1993, more than for any other type of investment made in the United States. Third, nations that have built up a normal supply of capital investments in support of economic activities (e.g., roads, factories, training, etc.) are benefiting the most from information infrastructures. Dewan and Kraemer end their study by predicting that advanced economies, although they have made far less investments in IT than the United States, will find economic advantages to investing further in what the Americans did. Underdeveloped economies need to build up their capital stock of more traditional investments before they can enjoy the kinds of economic benefits evident in the United States. In short, as with earlier investments in information infrastructures (that is to say, those prior to the study period), Americans tend to invest earlier and therefore enjoy economic benefits earlier than other nations.59 As the amount of information content in the work employees did rose all through the 20th century, we could see a simultaneous shift of employment from the pure manufacturing of bending metal and putting things together to a greater reliance on services and knowledge work to create value. It is not ironic or odd that Microsoft today is worth more than General Motors. Information and knowledge have economic worth and the American worker is demonstrating that fact, although many parts of the world are catching on fast. In the previous five chapters I have argued that the reason American workers rely so heavily on information and are so far ahead of so many other economies in the use of data in their jobs is because of the nation’s accumulated buildup of investment in information-handling technologies, coupled to a long-standing respect for the value of information. I want to reemphasize this point. For nearly 200 years, commentators from Alexis de Tocqueville to contemporary European observers of the U.S. scene have correctly pointed out that Americans display more than a tinge of antiintellectualism, particularly in business circles. Tocqueville observed in the 1830s that “the general idea

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that any man whosoever can attain an intellectual superiority beyond the reach of the rest is soon cast in doubt.” He explains why: “Life passes in movement and noise, and men are so busy acting that they have little time to think.” Americans fixed their energy on business, “the fire they put into their work prevents their being fired by ideas.”60 However, just because Americans as a whole may not enjoy being as intellectual as perhaps some European observers, does not mean they avoid using their intellect. They have a history of collecting and using information when it helps them do their work. That is why it is no accident that user guides, government reports, PC manuals, business publications, “how-to” books, niche magazines, and Web sites are so popular in the United States. The implications of our heavy reliance on information are important. Let’s look at business. One of the consequences in recent years of this intense use of information technology, in particular, has been the redefinition of what is an industry. Twenty years ago, for example, the book publishing industry was that sector in the American economy that only produced books. Today, McGraw-Hill—a major American publisher— sells online economic data; Prentice Hall is publishing on the Web, while other publishing conglomerates are in the movie and magazine business. In short, the traditional boundaries of the book publishing business are changing. Insurance companies want to offer banking services, banks lobby Congress to sell stocks (just like they did before the Great Depression of the 1930s), and cable and telephone companies are merging at a furious pace so as to seize the opportunity of piping entertainment into our homes. Increasingly, the redefinition of an industry is described as desegregation, the falling apart of an industry and its reconstruction into something new. The process is well underway, affecting those industries that have the highest computer usage. At the moment the outcomes are unclear, but what is obvious is that new industries are being born. Changes are as significant, however, as the shift industries made from the First to the Second Industrial Revolutions. This is a point that people are justified in hyping because it is that profound.


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One sector to watch in the United States is the wireless communications world. Some are calling it an industry, but the key fact is that it did not exist twenty years ago. Driven by stunning improvements in information and communications technology, is it an extension of the telephone industry? Or, is it an extension of the radio or telegraphic industries? Are cell phones part of it? What about wireless PC communications? We know that traditional phone companies (like AT&T) are buying up these firms, but cable companies are in the market doing the same thing. Whatever it is called, it sells billions of dollars in goods and services, is filled with technology and knowledge, and has attained a global presence at breathtaking speeds. As information content of work increases, so too does its portability. I have already noted the use of mobile workers, work at home, and so forth. But U.S. borders are not stopping the global expansion of work and industries across continents. Just as industries are becoming more closely linked due to communications around the world, and the global use of information and its technologies rises rapidly, so too is work linked to that of others outside the United States. While American workers may be leading the charge in many areas today, the world is rapidly catching up with U.S. usage of information. Thus, it increasingly means Americans will become reliant on the work of others in order to perform the jobs they do. For example, take auto design. Nissan engineers in Japan can design a new automobile (pure knowledge work) and transmit the blueprints to the United States for their factory in Tennessee to start building. Americans at the plant lay out production schedules and build and ship cars, some back to Japan, most to other parts of the United States. An American salesman tracks sales and reports results, along with market data, back to Japan, where marketing people at Nissan use that information to influence the design of the next model. If you are a financial agent for a global firm, you will work with colleagues in various countries to collect information on financial transactions on a country-by-country basis, waiting for data from Europe, East Asia, and elsewhere in order to perform your daily tasks at your terminal that is physically

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located in the United States. The U.S. military campaign against Iraq in 1991 took place in the Middle East, but a big chunk of it was managed out of the Pentagon and locations in Florida and Germany. In short, our work is being globalized. It is quite possible that fifteen to twenty years from now we will find it very difficult to write a book about American work or European work because national borders will have become economically less important than in the past. That is not to say political states are becoming a thing of the past—a point some economic observers make, confusing economics and politics—because the evidence of the demise of the political state just is not there. They are changing, but then they have always been changing.61 As the world’s economy begins to move into a future characterized by some of the patterns already evident in the American version of the Information Age, circumstances will change. Competitive advantages that Americans have, and which are based on information and information technology, will shrink as others catch up. To continue enjoying its current prosperity, Americans will have to move down the information competitive curve further into the future of the Information Age. Given their track record, one could reasonably expect American workers, their employers, and their IT suppliers to do just that, as they have since the end of the American Civil War in the 1860s. So, while there are no guarantees, real opportunities exist that build on existing momentum and long-term national investments and habits of behavior. Americans have an enormous advantage in this brave new world because they speak English. This is the language of choice for many businesses, and increasingly we are seeing that it is a language people want to learn or have mastered (e.g., throughout Scandinavia, Netherlands, Brazil, Hong Kong, etc.). A great deal of information is published in English, especially on the Internet and in business and technical journals. We do know that the majority of the business literature is in English. Other languages will come forward as non-Englishspeaking societies become info-junkies (Chinese perhaps) but the competitive advantage of English remains a powerful one,


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with over 400,000 million speakers.62 Just like French made it possible for Europeans to communicate with each other in the 17th through the 19th centuries, English is serving the same purpose today on a far more global basis. English is also the language of choice of those industries and technologists creating the information infrastructure and tools so crucial to knowledge-based economies.63 To an important extent, its popularity is due to the fact that many of these tools and technologies originated in the United States, so there is a momentum in place for continued use of English. That, too, may change as other languages come onstream or computer-based translation tools become more effective.

CONCLUSIONS The moral of our story is fairly simple. Many American workers are already working in the future economy of the world because of their historic reliance on information in what they do. They are blessed with an abundance of computing and communications technologies that will probably keep them ahead of the curve for a while. However, there are no guarantees that they will remain closer to the future, because the rest of the world is catching up fast, especially due to the relative ease with which the Internet is being adopted. Pushing this trend along is the continued and sharp declines in the cost of the technologies needed to participate in high information content work: cellular phones, wireless communications, and personal computers. Many of these technologies are dropping in cost at the rate of 20 percent or more each year. This means a lower economic standard of living will suffice to do what Americans have accomplished at higher economic levels, allowing participation in info-rich economic activities sooner than the Americans. This is a classic example of technology transfer from one society to another behaving the way historians have noted many times across the centuries.64 So much for information at work. Americans enjoy their fun and they are a spiritual people. Just as they took their information seriously at work, they did the same in their pleasures and in their religious practices. Looking at the presence

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of information in these two activities helps reinforce the notion that Americans have historically relied on information to work, play, and pray. Their after-work activities are the subject of the next two chapters.

ENDNOTES 1. Two recent publications include extensive citations of this literature: Jeremy Rifkin, The End of Work: The Decline of the Global Labor Force and the Dawn of the Post-Market Era (New York: G.P. Putnam, 1995), and Jorge Reina Schement and Terry Curtis, Tendencies and Tensions of the Information Age: The Production and Distribution of Information in the United States (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1995). 2. The literature is massive, however, Michael Dertouzos engages in discussion of most of the issues to defend his position on one side or the other, thereby offering a useful introduction to key themes in What Will Be: How the New World of Information Will Change Our Lives (New York: HarperEdge, 1997). 3. I differentiate between e-business and e-commerce, although most commentators use the terms interchangeably. E-business is about doing the work of companies, for example, processes over the Internet, such as e-mail. E-commerce is all about selling goods and services to customers, for example, when you buy from Amazon.com. When I submit travel expenses over the Internet to my employer, that is e-business; when I buy a book from Barnesandnoble.com, that is e-commerce. 4. One excellent example of this material: U.S. Department of Commerce, The Economic and Social Impact of Electronic Commerce (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1998), which runs to 150 pages of economic analysis. A more recent government study is from the U.S. Department of Commerce, The Emerging Digital Economy II (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, June 1999). 5. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Employment Projections,” Table 4a, published on the Internet, December 29, 1997 at http://stats.bls.gov/news.release/ecopro.table4.htm. 6. Ibid., Table 2.


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7. Ibid., “Fastest Growing Occupations, 1996–2006,” but also see “Occupational Employment Projections to 2006,” Monthly Labor Review (November 1997): 58–83. 8. It was not uncommon in the 1990s for the vast majority of workers in a manufacturing industry to not be manufacturing. Instead they worked in office jobs, designing work, selling, and managing. In high tech manufacturing plants, it was common for less than 10 percent of the workforce to actually be making something. 9. U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1997 Economic Census: Core Business Statistics Series (Washington, D.C.: GPO, March 1999): 11–12. 10. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1975): 1, p. 141. 11. Daniel Bell, “The Social Framework of the Information Society,” in T. Forestor (ed.), The Microelectronics Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1981), pp. 500–549. 12. For example, Schement and Curtis, Tendencies and Tensions of the Information Age and Thomas H. Davenport with Laurence Prusak, Information Ecology: Mastering the Information and Knowledge Environment (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). 13. For a more detailed discussion, see James W. Cortada, Before the Computer: IBM, NCR, Burroughs, and Remington Rand and the Industry They Created, 1865–1956 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993; reprinted 2000): 60–63. 14. W.J. Baumol, S.A.B. Blackman, and E.N. Wolff, Productivity and American Leadership: The Long View (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1989): 156. 15. Ibid., 150. 16. Schement and Curtis, Tendencies and Tensions of the Information Age, 86. 17. Not all parchment books copied many times before the invention of the printing press have yet been published as articles or books. So we could expect many paper-based books never to make it into digital form either. A major problem with scanning is that you still need to pay someone to stand over a scanner, turning the pages of a book and pressing them down on the

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copier’s surface. The labor costs are too high and turning pages by hand too slow. 18. Nicholas Negroponte, Being Digital (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995): 69–71. 19. Paul Levinson provides a typical example in his excellent book, The Soft Edge: A Natural History and Future of the Information Revolution (London: Routledge, 1997): 142–143, 182–183. 20. Ibid., 183. For an account of the end of the book and the arrival of online everything, see Clifford Stoll, Silicon Snake Oil: Second Thoughts on the Information Highway (New York: Doubleday, 1995): 173–191. 21. Alvin Toffler, The Third Wave (New York: William Morrow, 1980): 183. 22. Statistics are from Albert N. Greco, The Book Publishing Industry (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1997): 2–4, 20–21. 23. “Industry Statistics: Preliminary Estimated Industry Net Sales,” Press Release, Association of American Publishers, March 3, 2001, http://www.publishers.org/home/stats/2000prelim.htm. 24. Ibid., 216. 25. Ibid., 225. 26. UNESCO Statistical Yearbook, 1995, Tables 6.1 to 6.9. 27. Robert G. Picard and Jeffrey H. Brody, The Newspaper Publishing Industry (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1997): 2–3. 28. Ibid., 11–13. 29. Ibid., 18. 30. UNESCO Statistical Yearbook, 1995, Tables 6.1–6.9. 31. John Tebbel and Mary Ellen Zuckerman, The Magazine in America, 1741–1990 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991): 64. 32. The best counts come from Ibid., but see also Charles P. Daly, Patrick Henry, and Ellen Ryder, The Magazine Publishing Industry (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1997): 10–12. 33. For a clear explanation of this transformation to electronic and the issues involved, see Ibid., 235–268.


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34. For one of the clearest explanations of the role of IT in the American economy, see Secretariat on Electronic Commerce, The Emerging Digital Economy (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Commerce, 1998) and also available off the Internet at http://www.ecommerce.gove. The data came from pp. 4–6. See also U.S. Department of Commerce, The Emerging Digital Economy II, also available at the same Internet site. 35. For dozens of specific American case studies of each of these benefits, see Ibid., 12–23. 36. I have explored these issues in considerable detail in 21st Century Business: Managing and Working in the New Digital Economy (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall/Financial Times, 2000). 37. Ibid., 27. 38. We don’t have space in this book to discuss a very important factor influencing digital development, the role of the credit card in creating digital money, credit, and new shopping capabilities on the Internet. However, this subject is covered very well by David Evans and Richard Schmalensee, Paying with Plastic: The Digital Revolution in Buying and Borrowing (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999): 86–90, 321–325. 39. U.S. Department of Commerce, The Emerging Digital Economy, p. 46; Peter Freeman and William Aspray, The Supply of Information Technology Workers in the United States (Washington, D.C.: Computing Research Association, 1999): 53–69, 127–143. 40. “Wired Workers: Who They Are, What They Are Doing Online,” Press Release, Pew Foundation, September 3, 2000. 41. Ibid., A1–11. 42. U.S. Department of Commerce, The Economic and Social Impacts of Electronic Commerce: Preliminary Findings and Research Agenda (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1998) also at http:// www.oecd.org/subject/e_commerce/summary.htm., 109–110. 43. Ibid., 127. 44. Ibid., 115. 45. Ibid., 131.

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46. Richard K. Lester, The Productive Edge: How U.S. Industries Are Pointing the Way to a New Era of Economic Growth (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1998): 16. 47. Ibid., 31. 48. Ibid., 223. 49. The issue of process management is covered in considerable detail in James W. Cortada and Thomas S. Hargraves, Into the Networked Age: How IBM and Other Firms Are Getting There Now (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), especially pp. 119–155. 50. Charles Heckscher, White Collar Blues: Management in an Age of Corporate Restructuring (New York: Basic Books, 1995): 11. 51. Lester, The Productive Edge, 322–334. 52. Peter Cappelli et al., Change at Work (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997): 122–153, 212–215. 53. These themes are developed more fully in James W. Cortada, 21st Century Business.(Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall/Financial Times, 2000). 54. Dertouzos, What Will Be; Rules book; Dennis O’Sullivan, Carole Richmond and Thomas Power, e-Business in the Supply Chain: Creating Value in a Networked Marketplace (London: IBM Consulting Group and Financial Times, 1998). 55. For citations on surveys, see note 1, Ibid., A4–50. 56. Ibid., A4–6. 57. For example, Jupiter Communications, which predicted $9 billion in advertising and marketing revenues by 2002, Jupiter Communications, 1998 Online Advertising Report, Robertson Stephens, “Digital Media Overview,” Robertson Stephens & Company, August 26, 1997. 58. Economic and Social Impacts of Electronic Commerce, A5-1–2. 59. Although written in highly academic language, it is an extremely significant report, Sanjeev Dewan and Kenneth L. Kraemer, “Information Technology and Productivity: Evidence from Country-Level Data,” Management Science 46, no. 4 (April 2000): 548–562.


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60. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (New York: Harper, 1969), first quote p. 641, second two quotes, p. 642. 61. For an example of the argument that political states are declining in power relative to the rise of new economic combinations, see Kenichi Ohmae, The End of the Nation State: The Rise of Regional Economies (New York: Free Press, 1993), and for a more realistic view, Dale Neef, A Little Knowledge Is a Dangerous Thing: Understanding Our Global Knowledge Economy (Boston: Butterworth-Heinemann, 1999). 62. The Economist, December 21, 1996, pp. 76, 78, cited 320,000 but left out some 80 million speakers who emerged by the end of the century from natural population growth and additional training in the language in non-English speaking societies. 63. Dale Neef, A Little Knowledge Is a Dangerous Thing: p. 41. 64. Technology transfer from a high-tech to a low-tech economy always takes less time than it did to create it in the first place. For an explanation of this phenomenon, using American and Asian examples, see Baumol, Blackman, and Wolff, Productivity and American Leadership, pp. 271–273.

6 Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do, and Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do.

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ver watch a Superbowl game? It has to be one of the most information-laden events in American society. The stadium itself is plastered with advertisements along the walls. The electronic scoreboards also have advertisements, but more important, display scores, statistics on various types of performance, and information about the players themselves. The advertisements on television have become national events in themselves and are used to communicate a great deal of information to one of the largest audiences in the world. Then there are the commentators, experts discussing the current game, reviewing the statistical records of both teams and individual players, providing feedback on prior Superbowls and about the players themselves. In short, a 190

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Superbowl is an information-laden event, plummeting the audience with a large amount of data for hours. If one counts all the pre- and postgame shows, most of which involve commentators communicating vast quantities of information for days before and after, you have the quintessential American information-saturated leisure event. Like work, leisure activities in this society have an extensive information feature about them. This feature has the same characteristics as what we see in the work lives in this same society. Because America is a polyglot society, with about every conceivable culture, language, and ethnic heritage mixed into its social melting pot, one would expect that’s how Americans spend their leisure time would also vary. Because just about any pleasurable activity found anywhere in the world is evident in the United States, the subject of leisure is broad. In sports, it can range from jai alai from the Basque country of Spain to the recent and dramatic surge in popularity of the world’s favorite sport, soccer, to hunting, fishing, and camping. Americans like to play board games, go to the Internet for computer-based entertainment, watch any one of hundreds of channels on television, attend concerts, art shows, fairs, and go on vacation. In each of these activities they rely extensively on information and its artifacts, from maps to GPS tools, from the Internet to make airline reservations to cell phones to get directions. It took a Canadian English professor to point out the obvious. Marshall McLuhan noted that information was about more than what people did at work. It is: reshaping and restructuring patterns of social interdependence and every aspect of our personal life. It is forcing us to reconsider and re-evaluate practically every thought, every action, and every institution formerly taken for granted. Everything is changing—you, your family, your neighborhood, your education, your job, your government, your relations to “the others.” And they’re changing dramatically.1

Perhaps overstating the case, then again maybe not, his notion that information was linked to work and play is clearly on target. His sense that things were changing is also correct because new information tools and forms of media were always emerging; but, as I have suggested in earlier chapters

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and reinforce in this one, change in how Americans live their lives has long been influenced by information and its technologies. Information is used for both play and profit. To try and generalize about the role of information in the leisure activities of Americans is very difficult to do. However, by looking at several specific examples of very popular activities, we can reach the conclusion that, as in work, Americans rely on information and their supportive technologies as important ways to enhance the pleasure of playing and leisure. Useful candidates to look at are the ones attracting the greatest amount of public attention. We are as addicted to sports and television as just about any other nation. The Superbowl is a national event in the United States, nearly as riveting as the World Cup in soccer is to the rest of the world. Television, we are told by sociologists, today represents the primary source of entertainment for Americans. Sports and television are natural partners, a marriage built on money (revenues and profit). Both rely extensively on information. So we need to understand what is happening with these. There are some other obvious sources of entertainment—books (and not just for the intellectually inclined), vacations (because Americans love these but go on them in ways unique to their society), and video and other high-tech games. And, of course, we have television to draw our attention, on average almost a full working day’s worth of time each week, if you believe the pollsters. Looking at all five activities makes it possible to begin understanding how information works in the mosaic of American leisure. In each case Americans want a great deal of information about the activity in order to enjoy it. In other instances, the act of acquiring and working with information is the pleasure (e.g., baseball fans learning the statistics of teams and players). So information gathering and its use is often an important aspect of what makes something pleasurable. We also can observe that in each case Americans have used information technologies for many years. One of the first events broadcast on the radio was a baseball game. Can you imagine television without sports? Instant replay in television emerged largely in response to the need to see again quick action football plays.


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With the Superbowl in January 2001, Americans saw instant replay taken to a new level with computer graphics and simulation software used to show a play from multiple angles in real time. It was stunning, particularly for looking at close calls, such as one touchdown that was made with less than a couple of inches to spare. So, even technology is affected by our playful activities. The value Americans place on the role of information in their leisure is clearly demonstrated in the way vacations are taken. Thanks to recent work done by historians of popular culture, we can observe through the history of vacation the kinds of interactions between play and data we were able to see in American work. Once again, we find this American tendency to be info-junkies. Equally important, those values and patterns of behavior evident in their work life spills over into leisure activities.

INFORMATIONALIZING SPORTS: BASEBALL, FOOTBALL, AND BASKETBALL Americans began playing baseball before the American Civil War, and it became a hugely popular sport that could be played by kids, young men in informal pickup games, local leagues, and eventually by professional teams organized in national leagues. In fact, the game became so popular that people around the world think of baseball as pure Americana, as culturally identified with the United States as apple pie, hot dogs, and democracy. Americans couldn’t leave well enough alone. By the end of the 19th century, they were doing more than simply playing baseball; they were informationalizing it. During the 20th century they ran the game through every major information technology that came along, from radio to TV, into computers, and then all over the Internet. The heart of this informationalizing process was not just a story of reporting in local newspapers who played, won, and lost games; it was the collection and dissemination of extraordinary amounts of information about the game that makes this a useful case study to look at. We have all met boys, ages 10 to 18 or 19 years of age, and grown men (and increasingly women) in their 30s, 40s, and

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older whose knowledge about baseball can only be described as prodigious. They cut across all social and economic strata, come from every corner of America, range from high school dropouts to professors and professionals with advanced degrees. You find them in corporate boardrooms and in street gangs. But they all have one thing in common: mastery of information about baseball. They can rattle off who won the World Series in 1919, who pitched the winning game in that series, and recite a raft of statistics about the performance of individual players, often covering a period of more than a century. That is no mean feat, because the amount of information Americans have collected about baseball is so great that we have to think of that data collection and assimilation as a basic feature of how Americans approach baseball. What is even more startling is the fact that such intense fans are not rare in our society, we all know individuals who have that kind of command of the subject. Moreover, this is not a new phenomenon; Americans have been baseball statistical junkies since the last decades of the 19th century.2 Go to the Internet and log on to ESPN Network (espn. go.com/mlb/statistics)—one of the more popular Internet sites for sports and a good example of a television channel also delivering content through the Internet—and you will see what is involved. On that Web site are two sets of statistics on baseball, one for the American League and the other for the National League. It presents information that also is routinely published in more than a thousand American newspapers every week. The same material is verbally presented daily in one fashion or another in sports news broadcasts on radio and TV in all 50 states, in each American territorial possession, and at U.S. military bases around the world. For each team there are statistics (such as team batting and team pitching), next a set of nine statistics for pitching leaders (ERA, wins, losses, saves, etc.), followed by 11 sets of data on batting leaders (home runs, doubles, triples, runs, etc.), and finally a raft of data on daily leaders in pitching (5 statistics) and batting (another 5 statistics). In short, if my math is correct, that is a total of 34 classes of information. In addition, Americans collect individual statistics on every player and every team. The act of collecting is done by reporters and “industry”


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watchers (e.g., coaches and academics), but also by spectators who often are even provided spreadsheets in their programs where they can record information while a game is being played. These classes of statistics drawn from ESPN have been collected for the entire 20th century by various organizations and reporters; many others exist for the last two decades of the 19th. In addition, other correlations and analyses of baseball statistics are done all the time to gain further insight into the performance of baseball players and teams. The data sets described in this paragraph also represent the classes of information that have often been collected as well for local leagues (intracity leagues, the old Negro leagues) and the Little League (the one children play in all over the United States).3 In fact, Americans’ fascination with the hard data of baseball even affected the use of statistics, compelling scholars to cite them too. Daniel J. Boorstin, the great American historian, acknowledged as much, but in the process became caught up in the numbers game himself. After citing The Baseball Encyclopedia’s edition of 1969 (for the year he was writing The Democratic Experience), he noted that this book had 2,335 pages packed with tabulated statistics on 19,000 games. Information Concepts Incorporated pulled together the data and made money selling this information about baseball, using software to do the job of acquiring and organizing the material. Its information was of extraordinary value to reporters and news commentators, particularly on television where these facts provided fodder for commentary between plays about individual players and teams.4 The Baseball Encyclopedia has continued to be an important source to reporters on radio and TV. Lest we become too enamored of baseball on television and the Internet, I should also note that this sport probably has the largest body of literature (books and articles) of any athletic pursuit in the world. In addition to these materials, there are statistical guides Americans have been buying since the 1870s. The leader of them all is the Sporting News’ Official Baseball Register, the Bible of statistics, published in St. Louis, Missouri, since 1886 and still issued annually. By

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1880, there already were at least four additional statistical guides being published annually.5 Technological innovations helped the sport enormously. By 1850 reporters were transmitting sporting news of all types over the telegraph to such newspapers as the New York Herald and the New York Tribune. As baseball grew in popularity during the second half of the 1800s, news about games and players began traveling over the wires. The same happened with the telephone. Baseball was first broadcast on radio on August 20, 1920, when the radio station owned by the Detroit News went on the air to cover the World Series. Baseball came early to television, as soon as that technology became generally available to the American public in the late 1940s. For most of the 20th century, broadcasting of baseball games on the radio and television have remained profitable staples in programming, strongly endorsed by the American public as demonstrated by their tuning in to these programs. Americans were also quick to apply computers to baseball in a variety of ways. An early application was the collection and manipulation of all the statistical data that Americans had been accumulating for over three quarters of a century prior to the arrival of the computer. A second application involved playing baseball on computers by typing in plays, which then caused software to select counterplays to simulate the game. Americans were already doing this on big mainframe computers in the 1950s, a practice that became widespread by the mid-1960s.6 Use of computer-based games moved over to personal computers almost from day one of the new machines; baseball software has remained a staple in PC stores for over two decades. At one point in the 1960s, even managers at IBM thought that they might be able to make a business out of collecting and distributing sports statistics in the United States.7 Over time, simulations, data repositories, and other applications in support of the game and to improve its value as entertainment, popped up on computers, then on PCs, and most recently, on the Internet.8 Part of the reason for numerical data and facts on the sport reflects American values. Americans use statistics to


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canonize information. Hard work, the notion of proven results, and belief in the benefits of progress and winning are all themes demonstrated and discussed in baseball literature and in statistical sources. Keeping score tells you who won and how good players are over the course of their careers. Local teams are always valued as the best because they reflect local energy and ability to compete successfully. Promoters of the sport have been very aggressive in publicizing information about baseball, linking it to the identities of local communities since the 1870s, and constantly keeping the subject in the public’s eye. It was no surprise, for example, that the World Series games were broadcast on the radio and later, on television, along with thousands of professional and semipro games. These broadcasts represented teams from cities and regions across the entire nation, from high schools to local leagues.9 Depending on whose statistics one uses, either football or basketball is the second or third most popular sport in America. In some years football is more popular than baseball (e.g., in the mid-1990s after the major league baseball strike). Basketball goes up and down in popularity, also depending on strikes and other activities going on in the other two sports. But we see the same phenomenon of statistical concern about performance and extensive coverage of events, game-by-game, also reaching over a full century, and with an extensive trail of documentation. Football commands almost as intense an interest as does statistical knowledge of baseball. This is especially so with the National Football League (NFL) and with college football teams. Go back to the ESPN Web site and you will see a large collection of statistics for the AFC and NFC teams. Under the category of leaders there are 17 classes of statistics for both groups (e.g., passing accuracy, sacks, and interceptions). There are 7 sets of team statistics for each team (e.g., team offenses, ranking), and then other collections of statistics by team and player. The game is precisely timed, with exact numbers of seconds and minutes of play monitored. Precise rules governing such things as how far one must carry the ball in order to qualify for a first down are based on hard

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data which is collected and recorded while the game is in progress and then reported in considerable detail in the press. Statistical guides are also published and sell well, just as with baseball.10 Basketball also demonstrates a similar pattern. It was not invented until 1892. Baseball had been around in the two decades before the Civil War, and American football since the start of the last quarter of the 1800s, but basketball nonetheless shares the distinction of also being an American original. As with the other two, very early in its history fans and reporters began collecting basketball statistics—carefully organized, publicized, and discussed ever since. Regular season and playoff versions of a core body of information are always collected. Eight classes of data are gathered on overall leaders (e.g., scoring, rebounding, and steals), while an additional three classes of information are tabulated for a set of team statistics (team-by-team comparisons, offense and defense statistics). For each of the two conferences (Eastern and Western) data is collected for each set of teams (Atlantic, Central, Midwest, and Pacific, each with a group of teams; e.g., Los Angeles and Seattle playing within the Pacific). These constitute 11 classes of data. Then for each player, additional statistics on performance are also gathered (e.g., scores, averages, rebounds, etc.). As with football and baseball, rankings are very important and are routinely published. In newspapers it is always after each game. On the Internet, some changes in ranking are posted within minutes of a game’s end.11 As with football, specific times for play are prescribed, along with even subtimes (e.g., the amount of time a player has to shoot the ball). Results in performance are dutifully measured and reported on during and after the game to fans and players alike. The American penchant for data and precision in sports even affected athletics that did not originate in the United States. The most recent example of this concern for specificity imposed on a game involved soccer, the world’s most popular sport. Americans became interested in this sport in a substantive way in the 1970s, when local soccer programs for children were launched all over the United States. By the mid-1990s,


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American teams were beginning to play world-class soccer at international events. As the sport grew in interest, Americans began to impose their own penchant for precision on the game. For decades, for example, the game had lasted roughly 90 minutes, with referees deciding when, more or less, the game had been played long enough. During the second half of the 20th century they carried stopwatches with them to help make that determination. When the sport reached a level of popularity in the United States worthy of broadcasting on television, broadcasters insisted on precise times in order to plan their programs. Precise times were adopted and now are normal, as in basketball and football; we see how much time has elapsed in a game in the upper left corner of an American TV screen. With better data on timing, even the strategy for how the game should be played changed, affected by the clock as football and basketball had been. With the discipline Americans had come to expect from baseball, football, and basketball, it would almost seem inevitable that they would want statistics on soccer, organized in a way similar to the other sports. If you went to the same ESPN Web site used for the other sports, you would see statistics on overall leaders (18 classes, e.g., scoring assists, and offsides), another set of 6 classes of data on goalie leaders (e.g., wins, losses, and saves), and yet another set of 11 classes of data on each team (e.g., goal-scoring totals, home and away standings, winning and losing streaks). These add up to a grand total of 35 classes of data dutifully reported and published after each round of games and accumulated for annual results.12 For purposes of this chapter I have relied on the ESPN Web site. However, every major sports news service reports the same data both in print and on their Web sites (e.g., Sports Illustrated, and such TV channels as CNN). In addition, there are thousands of Web sites that offer similar or more detailed information. For example, it is now common for professional sports teams to have their own Web sites with thousands of “hits” per month by fans. American colleges and universities devote portions of their Web sites to the presentation of statistics and narrative coverage of their sports teams,

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just as they did in school magazines for decades. City newspapers with Web sites also have sports sections. In short, the sports pages online or in newspapers and magazines are important ephemera of American culture. The phenomenon of the sports page was not lost on historians. Two of the first to study the history of American sports, Frederick W. Cozens and Florence Scovil Stumpf, both of the University of California at Berkeley (for decades a sports powerhouse in its own right), summarized their findings about the sports page: Great numbers of Americans like the sports page: They buy it, read it, talk about it, and argue about it. Whether or not they actually sit through a game, listen to a play-by-play description on the radio, or see the show on television, they still want to read about it. Since each fan considers himself an authority, it seems an indispensable part of the fun to compare his own opinions with those of his favorite expert and to dispute the judgment of those who disagree with him.13

They caught the essence of why Americans want and need so much information. Just as they require data at work, they need information to be independent, resourceful, and to take charge of and express their own opinions. They are prepared to act on their thinking and to take action, such as to voice their position on the performance of a team. It is a characteristic evident across American activities, fun, and part of playing. And they have been in the habit of reading their sports pages for a very long time. The first sports pages appeared in the mid-1830s in such newspapers in New York as the Sun, Transcript, and Herald. In 1862, a leading early figure in baseball, Henry Chadwick, hired on to the New York Herald for the express purpose of reporting on the game. The first weekly devoted to sports in the United States began publication in 1831, the Spirit of the Times: The American Gentleman’s Newspaper, which survived until 1901 when it merged with another paper. By the time of the American Civil War, it reportedly had a national circulation of over 100,000; no other paper in the country had that kind of circulation, not even the national press of the day.14 It took the Civil War to generate that kind of circulation


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for political and military news. Over the course of the 20th century, sports pages increasingly became a standard part of most newspapers, from morning and afternoon dailies to rural weeklies. Almost from the beginning of radio, sports news was broadcast along with political and local news. The same happened with television. A standard segment in all news programs (e.g., such national ones as CNN Headline News or the evening news from NBC, CBS, ABC, and Fox) is sports coverage. The same applies to the vast majority of local television broadcast stations. In addition to broadcasting games on television through the 1950s and 1960s, sports news programming came into its own. These programs were often in-depth reporting on the week’s sports news, with extensive analysis and debate along the lines our historians said had occurred in newspapers. The other option was in-depth discussions with coaches. Today, most NFL coaches have some sort of a Sunday talk show on radio or television to pick apart Saturday’s game. The same occurs with college football coaches from such leading schools as the Big Ten, Florida State University, or Notre Dame. Programs with college coaches come and go, but as a genre they are around and are popular. Baseball coaches and players, curiously enough, do not normally have regular radio or television programs. On the other hand, radio and TV sports commentators have become national celebrities. The case of the legendary Red Barber is a good example. He started broadcasting Brooklyn Dodger baseball games in the 1930s, then Yankee games in the 1950s. Eventually he retired, but stayed on the air with weekly sports analysis on NPR until his death in the 1990s. A consistent pattern in American behavior has always been the use of new information technologies to get even more data. We have seen that process at work with sports. But one more example demonstrates the point again: sports cards. Children trade them, cherishing baseball cards and others for football, basketball, and cartoon characters. Baseball cards have been traded since the late 1800s; each with a picture of a player and biographical and statistical data printed on the back. Children trade, while adults collect them for fun and

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profit. And now welcome information technology. In 1999 the Upper Deck Card Company, which prints over a billion sports cards every year, introduced miniature CD-ROMs that captured the same information as the paper card but added additional data and video of players in action. When CNN Live interviewed kids about the arrival of new high-tech cards, their response was “Cool!”15 Why not? So many children have a CD player on their PCs at home. As hard as it may be for some Americans to believe that there was something as interesting to others as baseball, there was, and often it involved books. America really is a diverse society.

READING AND COLLECTING BOOKS FOR ENTERTAINMENT In the last chapter I presented the book as an artifact of information, as a container for holding facts and knowledge, and as a product of an industry, making information available to the American public. I also noted that of all the books published, most of those read for entertainment were biographies, histories, and novels. The number of books sold in each category was impressive, leading to my conclusion that books played a special role in American life. Venerated as an important source of useful information for the performance of work, and as a tool for learning, books have always also been a source of entertainment. In a nation that has always felt an ambivalence between pleasure and entertainment for its own sake, and the need to implement a long-standing work ethic (implying one should not “waste” time in non-work-related activities), books provided a convenient bridge between the two impulses, the one for play and the other for work. Books were always a part of American life and this was ever increasingly the case as we went through the 20th century. They had become comfortable old friends; the fat novel taken to the beach or read quietly on an airplane ride home at the end of the week. Americans always saw the book as the ultimate authority. If a fact was in a book, it was credible. If the story appeared


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first in a book, it had the chance of becoming great literature. Radio and television simply reinforced that belief with references to books and even programs devoted to authors and their books. C-SPAN’s highly popular BookNotes is simply the latest version of the book honored and seen as entertainment. Still need proof of the book as entertainment buttressed by TV? Go no further than Oprah Winfrey’s TV program, seen by millions. When Oprah holds up a new book (and she does this on a regular basis) and says “Read this book,” millions of Americans do just that. It is their television entertainment drawing them back to the book as the ultimate authority, as an important source of information and entertainment.16 Fiction—usually novels—is clearly a class of books not usually read for purposes of work or politics; nonetheless works of fiction are major sources of information. Just think of Michener or Clancy. While history or biography arguably could be seen as educational or extensions of work (especially if the reader is an historian), best-selling novels are routinely sold in quantities far in excess of what professors and teachers of literature need. So novels allow us to partially answer a question: Are books a source of play and entertainment for Americans? The answer is more than just intuitively yes; it is yes from a factual point of view as well. The evidence is all over the place. Of the top 20 book industry categories of products in the 1990s, 6 concerned fiction (e.g., trade paperback general fiction, mystery, romance novels, etc.).17 The majority of books on the New York Times bestseller list are invariably fiction. Bestsellers that are novels consistently outsell nonfiction bestsellers. John Grisham, Tom Clancy, James Redfield, Danielle Steele, and Stephen King are today’s giants in American fiction because each of these authors sells millions of copies of their books. That is not to say nonfiction fails to sell well, just not as extensively. Some bestselling nonfiction authors of the 1990s included John Gray (Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus) and Rosie Daley (In the Kitchen with Rosie) both of which sold over a million copies each. It was not uncommon in the 1990s, as in the 1980s, for a few, wellknown novelists to sell more than half the adult books printed

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in the United States.18 Gallup polls conducted in the 1990s demonstrated that reading remained one of the most important American leisure-time activities.19 Some critics have argued that Americans no longer read, such as Alan Bloom (in The Closing of the American Mind), who proclaimed that American students “have lost the practice of and taste for reading.”20 But the Gallup polls have suggested he and other like-minded commentators have been too pessimistic. The evidence indicates overwhelmingly that books are more popular today than at any time during the 20th century. Americans spend a great deal on books. In the U.S., sales in 2000 totaled $25.3 billion. Sales of professional, scholarly, and scientific publications accounted for $5.1 billion, while sales of religious publications reached $1.2 billion. Children’s books amounted to $1.9 billion21 Another form of entertainment with books—getting back to the idea that they were also icons and not just vessels for information—is book collecting. Book collectors have populated western civilization since the first parchments were written. Jumping over 2000 years of book collecting and focusing on America, we can see that collectors have been as active in the United States as anywhere else. What students of the process have learned, however, is that due to the enormous wealth generated by the American economy since the mid-1800s, collectors have been able to put together extraordinary collections. These have ranged from tens of thousands of volumes that tell the story of a subject to equally large collections of rare, antique books dating back many hundreds of years. Book collecting has graciously been called “a gentle madness,” reflecting the intense acquisitive behavior of the collector. American collectors enjoy putting together libraries with the same initiative as their European counterparts. Book collecting in America began in the 16th century, often with very small libraries. In the 18th century, a few wealthy plantation owners in Virginia amassed collections of thousands of volumes. Thomas Jefferson was such a collector, and eventually his library became the nucleus of the U.S. Library of Congress. My favorite early collector is Reverend William Bentley of the late 18th century, who was considered one of the most


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knowledgeable men in America. Jefferson invited him to become the first president of the University of Virginia, a position he declined. This Massachusetts citizen put together a library of some 4,000 volumes, perhaps the largest collection in 18th century America. It was a fabulous collection of books published in England, America, Germany, France, the Low Countries, and many other nations, covering many topics. Jefferson had a larger library by the early 1800s, but Bentley (unlike the better-off Jefferson) put his together on a minister’s salary, without benefit of wealth, and he leveraged it as well as any human being to become recognized as a great intellect.22 Great industrialists of both the 19th and 20th centuries continued this tradition of collecting, but with a more organized approach to the disposal of their libraries. By then there were many great universities where they could deposit their collections at the end of their lives, a unique feature of American collecting. The custom of donating these collections to public and private scholarly institutions like colleges, universities, and public libraries, while not totally an American practice, is most pronounced in the United States. But, what made book collecting in America so entertaining? In 1862, an important collector, John Hill Burton, said that all great collectors aspire, “to find value where there seems to be none, and this develops a certain skill and subtlety, enabling the operator, in the midst of a heap of rubbish, to put his finger on those things which have in them the latent capacity to become valuable and curious.” He argued that collectors saved books from destruction, finding homes for them once their value was established.23 This was the thrill-of-thehunt argument for a higher purpose. Another collector put it more bluntly: “I have known men to hazard their fortunes, go long journeys halfway about the world, forget friendships, even lie, cheat, and steal, all for the gain of a book.”24 Nicholas A. Basbanes, today’s most respected student of American book collectors, has uncovered a large network of Americans who have put together great collections over the past three centuries. But equally important, collectors are active today, displaying the same behavior as those of earlier

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centuries. Despite radio, TV, and the Internet, they continue to acquire books, contribute important collections to American academic libraries, and go out and do it again. Collectors today are not limited to the extremely wealthy, but can be found in all stations of life. The actual number is unknown.25 They come in all ages as well. One boomer reflected the circumstance of her generation when it came to books: The presence of books—so many books, in fact, that some could even be spirited away to a private hiding spot without a major hue and cry and others could be cannibalized without detection or consequence—became the commonplace with my generation. And it was the books that mattered most in our new feast of information.26

The conclusion is obvious and clear, there are so many books in America that they are comfortable objects, ever-sofamiliar friends for so many people. Is it any wonder that for many they are a source of pleasure and a form of American fun?

INFORMATION, TOURISM, AND THE AMERICAN VACATION While the majority of Americans have long enjoyed vacations that involved leisure activities such as camping, playing at the beach, gambling, and good eating, there always were some who wanted to be productive during these events, or at least appear so. Productive meant either mixing work with leisure or learning at the same time that they were playing. Those readers whose parents dragged them through all the buildings of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. know what I mean. There always existed a tension, even ambivalence, between the desire for leisure activities and an element of guilt over the fact that people were taking time off from work. In fact, we have a very American expression to describe the attitude: “goofing off.” This tension surfaced early in the life of the nation and has remained to this day as a feature of American vacationing and tourism. The reason I discuss vacationing and tourism at all is because the hunt for information,


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knowledge, and self-improvement laced its way throughout the history of American leisure. The search also served to partially bridge the gap between “goofing off,” with all its implications about the evils of time off, and doing something positive and productive. It would be easy to exaggerate the notion about the amount of information content in vacations, but at the risk of doing that we need to acknowledge the role of selfimprovement in the process. The book taken to the beach with all the intentions of reading it, the enormous quantity of travel literature with extensive historical and economic or cultural information that has flooded the American book market since the 1870s, and the large number of lectures given at national parks, in theme camps, and at conferences, are all elements of the vacationing story. Historians of vacationing and self-improvement have described these various activities, although they have not yet quite figured out the balance between work and play. What they have done is call out the tension between the two elements, and it is enough for our purposes that we acknowledge that fact too.27 The wealthy always were able to take a few days off and go to the country or to the beach, whether in the 18th or 19th century. As time passed, ever-increasing percentages of the American public could also afford to vacation. By the second half of the 19th century the middle class was beginning to vacation, and by the 1920s, working-class Americans were on the beach too. In the 19th century, vacation spas and popular locales (such as Niagara Falls) became the places to visit. As the national park system began to develop, vacationers went to these sites, often camping for up to two weeks at a time. As early as 1866, tourists could visit Civil War battlefields around Richmond and almost immediately Gettysburg became a “must see” site. By the early decades of the 20th century, the long-standing debate about whether vacations were “good” or “bad” for Americans or appropriate for workers was over; everyone was headed to the beach! Invariably, people took fat novels along to the beach.28 The middle-class made vacationing an entitlement, and by the end of the 1930s, so did factory workers.29

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Vacationing has been a mixed blessing for Americans. From the early 19th century to the present, while they enjoyed being on holiday they fretted over the potential dangers of leisure and the need to always work. Discipline and work were American virtues, leisure always seemed a cousin of sloth. As was so often the case with American beliefs, Puritan work values translated into Protestant work ethics that, in turn, created ethical concerns for Americans with taking time off from their jobs. This ethical problem never fully went away but people went on vacation anyway and had a great time. By the second half of the 19th century, however, selfimprovement holidays began to emerge as a popular option. These holidays were laden with information, indeed designed around the acquisition and use of data for high moral purposes. These events served to neutralize the ethical problem in a partial way by giving one a sense that something solid was being done of a productive nature (read, compatible with American work ethic) but still involved the fun activities of vacations, such as time at a resort, basking in the sun, or eating interesting meals. One of the best known of these cases is the Chautauqua Lake meetings. After 1874, thousands of Americans came to this spot in western New York to vacation and hear lectures on a variety of topics as a way to improve themselves. The Chautauqua Movement spread to other parts of the nation and by the end of the century the notion of attending lectures had become a feature of many vacations. Religious camps throughout the century provided a variant of that model, but obviously focused on religion. Methodists and Baptists led the way, but other denominations also ran camps.30 Public lectures and visits to lyceums became extensions of the Chautauqua Movement, and remained an element of the American landscape to the present. While the Chautauqua Movement eventually disappeared, today people still go to Saturday seminars at hotels, for example, to learn how to make money in the real estate market, or to become better photographers. In the 1880s, hundreds of thousands of Americans mixed pleasure with knowledge; a hundred years later, if you counted visits to historic sites, theme camps (e.g., to learn a


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language), and trips to museums, the impulse to learn while on vacation remained a familiar pattern. Historians of vacationing often make the distinction between vacationers and tourists, a distinction that affects the role of information. A vacationer is normally someone who goes away from home for a period of time to relax and enjoy leisure, such as going to the beach or to the mountains. A tourist is someone who chooses to go somewhere on vacation to visit sites, maybe even a lot of them (e.g., the old joke, “If this is Tuesday we must be in Belgium”), to hunt for information. Those who went to Chautauqua Lake and heard lectures on art, history, politics, and ethics were vacationers. Those who listened to park rangers lecture on the Battle of Fredericksburg at the national park were tourists. It was tourists who injected the greatest amount of information content into their excursions, beginning in the 1860s and continuing to the present. One historian defined them as Busy vacationers, people with a purpose. They left home not only to enjoy recreation and amusement but to add to their stock of knowledge, experience, and information. Rather than idling away time at a resort, drinking juleps and flirting with strangers, a tourist could feel engaged in constructive activity.31

Even at the height of the Great Depression of the 1930s, the number of tourists off to learn new things increased over earlier periods. I say more about self-improvement later in this chapter; however, it is important to call out the fact that tourists often linked lectures, visits to interesting places, and even spending time in a library as part of the fun of vacationing or sightseeing. “Self-improvement vacations” as they are often called in the tourist business thus had a long history stretching back to the 1860s and 1880s. In the years following World War II, hunting for information and knowledge mixed nicely with pleasure. Dozens of national historic sites were either established or expanded. Many American historic parks already existed by World War II and during the Great Depression had been enhanced by the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) with roads, informative markers, and visitor centers. It was no accident that by the end of

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the 1950s, perhaps the best network of national parks and historic sites in the world existed in America, run by the U.S. Department of the Interior. By the end of the 1980s, one could hardly camp at a national park without reservations. Long lines to visit historic sites had become a common scene. Part of the reason for their popularity could be attributed to the ever-increasing percentage of the American public affluent enough to go on vacation. Another piece of the answer is that the nation’s population increased over the course of the century, yet the number of Mount Vernons remained the same: one. By the end of the 1950s, the U.S. Department of the Interior was also publishing travel guides and booklets describing historic events; these publications were bought by the hundreds of thousands, adding to the whole experience of learning while not working. The number of visitors just to the national parks suggests the extent of American tourism. Jump to a time close to now, to the 1990s, and one can see what happens in good economic periods. The National Park Service reported that visitor days (each visitor day equals one person on one day in a park) consistently exceeded 110 million. Of that number, about a third visited historic sites; the others went to scenic parks such as Yellowstone.32 Americans could go to a total of 240 historic sites, historic parks, battlefields, and monuments. In addition to being info-junkies, Americans secretly enjoy history.33 In 1999, the entire park system hosted over 280 million visitors. But that is another story about information for someone else to tell. The Smithsonian Institution represents another example of the role of information in American tourism. One of the world’s premier scientific and cultural organizations, it was founded in 1847 in Washington, D.C. and is now sponsored by the U.S. government. It conducts research, houses more than 140 million items of historic, scientific, and artistic value, and has acquired the nickname “attic of the nation.” It has more than a dozen museums and a zoo in Washington, and every few years adds another building. The most popular Smithsonian facility is the Air and Space Museum; it is the most visited of its buildings. Millions of tourists—mostly Americans—come


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to the Smithsonian annually. Throughout the 20th century the Smithsonian always had museum facilities, but not until the 1950s did it equal the public buildings in Washington in the number of tourists it attracted. By the 1980s, it was not unusual to see families dedicate a whole week just to going through these facilities. No longer merely exhibiting items in cabinets or behind glass cages, the Smithsonian led the museum profession into many innovations: better signage around artifacts to explain their significance; movies and lectures; self-tours with tapes and headsets; video stations where tourists could see film clips and get microlectures; Web sites; and a flood of publications describing exhibits much the way art museums do.34 Museum curators around the world recognize the Smithsonian as a leader in telling a nation’s story through creative and innovative use of presentation skills. Theme camps represent yet another variant on vacations, although overwhelmingly aimed at children. Since the late 19th century, camps have existed where children could go for one or more weeks to learn things. Boy Scout camps taught character and camping skills; later the Girl Scouts and Campfire Girls did the same thing. Every major Protestant denomination, and some Catholic organizations, also maintained camps that mixed religious instruction with fun. After World War II, and particularly after the 1950s, instructional camps were established to teach specific skills, such as foreign languages (e.g., the Concordia camps in Minnesota), horseback riding (e.g., dude ranches), and more recently, computer skills. Organizations like Young Life and the YMCA combined development of skills with character building, with varying degrees of religious instruction. Camps have always been very popular in the United States. Camps routinely attract approximately nine million children, who are living proof of how continuously popular such vacations are for the American public. They are as innovative as the society that nurtures them. Over 8,500 summer camps existed in the United States in 2000. During the 1990s alone, these camps enjoyed an annual growth rate in attendance of between 8 and 10 percent. They are roughly half populated with girls, half with boys. The American Camping

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Association, an industry accrediting association that has been in existence for over a half century, reported in 1999 that 28 percent of all parents had sent their kids to camp at one time or another to learn new things, such as social skills and selfconfidence.35 American ambivalence about work versus play has inadvertently been heightened by information technology over the past decade. If anyone wanted to do any work while on vacation prior to the 1980s, they had three choices: Bring a briefcase full of papers to work with, stop by and visit an office or customer while on vacation, or make telephone calls while the kids were playing on the beach. Americans availed themselves of all three options, either because they felt they could not stay away from work for periods of a week or two or out of a compulsion to mix work and play. Technology, however, made it easier to mix the two together. First, there was the telephone, obviously available to vacationers since before World War II. Second came the fax machine in the 1980s. By the early 1990s, most luxury hotels put fax machines in their bedrooms. By the mid-1990s, a rush of new technologies went on vacation too: pagers and cell phones offering national coverage, and laptops with modems (so that vacationers could pull into their machines e-mail from the office over the telephone lines in their hotel rooms). It is now possible to argue that one could not only work and “stay in touch” with the office, but colleagues at work could also impose themselves on the harried vacationer. This activity is all about information-based work. American business culture, particularly among executives and senior managers, dictates that mixing work and pleasure is normal, appropriate, and to be expected by all involved, from secretaries and coworkers to spouses and children. Now add in some new services available since the 1980s, and one can see that the office, too, has gone on vacation with Americans. Federal Express can deliver papers overnight from the office to one’s vacation spot, UPS brings packages to our hotels and vacation condos, while courier services can do the job in hours! As the American workforce became more mobile, particularly in such professions as consulting and sales, work naturally


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joined the vacation. The one-hour conference call wedged into a Tuesday morning while the kids were playing became a common phenomenon. But the one technology that really linked people to work appears to be the laptop computer. Almost all laptops today are equipped with the capability of plugging into a phone line to receive and transmit e-mail. Pitney-Bowes reported in one recent study that Americans often receive up to hundreds of messages daily.36 The ease with which one can download information onto a lightweight laptop makes it too tempting not to. Furthermore, if one goes for several days without checking the e-mail, there could be hundreds of messages waiting. Increasingly, American managers in particular won’t allow that to happen; they log on for a quick look. Even people who should know how to go on vacation cannot escape the clutches of technology. University of Virginia historian Cindy S. Aron, who wrote the excellent history of American vacations that I relied on for much of the early information in this part of Chapter 6, explained how she and her family could not escape information in the late 1990s while at the beach: The multitude of vacationers brought with them one laptop computer (I admit, it was mine, but in past years others have brought theirs), one fax machine, and three cellular phones. The FedEx truck arrived almost every day with a package of papers. I recall one specific afternoon when a fax was arriving over the phone line, one person was talking on a cellular phone on the porch, another on a cell phone in the living room, and FedEx was making a delivery. One disgusted relative shook his head and muttered something that sounded like, “whatever happened to vacations?”37

Her family came to their beach house every year, including grandparents, aunts and uncles, and cousins. Years ago her family had agreed not to have a television set in the building. This was so that the various generations could spend time together, carrying out “the important social and cultural work of the family beach house . . . as we rehashed old problems, tried to heal old wounds, retold old stories, and remade family ties.”38

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The entertainment and travel industries as well continue to recognize the value of self-development and learning on vacation, adding to our increased reliance and enjoyment of information. Disney, for example, experienced huge success with Epcot at Disney World in Florida. Here one could see new gizmos, products, and a view of the future. Disney added World Showcase nearby where a tourist could get a sense of life in other countries, much like a similar street created at the Chicago’s World Fair in 1893 did for an earlier generation. At the end of the 1990s, Disney added The Disney Institute, which hosts lectures on such topics as art, architecture, time management, sports and fitness, gardening, and cooking.39 Another organization, Outward Bound, along with Stephen Covey’s institute, targets professionals and managers to provide a combination of vacation and self-improvement experiences. Outward Bound has five such programs in the United States, teaching people to be more confident in themselves and trusting of their colleagues.40 These have been very popular in American business circles for the past two decades. They represent a long-standing tradition of feeding information and self-improvement to Americans on vacation, people who are normally slightly nervous about taking time off. What effect is the Internet having on vacations? The answer is a great deal and very quickly. The entertainment and travel industries have put an enormous amount of information on the Internet concerning travel schedules, hotel offerings, itineraries, and the capability of scheduling these online. Look at some of the endnotes in this chapter to see what I mean (such as the last note in the preceding paragraph). Increasingly, access to the Internet is made possible in hotel rooms and is always available through one’s own laptop plugged into a phone line or a cell phone. As with other technologies, therefore, the Internet is going on vacation with Americans. As the number of airplane tickets and other reservations being made via the Internet increases, it will probably become an essential tool for planning and experiencing a vacation or a quick sightseeing trip. When faster Internet service comes along in several years (known as Internet II), accessed on ever-smaller devices (e.g., a PC on a cell phone or on a


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watch-like device), it will be able to provide more information to vacationers. It will not be too long, for example, before you will be able to take a tour through a museum, getting the lecture off the Internet with some portable device. Already Americans extensively use GPS systems while hiking and camping to determine exactly where they are and to calculate where they need to go, taking advantage of the network of satellites built during the Cold War. Widely available in luxury cars and in many rental vehicles, GPS systems add a whole new dimension of service and information to the old Boy Scout’s compass. The Internet, laptops, and GPS are all part of the information technology infrastructure Americans equipped themselves with around campfires across the nation. There is a fine line between entertainment for its own sake, and information for practical uses. The range of use was so vast that we can realistically assume that information covered the wide spectrum of hard practical use (e.g., GPS) to entertainment dressed up as educational recreation (e.g., visits to aquariums).41 Is information dumbed down for television viewers? The evidence seems to suggest yes; it is a media that lends itself to quick sound bites and short commentaries while books and magazine articles are more suitable for lengthier, more sophisticated discussions. Each of these media exist at the same time and thus provide a range of options, quality, depth, and sophistication in available information used in entertainment. Entertainment is a powerful incentive for the use of various types of information. On the one hand it drives many economic activities, such as the television industry or the development of ever better graphics for video games, and yet on the other hand, makes possible a broad range of entertainment. Some observers of the role of entertainment in the United States have argued that it drives economic development in the United States. Clearly the “entertainment and media industry” is largest in the United States, generating more revenue than many other features of American life. Americans spend roughly 5.2 percent of their income on clothes and a similar amount for health care. Yet they also spend 5.4 percent for various forms of entertainment. Many of

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these are information based, such as music, television, videos, radio, and reading materials. Michael J. Wolf, who argues the case that entertainment is a driving force in contemporary American society, has demonstrated that even information intensive programs on television are driven by the need to entertain. They include The NBC Nightly News and Larry King Live.42 The issue is one of battling for our attention among competing sources of information. Yet this is not only a TVcentric issue or one of concern to entertainment parks. This was an issue with pre-Civil War novels, self-help camps in the 1890s, and with religious radio programming in the 1920s and 1930s. The strategies most successful have had less to do with the quality of information than with entertainment and providing targeted information to niche markets. These are fundamental features of American information and about how they are deployed into the American economy.

PURSUING EDUCATION ON ONE’S OWN INITIATIVE Often linked to vacations, but most normally an activity done outside of work, usually during the work week, is the pursuit of education, knowledge, and self-improvement. This has long been a popular activity in the United States. The nation collectively built a social and educational infrastructure to support these interests with institutions that reflected a range of approaches from leisure (e.g., public seminar and debating programs and theme vacations) to the hard work of school (e.g., community colleges). A wide range of other approaches came and went while others stayed, from the public library system and worker improvement societies of the 19th century, to community colleges teaching courses at night in the 20th century. Television courses taught very early in the morning, often for academic credit at a local college, have been offered for decades. Taking distance learning courses through colleges via the Internet is a relatively new experience, one of the fastest growing educational developments since the 1990s. In fact, distance learning alone threatens to disrupt the fundamental


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teaching methods that for over three centuries involved professors talking in front of classrooms full of students, with both groups working on a piece of real estate called the campus. This is a very serious generalization to make, one with profound implications. James S. Noblitt, a Senior Fellow at the Institute for Academic Technology, and a professor at Cornell University, recently laid it on the line for his colleagues: “If educators do not define the educational uses of information technology, others will.”43 Corporations are also demanding change. They want educational institutions to rely increasingly on information technology to help business employees continue adding skills to improve their effectiveness.44 Enrollment in distance learning classes is currently expanding at a faster rate than general college enrollments. In short, employers and employees are coming together on the issue of selfimprovement. It is a shared objective that has a history dating back to the 19th century. American experience with continuing education—that is to say, education for adults beyond normal childhood schooling—has a very complex history. It encompasses a patch quilt of offerings and organizations, from self-help societies, lecture series, institutes, junior colleges, night classes, and distance learning to mail-order education. In each century one can find a variety of permutations. We must acknowledge the inescapable reality that voluntary education has been a forceful feature of American society for a long time, powerful because of the extent to which it existed and the variety of its forms. Professor Joseph F. Kett has conducted the most thorough research on the history of this form of American education. He has concluded that despite all the noble intentions of educators, even they consistently underestimated the demand for adult education and self-improvement. From the worker selfhelp societies that cropped up in pre-Civil War America to the veterans of World War II swamping American colleges and universities by the millions, Americans have long invested in their education.45 To be sure, the definition of continuing education changed over the years, from pure moral training in the early Republic to practical skills and collegelike classes in the 1960s. One statistic helps explain the scope of this interest: By the end of the 1980s, almost 40 percent of all undergraduate

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students in the United States were 25 years of age or older. And that does not include Americans who were taking seminars (e.g., Dale Carnegie self-improvement courses) or those I referred to earlier, at hotels on Saturdays to learn how to make money in real estate or to take better photographs. This is not the place to recite the history of this educational feature of American life. Kett and his colleagues have done that well enough. We do need to understand several of their findings, however. While education was not a democratic process in the 18th century, it became, like vacations and reading in general, a more egalitarian, commonly accessible feature of American life as the nation passed through the 19th century. By the time of the Civil War, many Americans already felt pressure to maintain their skills to remain competitive in the workplace. The expanded availability of books paralleled the rise of organizations that provided education to the democratizing masses of American society. Continuing education extended to the working classes, to women, across the entire United States, and covered a range of subjects from the “useful arts” to religion, culture, literature, and personal selfhelp. As the century ended, private organizations, such as mechanic’s clubs, were replaced by other societies, even vacation providers, and expanded college programs. During the same century, a network of public libraries slowly expanded across the United States. We take them for granted; they seem everywhere. However, there was a time when they were rare, yet they represent one of the great information infrastructures built in the 19th century. In 1876, there were fewer than 3,700 libraries with 300 books or more; but in total the nation could claim some 8,000 libraries, possibly as many as 10,000 by the turn of the century. Forty-two states had a traveling library system. Circulation of books was generally very heavy; some libraries circulated over a million volumes a year by 1900.46 In short, the public library represented a very popular source of information, entertainment, and self-help education, not only in the 19th century but all through the 20th as well. Kett’s research led him to observe that from about 1870 to 1930, emphasis clearly shifted to the practical—to learning


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skills that would improve job performance rather than enhance one’s intellectual or cultural knowledge. That emphasis on the practical remained a hallmark of voluntary education programs for the rest of the 20th century. During the early decades of the 1900s, American proprietary schools worked out the process for providing what we came to call vocational education. Corporations encouraged learning practical skills, as they do today when they offer to pay for an employee’s training in the use of PCs, Microsoft products, or Web page design software.47 At the same time that governments and corporations were installing computers, and sales of books were rising following the hiatus of World War II, education also surged, reflecting the ongoing growth of sources of information across the broad spectrum of American society. Kett described the situation this way: Starting with the flood of veterans into colleges and universities after World War II, the period since 1945 has witnessed a succession of surges in adult course enrollments. For example, during the span of less than a decade from the mid-1960s to the early 1970s, participation by adults in organized educational activities rose at more than twice the rate of their increase in population.48

Although institutions of higher learning provided the lion’s share of that education, corporations by the early 1990s were spending around $60 billion each year in training programs as well. By the end of the decade, these corporations were figuring out that using the Internet to deliver training was costeffective.49 Let’s put all these training activities into a fuller perspective. Between 1910 and 1986, Americans aged 25 or older went from having 8.1 years of formal education to 12.9 years. Half of the increase in the median number of years of schooling occurred between 1940 and 1970, reflecting a rate of increase in the speed with which education became available. This increase in the rate also occurred at the same time that the rate of speed increased in the acquisition of other forms of available information and skills through schooling. In 1930, 30 percent of all 17-year-olds graduated from high school. That

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number jumped to almost 51 percent by 1941, up faster than the rate of graduation in the period 1910 to 1930. Momentum continued after World War II, ever-higher percentages of students graduating from high schools (up into the 60s percentile range by the 1960s, and now creeping up further).50 An absolutely major event in the history of education in America, with profound repercussions for the nation, involved veterans of World War II. In 1944, Congress anticipated that in the near future members of the armed forces would be returning home and would need help in reentering the civilian workforce (a lesson learned from World War I). To help in their transition to peacetime pursuits, it passed the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act, otherwise known as the G.I. Bill. It included provisions for funding college education for vets. The results were extraordinary. The numbers tell the story. In 1946 and 1947, over a million veterans enrolled in colleges and universities. Over 18,000 applied for admission to Harvard. Another million plus went to college in 1948 and 1949. Almost half of all college students in 1947 were vets. Their presence caused enrollments to surge across the nation, nearly doubling in number between 1939 and 1950.51 Roughly 25 percent of all World War II veterans eventually went to college or acquired some form of vocational training above the high school level. Obviously some veterans were already college graduates from pre-war days, otherwise the number might have been higher. What makes this story so remarkable is that this nation injected into its economy millions of college graduates who went on to become parents of Baby Boomers. This next generation, in turn, made up another huge surge in college populations in the 1960s and 1970s, acquiring from their parents the expectation that they too must obtain a college education. Coming on the heels of a highly productive American economy of the 1950s and 1960s, which these G.I. college graduates benefited from, it was almost inevitable that the value placed on learning and knowledge would be reinforced from one generation to another. Tickle’s comment earlier in this chapter about being surrounded by books makes sense in the context of what happened to so many veterans and their children in such a short


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period of time. The growth in the number of college graduates changed the nature of the typical college student. The population evolved again into even more diverse forms in the 1960s with the addition of the women’s movement, which encouraged girls and young women to aspire to careers (that in turn required training and college education), and special programs to encourage African Americans and other minorities to obtain higher education. In the 1970s the nation experienced a return to college of older students as the proportion of eighteen-year-olds in the general population subsided. By accounting for these various changes, one begins to understand the profile of the contemporary American adult in school. As the economy of the United States shifted to one that required greater amounts of education and training in order to succeed, Americans found the time after work and on weekends to continue their education. Others simply delayed going into the workforce until they had acquired more education and the credentials of the trained expert. We have all seen the statistics showing that beginning in the 1970s people with more education earned higher salaries. One widely circulated study demonstrated that a male high school graduate of 1979 saw no appreciable increase in income through 1994 after adjusting for inflation. In fact, his income fell by 16 percent despite the assumption that he and his peers also received training in various skills from their employers. By contrast, a college graduate during the same period actually enjoyed a 20 percent increase in income. This statistically mythical man also had a wife who earned more than the male high school graduate; her income actually doubled in this period.52 Is the penchant for mixing learning and information in leisure activities strictly an American phenomenon? A brief look at the pattern of behavior of another large group that shares a similar work ethic suggests that Americans are not alone. East Asians are by culture and religion Confucian, and as such place a great deal of emphasis on learning and continuous personal improvement. Like Americans, they use learning as a major source of justification for leisure activities. Travel, for instance, is seen as a way of learning new things. Surveys conducted in the 1980s and 1990s of South Koreans,

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Taiwanese, and Japanese all confirmed the central role learning plays in their holiday travels. Club Med Japan offers classes in various European languages as a form of justification for their travel packages. Middle- and upper-class Asian families deluge their children with special classes ranging from playing musical instruments to painting, religious summer camps, and language schools. In many ways, they were practicing what Americans had been doing with their education camps of the 19th and early 20th century.53 But in some ways they are also different. The most evident difference involves the role of family and group. East Asians like to go on family vacations, experience familywide learning experiences, and participate in group activities, whether it is the Japanese developed karaoke or travel jaunts to visit European museums. Americans are less likely to place as much emphasis as Asians on group and family learning experiences. The issue of comparison is one of a degree of emphasis because both are active in family-oriented activities. But let’s come back full loop to the common themes in American education and self-improvement. The emphasis on the practical—improved job prospects and performance— played an important role all through the 20th century in stimulating interest in learning. This behavior spilled over into reading and even into vacationing. All of this occurred at the same time that a vast collection of information technologies were permeating the American economy, from telephones to cell phones, from humble adding machines to super computers, to PCs and now to laptops. But we can find still additional evidence that Americans loved their information, education, and access to information technology.

PLAYING ON THE NET Nearly since the first day PCs came into existence, commentators have been arguing that children have a natural affinity for computers that somehow eluded the rest of us. Of course, given the fact that more adults than children use PCs, the observation on its face begs to be challenged. But, as any parent can readily attest, children do seem more comfortable with


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this technology than the rest of us. Part of the reason for this circumstance that we normally hear is that children were raised with computers all around them while their parents’ generation encountered the technology either as teenagers or as adults. We also are told that children have had screens of various sorts in their lives, meaning television. But here again, anybody under the age of 55 could say the same thing, unless they were raised in a household that did not have a television in the home. Even in that situation, children would have been exposed to TV at a friend’s home, just as children are exposed to PCs and the Internet at their friends’ homes too. Given the fact that over a third of American homes now have PCs, we could expect that a child has a minimum of a 1 in 3 chance of being exposed to a PC on a regular basis. That statistic does not include the odds of exposure at school (today about 1 in 9, with the ratio changing rapidly in favor of more exposure; this is particularly evident in wealthy school districts). The point is, however, screens have been a part of the American scene for a very long time. Multiple generations have been exposed to these in various forms and to a greater or lesser degree. We now have, however, a growing body of evidence to demonstrate that children raised in the period after the arrival of the PC are very likely to use this device for entertainment, not just simply to do homework (the positive image we are presented) or to become sinister hackers (the negative image we are also so frequently offered). They are more likely to use it for games and homework because these activities do not require extensive technical skills, especially today, given how games and operating systems work. To be a hacker, on the other hand, does require extensive technical skills; that is why there are fewer hackers than press coverage about them would lead us to believe. The fact that many people, adults included, use PCs and the Internet as a form of recreation should not be a surprise. One student of the process, Don Tapscott, put it this way: “Play has its own pursuits: amusement, competition, expending excess energy and companionship—all of which can be fulfilled on the Internet.”54 Part of the reason children find the Internet so entertaining is due to the fact that, along with PCs, it tolerates an enormous variety of ways for the mind to work and think. It also provides a plethora of games

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and activities, and a growing array of interesting information to feed a child’s curiosity. This applies to both boys and girls, to preteens and high school seniors, and, of course, to college students and young adults. The central activity of children and teenagers with PCs and the Internet is playing games, usually video games. But the sale of computer-based games gives us a hint at how many people became interested in these diversions. These games are played on a PC and do not require use of the Internet. To be sure, not all were children buying them, but they did represent a large portion of the demand for this software, along with teenagers and young adults. The key observation I can make is that video games have been popular from the earliest days of the PC. By the early 1990s, video games had become very big business. For example, in the first half of 1994, Nintendo sold 2.3 million copies of its N64 systems in the United States. Sony did very well too at the same time with its Playstation, selling more than 4 million. All through the 1990s, sales of video games did well, rising from less than $3.5 billion worth in 1990 to more than $5.5 billion in 1997. Unofficial sales data for 1998 and 1999 demonstrated continued growth in sales as well.55 In Chapter 4 I described some of the more popular products being sold in the United States. I do not need to repeat that story here. However, what is interesting to review here is everyone’s reaction to video games. All through the 1980s and 1990s various groups, including parents, had expressed deep concerns about violence on television. Following a long-standing tradition that information should be of a practical, moral nature, the effects of what some called “bad information,” corrupting in its influence, would capture the nation’s attention. Periodic eruptions of violence at schools (like the high school shootings in Colorado in 1999) stimulated a great deal of additional debate and passion about the role of technology in affecting children’s behavior. Specific targets were violent programs on television and action video games. With the arrival of the video game in the 1980s, and in particular with violent shoot-em-up games sold primarily to boys, the debate had been intense for nearly twenty years. By the late 1990s, the Clinton Administration had decided it


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would support technology to restrict children’s access to violent TV programs (the V-chip proposal) and endorsed selfregulation by movie producers to reduce access to violent movies by children, but proved reluctant to go after the video game market. Part of the problem for policymakers and parents alike was the fact that child psychologists could not demonstrate with sound scientific evidence that violent games led directly to violent behavior. Boys, in particular, had played violent games for centuries and somehow civilization survived. Politicians, law enforcement officials, and parents felt otherwise. The evidence was not clear-cut. Meanwhile, children continued to play with videos because they were fun.56 One could argue that the debate over the benefits of video playing is similar to the 19th century discussion about the negatives of leisure. However, it is a different debate because of the modern focus on violence. In the 19th century there were discussions about men getting drunk on vacations and going home to beat their wives and children. But the issues turned more on whether or not leisure was unproductive (in a work sense) or immoral (leading to drunkenness or idleness) than whether it was conducive to violence. Today’s debate centers on the issue of violent behavior. What the kids are saying is that video games are a form of play, hence fun. We know from personal experience and scientific evidence that play is a way children learn. In other words, play is productive and, in the American way of thinking, a good thing. Video games do teach children how to navigate on the Internet and to operate and be comfortable with personal computers. They also see the PC as a tool that they can use in different ways. For example, children report that they do research for their school papers on the Internet, which is just fine because librarians are encouraging people to use online database search engines to do their research and are investing millions of dollars in digitally-based sources of information. Given their popularity, as evidenced by the number of video games sold and what children are reporting they do with PCs, game software is now a major element of the American leisure scene. This software is informative, since not all games are violent uneducational artifacts. A massive amount of

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children’s educational software has been developed and is being used by thousands of school districts all over the United States. This software relies on many of the same design techniques and technologies as video games. So learning how to use a PC to play a video game also has taught children how to use educational software at school. In fact, in too many instances, they have a better understanding of how to use this information technology than their teachers. For many children, particularly very young ones, video games and educational software are one and the same, no different than board games such as Candyland and Scrabble were to their parents—one pure entertainment, the second closer to being educational and fact-based. Today there are thousands of K–12 educational software packages not counted in the sales figures I cited for games.57 But grownups play too. In the late 1990s, Americans obtained the capability of downloading music of relatively high quality off the Internet onto their PCs without paying for the recordings. This was made possible primarily by a software program called Napster, made available to the public in August 1999, and which by the end of 2000 had over 10 million users. Initial impressions were that high school and college students were the primary users of such software for what appeared to be an emerging “killer app.” The first major survey of the use of this application, conducted in the spring of 2000, suggested that there were 13 million Americans downloading music off the Net, or approximately 14 percent of all Internet users at the time. Surprisingly, 42 percent of those downloading music were between the ages of 30 and 49. In addition to downloading music, one can listen to recordings over the Internet like we do over the radio. Some 38 percent of all American Internet users reported having listened to music that way. But the big story remained the downloading of music using tools like those from Napster. Current thinking is that over one billion free music files now sit on PCs operated by Napster’s customers. These users break out into roughly two-thirds men, one-third women. Yes, many are young; in fact nearly 1 in 4 Internet users who have downloaded music were between the ages of 18 and 29. There are three points to make about this data. First, this is yet another example of Americans eagerly


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going after information (digital files) for entertainment. Second, this practice cuts across many age groups and both genders. Third, this is an excellent example of building on an existing infrastructure because these people did not go out and buy PCs so that they could download free music. Rather, they exploited an existing technology that they already had for other purposes, and added this additional application.58 Yet it is not enough to say just that people exploited the Internet like any other technology. There appears to be some unique features of the Internet that may be influencing how it is used for pleasure or profit. The differences from prior information technologies are sufficient to ask the question: Does the Internet represent a fundamental change from prior tools? I believe the answer is yes for three reasons. It responds so quickly to instructions; in other words, it is richly interactive while books and TV are not. The quantity and variety of information made available to the user surpasses any prior paper or electronic media, making it possible to combine different functions and data in ways new to the user. This, in turn, gives users of the Internet significantly more power to collect, change, apply, and enjoy vast quantities of information, leading to new ways of doing business and finding novel ways to play. In time, we may well come to the conclusion that the Internet was as important a new media as was the book five hundred years ago.

TELEVISION: A MEDIA IN TRANSITION No media for the flow of information in America is more visible or the subject of more discussion than television. Available in nearly every home in America, regardless of income or region, it is a medium that for its first 35 years hardly changed its look and feel. Then, technological innovations, changes in regulatory patterns, and the arrival of cable, the PC, and the Internet fundamentally triggered a series of transformations in American television that is still underway. Today, Americans have access to more television programs, channels, and technologies for controlling when and what they watch than they ever had before.

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It is a collection of merging technologies that is very popular. The fundamental trend today is the merger into television of many of the features evident in such other media as online magazines and newspapers, hypertext (merger of video, sound, and data), and the high quality screens of the PC. Television is rapidly evolving from a passive medium that feeds us images that we watch into one in which viewers interact with it much the way they do with personal computers. The transformation began in the 1980s with the hand-held “clicker,” and now is moving to a hybrid of PC and television in which the functions of both are within the same unit (which is what WebTV is all about). Those listed in this paragraph were driven primarily by changes in technology. A second trend is also a consequence of technological innovation: the fragmentation of audiences into niches. For example, as late as 1979, there were three national channels: ABC, NBC, and CBS. Americans could watch programming from only those three. Their formats were similar. They offered, national news at the same time. They had sitcoms, quiz shows, sports, covered the same national events (e.g., President Kennedy’s funeral and the first landing on the moon), and looked a lot like each other. If a program became very popular, such as the Ed Sullivan Show on Sunday nights, the majority of the nation’s TV watchers were tuned in to only one show. Today that situation no longer prevails. There are hundreds of options. Audiences per show normally are lower because they are spread across a richer variety of programs than ever before, and now with the Internet we may see even further desegregation of audiences in the years to come. This trend is evident in every major type of programming: sports, news, sitcoms, drama, and so forth. A third trend is the increased availability and popularity of information-based or news programs. News programs we understand—the evening news on CNN or the local news—while by information-based programming I mean such things as the History Channel or Discovery, where the viewer is exposed to information, facts, and learning. Before we think everyone is very interested in what is going on in the world in a serious fashion, we should understand that news has also acquired an


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entertainment quality that might cause some readers to question if news is serious business or entertainment.59 The American public has a history of treating news less seriously than we might think, given the fact that they watch a lot of it on TV, and increasingly go to the Internet during the day to get updates. The experts on television as a medium report state that the quality of the information available here varies enormously. Much of it is packaged as entertainment of varying quality. Every disaster is the excuse for more programming and high drama, even with docudramas a year later. The History Channel, an excellent source of much information about various historical topics, does not hesitate to package the subject as entertainment with such programs as History’s Mysteries and short pieces of historical trivia or where historical artifacts are today. The American interested in the serious social and economic causes of the American Civil War has to go to a book written by a professor, but for a general overview of the Civil War, the History Channel will do. For many Americans, the primary source of information about a historical topic is television, with its “lite” version of the subject. That circumstance always raises the question of whether or not Americans are getting sufficiently good information on a topic. That debate rages on and this book is not the place to participate in this never-ending discussion. That variety exists, and will continue to be a part of the American information landscape, is sufficient. When information has to be very good—as in the case of medical knowledge—it is, and when it can be trivial—as in the instance of vacation related information—it is trivial. Variety, depth, and scope are simply features of the American information landscape. The Pew Research Center, one of the nation’s most distinguished research institutes devoted to the study of television, published a study in 1997 on news-viewing habits of the nation covering the previous ten years, presenting one of the first comprehensive studies of the subject. It discovered that Americans paid little attention to serious stories of the day with two major exceptions: manmade disasters and U.S. military actions, with between 44 to 45 percent of adults tracking

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these kinds of stories. The Pew study determined that roughly a fourth of Americans paid attention to political stories and only a third to business and economic themes. On average, 30 percent of Americans over the age of 50 watched news programs regularly, those between the ages of 30 and 49, 23 percent, and the under 30 community, 20 percent. However, the Pew determined that 43 percent of the people it interviewed answered information questions correctly, which led its researchers to conclude that while Americans might not always watch the news, many did take in information about what was going on. They surmised that viewers obtained news from multiple sources and not just from TV. While there were some gender differences (e.g., men were slightly more interested in news subjects than women and each had different topics of interest), on average those differences were not significant.60 What the study did was to validate that many Americans were interested in the news, but probably were getting it from multiple sources. However, the data unearthed by the Pew study actually points to another conclusion, namely, that television has a high entertainment quality to it. That is why so many news programs are structured almost like suspense stories, why reality programming is so popular. The stories most popular with Americans had features of conflict and contest about them, the raw materials for good entertainment. Just looking for information of a practical nature thus does not do justice to what Americans want from their electronic media: data and entertainment, with the latter often taking precedence over the former. Increasingly during the years before and during the period covered by the Pew study, Americans acquired a variety of new TV sources for information. In 1980, Turner Broadcasting System introduced the Cable News Network, which provided 24-hours-per-day news on TV. That had never been available before. In 1983, CNN started a second channel to provide lessdetailed news stories, also around the clock, called CNN Headline News. Over the years this channel supplied cable providers with news and it was licensed to other TV stations around the world. There probably are very few American


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adults who have not seen CNN news broadcasts. It became an instant success and, frequently over the years, took viewers away from NBC, CBS, and ABC, particularly when a major news story was breaking (e.g., their coverage of Desert Storm in 1991 was realtime, on the ground, watched by millions around the world, including senior Iraqi leaders).61 A second example of a major new source of information from television is C-SPAN. This is the channel that broadcasts Congressional debates, uncut and without commentary, from gavel to gavel; speeches by American presidents; and covers other national political events (e.g., July 4 events at Arlington Cemetery). The creator of C-SPAN, Brian Lamb, was very concerned that the big three networks were dominating coverage of American politics and could influence public perceptions, especially if important stories were not presented because they made for bad TV programming. To offer the public an unedited view of the American political process became his aim. In March, 1979, the channel broadcast its first coverage of a House of Representatives session to 3.5 million households through 350 cable systems. Over the years the variety of government events broadcast expanded. In January, 1987, it began to broadcast around the clock. Today, over 70 percent of adult Americans are aware of C-SPAN, although we do not have hard data to indicate that these adults also watched the channel. But this piece of evidence about awareness would suggest some interest in its programming. What information exists indicates that, by 1995, up to 36.9 percent of adult TV audiences had seen a C-SPAN broadcast within the last week. During the same period, 62.6 percent of the adult population had seen some cable TV (not necessarily C-SPAN; it could have been a golf game or a sitcom). In the same period, 57 percent of the public claimed to have read a daily newspaper; 66 percent a Sunday paper.62 The number of available news and information channels increased all through the 1980s and 1990s, competing for the attention of American viewers and, thereby, continuing to fragment audiences. Since most channels are not publicly subsidized, the fact that so many could exist without going out of business is a solid indicator that they were successful in

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competing against each other for audiences. And how many such outlets existed? A snapshot of the number in mid-1999 cataloged 158, ranging from CNN to QVC to the Auto Channel.63 In addition, we have to add the thousands of programs these channels provided, many on a 24-hour basis (e.g., CNN and Fox News), to get a sense of the massive number of hours of broadcasting now available to the American public. The offerings from NBC, CBS, and ABC prior to 1980 now seem few and primitive, but they conditioned the American public to receive news by television, thereby making it possible for today’s channels to beam to an accepting audience. Other options appeared, such as the Fox News channel. Yet one of the most interesting developments was not just the creation of alternative news stations—which is an important development itself—but the birth of many TV magazines that further fragmented audiences into niches interested in specific types of news stories. For example, between July 1996 and July 1998, the big broadcasters (ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox, and CNN) increased their combined hours of TV magazine broadcasting from 26 to 63 hours per month, clear evidence of their popularity. Programs included 60 Minutes (which in the late 1990s went to broadcasting twice a week instead of only once), 20/20, 48 Hours (that did the same thing as 60 Minutes), and America’s Most Wanted, to mention just a few of the more popular ones.64 Many appear through cable channels, as do regular news broadcasts. In fact, by the end of the 1990s, 40 percent of Americans were watching cable news on a regular basis. That number did not include those who watched news on one of the traditional networks, suggesting that the number of Americans watching news on a regular basis was high and continuous at the start of the new century.65 In addition to the larger number of news broadcasters and electronic magazines now available, there are programs and channels delivering information on a variety of topics to the American public. These include such nonnews channels as the Food Network, History Channel, Knowledge Channel, ESPN, Nickelodeon, the Outdoor Channel, Pathfinder, and so many others. There are some very esoteric channels also


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available now, such as Ecology, the Erotic Network, Court TV, Playboy Channel, Sci-Fi Channel, and the Filipino Channel. These are aimed at far narrower audiences than the CNNs of the world, and are often watched along with more mainstream programming. Many of these channels experienced significant growth in viewership at the end of the century. Home & Garden Television was typical, frequently enjoying double-digit growth rates in the late 1990s. Among the fastest growing were Entertainment Television, the History Channel, Weather Channel, Courtoom Television Channel, Animal Planet, Travel Channel, and the Fox News Channel. The History Channel routinely entered nearly a half million homes, while the Weather Channel claimed that in periods of bad weather, over 2 million households tuned in to its programs.66 Michael J. Wolf, a media expert who has looked at the popularity of these kinds of channels, concluded that in addition to their entertainment value, self-improvement was part of the motivation for audiences to tune in, cutting across TV and many other media. This is the same motivation we saw with 19thcentury tourism. Wolf observed that . . . the Learning Channel, the Discovery Channel, A&E, and the History Channel are increasingly playing a role in delivering educational content to adults. The demands of work as well as the need to find personal fulfillment beyond the limits of any one job are driving people to look to new sources of education in books, magazines, television, and, most promisingly, the Internet.67

Wolf points out an important pattern of American use of TV, the utilization of multiple information media at the same time. Americans normally do not discard an older way of acquiring and using information, they simply add the new to their quiver. MTV conducted a study of that phenomenon in 1999 to see what was happening with young viewers of television who also used the Internet. It concluded, that “new media such as the Internet are supplementing, rather than replacing, traditional media such as television.”68 My discussion started with the statement that technology had profoundly changed television, beginning in the 1970s and early 1980s. The question today, of course, is what role

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will the Internet play in the world of television? PCs have far superior screens to TV cathode-ray tubes. PCs are intelligent, which means we can interact with a program using software. Increasingly, television programming is also becoming available on the Internet, just like radio programs, music, and newspaper reports. The imminent conversion of television broadcasting from analog to digital formats holds out the real promise of additional flexibility and delivery of programs in different formats. A threat to cable broadcasters exists because viewers will not have to pay for expensive set-up boxes they are forced to install today. Bruce M. Owen, an expert on the subject, has taken a hard look at television, cable, and the Internet. He acknowledges that all three will continue to play in the market for the foreseeable future. In fact, he believes that “the immediate threat to conventional broadcast television is not the Internet. It is broadcast satellites and advanced wireless cable systems, all of which can use the latest digital compression technology without being constrained by government standards, and all of which have far more bandwidth than individual broadcasters do or will have.”69 About the Internet he has an unconventional view: The threat from the Internet is not that Internet suppliers will be outbidding TV networks for Hollywood sitcoms, but that the frenetic Internet community will tempt broadcasting’s mass audience over to the Web. If that happens it will be because the public has fallen for e-mail, chat rooms, multiplayer games, and other to-be-discovered Internet content.70

He arrived at this conclusion because at the time he wrote his observation (1999) it cost more to broadcast over the Internet than over cable. However, given the fact that computerbased technology costs drop on average by 20 percent a year, his conclusion may become outdated by the early years of the 21st century. In that case, we will probably see Americans do what they have always done with information technologies: Add it to their collection. As they become familiar and comfortable with using the Internet for other activities, such as looking up travel information or playing games, their leap to online television viewing would only be a small hop.


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However, Owen is right about the future of wireless and satellite transmissions. Their costs have dropped enormously, giving cable companies a run for their money. Furthermore, American firms such as AT&T quietly invested billions of dollars in the 1990s on infrastructure that is now coming online. As soon as the original investments in these infrastructures have been substantially recouped and competition kicks in aggressively, one can expect costs to drop very fast, perhaps faster than those of Internet providers. In that case, Owen will be on the mark because Americans have a history of not being loyal to one format for the delivery of information. They use everything useful that comes along, and if the price is less, so much the better.71 So what are we to make of television? It is a very popular medium for the transmission of information and as a source of entertainment for Americans. As with radio, they have enjoyed using this medium for playful activities such as watching a comedy or a sports event, but also to learn new things, even to take distance learning courses. As technology evolved, new possibilities became evident that allowed viewers to pipe more variety in programming into their homes (cable) or to lower costs of TV (satellite dishes). But the biggest change of all was the fragmentation of audiences due to all this additional variety of programming capability provided by new channels. As is occurring with the Internet, and long existed with buyers of books and magazines, American viewers could increasingly narrow their viewing tastes, or vary them as their interests changed over time. The implications are enormous. For example, if the amount of information Americans receive from screens (TV or the Internet) remains high, or expands—and there is absolutely no evidence that it will shrink—can we look for patterns in information gathering by them to mimic what happened with books? Books served as the primary vehicle for delivering substantial amounts of information for over two hundred years. Will the pattern of newspaper reading over time also serve as an indicator of future behavior on the part of Americans? For example, will Americans turn to newspapers only for local news and advertisements, along with more commentary on

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lifestyle issues? Will they look to electronic media for more current news than a newspaper can provide? I think the answer is yes, because what appears not to have changed over time are the twin interests on the part of Americans to use information in various recreational activities while also devoting some of their personal time to improving their knowledge of the world around them. That they do not always do this well, as surveys of what Americans like to watch in the way of news stories tell us, does not take away from their twin interests. Leaving aside, therefore, the issue of quality and effectiveness, we are left with the basic fact that Americans like to play with information for both fun and serious reasons.

PATTERNS AND CONSEQUENCES In the process of collecting material for this chapter, it became evident to me that information appears in all types of American recreation. Much like the person who buys a new car and seems all of a sudden to see the same model all over the place, a similar situation exists with information’s role in recreational and other private activities. Some are not worth commenting on, such as the enormous number of Internet sites devoted to sexual themes, but on the other hand, to keep this chapter down to chapter length, other examples had to be arbitrarily dropped, such as the role of cookbooks. More than just a type of publication, these are wonderful examples of individual data collection and use of information because women in America have been carefully writing down recipes since the 17th century, relying on these precious handwritten books for generations. Millions of families have them, although not as many as have Bibles. They are working documents used frequently, even today, when people have less time to cook than ever. Like heirlooms and family bibles—about which we will have a great deal to say in the next chapter—they are tools that link together generations within families through shared experiences. And the list goes on: hobby magazines that describe how to build airplanes or repair cars (very popular in the 1920s–1960s); niche publications today that describe how best to enjoy such sports as


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horseback riding, skiing, golf, tennis, and even extreme sports (e.g., snowboarding). Every sport has its “how-to” magazines, books, Internet sites, and TV programs devoted to it. Every important hobby involving collecting does too, from the time-honored antiquing (on TV it is the Antiques Roadshow) to stamp collecting, trading baseball cards, to outstanding Internet sites for antiquarian book collectors. Because America is a polyglot society, it is no surprise that there are so many forms of recreation. What is important to observe, however, is how each of these forms of leisure also has a trail of information, which Americans rely on as part of the joy of the activity. This is the key theme of this chapter. The variety of information handling technologies employed, from the handwritten cookbook to the Internet, is nothing less than remarkable. It is also a distinguishing characteristic of the practical nature of Americans that they would apply every available form of information handling to enhance their pleasure. They used this technology with the same intensity and creativity as they did at work. The pattern was always similar. The experience of work influenced how Americans played. Historians have clearly shown us the difficulty Americans always experienced in separating these two parts of their lives. So it is not a huge leap in logic to accept the notion that Americans would take what they learned at work and apply it to their recreation. What is also interesting to observe, both at work settings and at play, is how Americans always treated information as an object, something with value. At work, it is the “competency,” or “intellectual capital,” which is sold through publications, consulting, or as attractive Internet sites. It is the publisher or bookseller, peddling wads of paper with print on them, sustaining a multibillion dollar industry called book publishing. Antiquarian collectors of books or of baseball cards with data on players, and Civil War buffs who fill whole file cabinets with old newspaper clippings and Confederate ephemera, all demonstrate the connections between value and pleasure expressed in the handling, use, and valuing of the physical artifacts of information. However, Americans like to

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retain control over their information tools. There are many who would argue otherwise, beginning with that distinguished 19th century American writer, Henry David Thoreau, who said, “Men have become the tools of their tools.” I have concluded that Americans do maintain control over the information they use and the information technology they need. Their history suggests they have always balanced a variety of technologies, choosing successfully what media to use for specific types of information. The Bible continues to be a preferred source on religious themes; TV simultaneously is used for both news and entertainment; the Internet blends games, information hunting, and business transactions. Books and magazines provide amounts of details not conveniently pulled from the other media. People manage to juggle all of these sources of information simultaneously. That capability suggests people know how to manage and control what is now a vast body of information that comes in and out of their lives. The discussion so far in this book has been about the quantity and location of information, its role and presence. But we can also ask a very reasonable question about the quality of information. Most students of the role of information and its various forms, invariably focus a great deal on this issue. Some scholars of self-improvement vacations argue that tourists are not really interested in learning, but rather to be exposed to some learning as a justification for the time off from work. Others argue that self-improvement activities, such as history programs on television, are dumbed down to appeal more to the “masses.” Critics would go even farther, in the case of television, and point to such programs as those devoted to history or to animal programs, that these are not education but rather “docutainment.” Leading critics of television’s quality, such as Neil Postman, have long argued this position.72 The attacks continue from other sources. For example, television news, or what is presented in U.S.A Today are frequently attacked as superficial, even trivial. However, there is much that we can criticize as faulty with such logic. For example, if an historian criticizes the dummification of history as we see on the History Channel, I have to be a little more than suspicious. Most viewers know


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little history and even fewer have Ph.D.s in the subject. But they watch programs on historical themes by the millions. Ken Burns’s films on the Civil War and baseball are considered major works. Is it possible that what we are seeing in some of these criticisms is intellectual arrogance? Regarding the entertainment value of learning, Americans have not been in the habit of saying true learning occurs only if it is not entertaining. They want it to be entertaining. They want their museums to have things you can touch, videos, lectures, and things on exhibit. They want docudramas and historical films on PBS. The fact that the people of this nation have not held back in the development of information infrastructures, in the generation and dissemination of vast quantities of information, and have done this for over three hundred years, leads me to several conclusions about the quality of information. First, it must be of some practical value or Americans would not continue to add to their stock of information. This is especially the case with work-related information and tools. The economists would argue that in aggregate information has made the United States a very productive economy. The evidence already viewed in the last chapter on what happened to the U.S. economy of the late 1990s is simply the latest round of evidence. Second, the fact that there is some informational content either in the planning or execution of leisure activities suggests that there is value there to its users; otherwise they would have gone about their way without information or educational content. Third, who is to judge what quality there is in information? One of the enduring qualities of American society is the ability of this nation to have coexisting an enormous variety of information and uses of knowledge. For one person it is junk, for another just the right thing. Because of this variety, it is difficult to argue that information is dumbed down, useless, or simply mental pabulum for the masses. In the final analysis, the range of quality and purposes varies as do the interests of people. What we can generalize on, and was done in this chapter, is to point out that information does play a noticeable role in the leisure activities of Americans in sufficient quantities

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that it cannot be ignored as an aspect of what they do. I make no assumptions about the quality. Just as some readers will find this book terrible, others may judge it filled with useful insight.

CONCLUSIONS In the end we are left with the reality that information, and information technology, is physically present in the daily lives of most Americans. Two students of the role of information in the American economy put it well: A casual tour through urban or rural America will pass telephone poles, radio and TV transmission towers, cables, and parabolic satellite dish antennas. A tourist is likely to see old information devices, like traffic lights and pay telephones, sharing the scenery with more recent automatic teller machines and surveillance cameras. In some cities, the visitor might seek information from a video tourist kiosk.73

From the day Samuel Morse invented the telegraph and transmitted as his first message “What has God wrought?” to today’s proponents of an Internetian Utopia, Americans have been relatively comfortable with information technology in their private lives as they obviously were in their professional activities. Quality and value of information connect together when there are practical or entertaining features to a particular piece of data. Quality implies that information is entertaining, morally uplifting, or simply useful in some way. Value has always linked to practical uses of information, no matter what the setting is, from work to vacations, from religious practices to supporting hobbies. And hobbies—a subject left out of this chapter on purpose because of the constraints of space—have always had information features about them. We saw this with book collecting, or in how boys amass large collections of baseball cards. A leading historian of American hobbies, Steven M. Gelber, acknowledges the informational quality of hobbies, arguing that they “generate expertise, much of which is passed on in printed form.”74 He, too, made the point


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throughout his book that hobbies in America had a practical, even profit side to them, such as paying attention to the value of baseball cards. You could take my previous discussion of vacations, particularly the moral reasons for their features, and plug in the word hobby and have the same findings as those Gelber uncovered. He clearly demonstrated the link between work and play, so much a theme in this chapter: “Hobbies are a contradiction; they take work and turn it into leisure, and take leisure and turn it into work. Like work, hobbies require specialized knowledge” that was of some economic value and occupy what he called “the borderland that is beyond play but not yet employment.”75 All of which is to say, that is why information and its artifacts are used in leisure as at work. To drive these points home further, let us now look at the role of information in some of the most private and spiritual aspect of American life, religious activities.

ENDNOTES 1. Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore, The Medium Is the Message: An Inventory of Effects (New York: Bantam, 1967): unpaginated. 2. Baseball cards and statistical guides made their appearance early in the history of baseball. Statistical guides to help fans began appearing in the 1870s. See note 5 for specifics. 3. As examples of what is available, see Dick Clark and Larry Lester, The Negro Leagues Book (Cleveland, Ohio: Society for American Baseball Research, 1994) and Discover Greatness!: An Illustrated History of Negro League Baseball (Kansas City, MO: Negro League Baseball Museum, 1994). 4. Daniel J. Boorstin, The Americans: The Democratic Experience (New York: Random House, 1973): 406–407. 5. Beadle’s Dime Base Ball Player (began 1871), Chadwick’s Base Ball Manual (began 1870), DeWitt’s Base Ball Guide (began 1872), and Spalding’s Official Base Ball Guide (began 1876).

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6. IBM field engineers routinely provided their customers with a baseball game to run on their computers, beginning in the late 1950s. Management did not object to this since these games were often played on the day a new computer was installed and thus, in their minds, provided a rationale for the practice because the game would test the system to see if all components were working properly. For an early description of the application, see “Baseball by Computer,” Newsweek 74, July 28, 1969, p. 74. 7. Reporting on this topic was the occasion for the first article to appear on the role of computing in America’s most widely distributed sports publication: A. Wright, “Numbers Game for the Tour, IBM Sports Information Service,” Sports Illustrated 27 (November 13, 1967): 76–78. 8. Sports historians are hardly aware of how soon computers were applied to the game. For an early account of the role of computers in American sports, see J. Gerry Purdy, “Sports and EDP. . . . It’s a New Ballgame,” Datamation 17, no. 11 (June 1, 1971): 24–33. 9. Frederick W. Cozens and Florence Scovil Stumpf, Sports in American Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953): 127–153. For a useful discussion of the newsworthiness of sports and their value as entertainment, see Joan Chandler, “American Televised Sport: Business as Usual,” in Wiley Lee Umphlett (ed.), American Sport Culture: The Humanistic Dimensions (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1985): 83–97. 10. http://espn.go.com/nfl.statistics. 11. http://espn.go.com/nba/statistics. 12. http://espn.go.com/soccer/mls/statistics. I do not want to imply that these types of statistics are an American creation; the majority are not. 13. Cozens and Stumpf, Sports in American Life, p. 111. 14. Ibid., 113. 15. CNN Live, broadcast of June 26, 1999. 16. I can’t claim credit for this insight; that has to go to Phyllis A. Tickle, a contributing editor to Publishers Weekly, who made that point in God-Talk in America (New York: The Crossroad Publishing Company, 1997): 12–13.


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17. BP Reports, April 3, 1994, p. 4. 18. For a picture of the market in the 1990s, see Albert N. Greco, The Book Publishing Industry (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1997): 125–130. 19. “At Leisure: Americans’ Use of Down Time,” New York Times, May 9, 1993, sec. 4, p. 2. 20. Alan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987): 62. 21. http://www.publishers.org/home/stats/index.htm. 22. Bentley’s book collecting activities are described brilliantly in Richard D. Brown, Knowledge Is Power: The Diffusion of Information in Early America, 1700–1865 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989): 197–217. 23. Quote reprinted from Nicholas A. Basbanes, A Gentle Madness: Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes, and the Eternal Passion for Books (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1995): 16–17. 24. Ibid., 18. 25. Ibid. I too am infected with the “gentle madness.” I collect old computer books, and have over a thousand of them. Furthermore, I show no sign of slowing down; I will go out of my way to find more of them, 26. Tickle, God-Talk in America, p.12. 27. The most recent example of the discussion about leisure versus work on vacation is by Cindy S. Aron, Working at Play: A History of Vacations in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). Unfortunately it takes the story only to 1940, thereby leaving out the greatest period of American vacationing and sightseeing, the half century following World War II. 28. While I have not done a formal scientific study of what percentage of the population of a country takes a book to the beach, having been on many beaches it is apparent to me that Americans per capita lug more books to the shorelines than any other society! 29. Ibid., 5, 237–257.

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30. For details, see Frederick A. Norwood, The Story of American Methodism: A History of the United Methodists and Their Relations (New York: Abingdon Press, 1974):, especially 254–55, 259; Aron, Working at Play, 100–109. 31. Aron, Working at Play, 155. 32. http://www.aqd.nps.gov/stats/summary; see also http:// www. nps.gov/pub_aff/faqs. 33. The evidence of American interest in history is everywhere. Most communities have local museums or historic sites that are constantly visited. Biographies frequently make it to bestseller lists, such as the collective biographies of the generation of World War II by Tom Brokaw, The Greatest Generation (New York: Random House, 1998). Some historians are celebrities, such as Stephen E. Ambrose and Daniel J. Boorstin. American Heritage, a very expensive magazine on history for the general public, has done well for decades. 34. The Smithsonian Institution is also a major publisher on American culture, including important books on the role of information. For example, see Steven Lubar, Infoculture: The Smithsonian Book of Information Age Inventions (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1993); Peggy A. Kidwell and Paul E. Ceruzzi, Landmarks in Digital Computing (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1994), and Paul E. Ceruzzi, Beyond the Limits: Flight Enters the Computer Age (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989). All these authors are employees of the Smithsonian; the last publication is both a history and an exhibit guide to a Smithsonian presentation at the Air and Space Museum. 35. http://www.acacamps.org/media/factsheet. 36. Sylvia Dennis, “Mobile Taking Off,” Newsbytes, July 24, 1998, http://www.newsbytes.com. For a more comprehensive analysis of e-mail, see Linlin Ku, “Social and Nonsocial Uses of Electronic Messaging Systems in Organizations,” Journal of Business Communication 33, no. 3 (July 1996): 297–325. 37. Aron, Working at Play, 258–259. 38. Ibid., 258. 39. Like so many entertainment companies, Disney is on the Net with many sites and exploits all types of information technology to reach its customers. For details on its Florida facilities, see http://disney.go.com/DisneyWorld/Disney/Institute.


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40. http://www.outwardbound.org. 41. For this point see Susan G. Davis, Spectacular Nature: Corporate Culture and the Sea World Experience (Berkeley, CA.: University of California Press, 1997). 42. Michael J. Wolf, The Entertainment Economy: How MegaMedia Forces Are Transforming Our Lives (New York: Times Books, 1999): 28. 43. James S. Noblitt, “Making Ends Meet: A Faculty Perspective on Computing and Scholarship,” in Diana G. Oblinger and Sean C. Rush (eds.), The Future Compatible Campus (Bolton, MA: Anker Publishing Company, 1997): 155. 44. Diana G. Oblinger and Anne-Lee Verville, What Business Wants From Higher Education (Phoenix, AZ: Oryx Press, 1998), presenting the results of a study sponsored by the American Council on Education. 45. Joseph F. Kett, The Pursuit of Knowledge Under Difficulties: From Self-Improvement to Adult Education in America, 1750–1990 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994): xvi–xvii. 46. R.R. Bowker, “Libraries and the Century in America: Retrospect and Prospect,” Library Journal 26 (January 1901): 5–6; Kett, The Pursuit of Knowledge Under Difficulties, 214. 47. Ibid., 223–256. 48. Ibid., 404. The role of corporations in educating workers has been growing rapidly to fill a void left unfilled by higher education. The issue is well covered by Stan Davis and Jim Botkin, The Monster Under the Bed (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995). But for a better understanding of the skills, information, and knowledge workers need today, see Diana G. Oblinger and Anne-Lee Verville, What Business Wants From Higher Education (Phoenix, AZ: American Council on Education and Oryx Press, 1998): 69–121. 49. For the business case, with examples, see Bill Roberts, “://Training Via the Desktop://,” in John A. Woods and James W. Cortada (eds.), The 1999 ASTD Training and Performance Yearbook (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1999): 61–66. 50. The statistics are summarized in Kett, The Pursuit of Knowledge Under Difficulties, 406–407.

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51. This story is well told by Keith Olson, The G.I. Bill, the Veterans, and the Colleges (Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky Press, 1974), the statistics come from pp. 21–22, 30–31, 35; Cyril O. Houle, Elbert W. Burr, Thomas H. Hamilton, and John R. Yale, The Armed Forces and Adult Education (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1947), also contains much statistical data. 52. Frank Levy, “Where Did All the Money Go? A Layman’s Guide to Recent Trends in U.S. Living Standards,” MIT Industrial Performance Center Working Paper, WP-96–008, July 1996; also summarized by Richard K. Lester, The Productive Edge: How U.S. Industries Are Pointing the Way to a New Era of Economic Growth (New York: W.W. Norton, 1998): 41–43. 53. Hellmut Schutte and Deanna Ciarlante, Consumer Behavior in Asia (London: Macmillan Press, 1998): 121–122. 54. Don Tapscott, Growing Up Digital: The Rise of the Net Generation (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1998): 159. 55. Ibid., based on data collected by the Electronic Industries Association, pp. 162–163. 56. There is a growing body of literature on these issues. Useful ones include Patricia Greenfield, Mind and Media: The Effects of Television, Video Games and Computers (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994) and Marsha Kinder, Playing with Power in Movies, Television and Video Games (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991); Tapscott, Growing Up Digital, pp. 159–183. 57. For a source on several thousand educational packages, see http://www.edmark.com. 58. All the data in this paragraph is based on a study conducted by the Pew Internet and American Life Project, “13 Million Americans ‘freeload’ Music on the Internet,” Press Release, June 8, 2000, Pew Foundation. 59. The case that much of what is going on in the economy is increasingly being converted into entertaining activities has been made by media expert Michael J. Wolf, The Entertainment Economy: How Mega-Media Forces Are Transforming Our Lives (New York: Times Books, 1999). 60. Kimberly Parker and Claudia Deane, “Ten Years of the Pew News Interest Index,” a paper presented at the 1997 Meeting of


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the American Association for Public Opinion Research, and reprinted by the AAPOR on the Internet at their site, http:// www.peoplepress.org/aapor. 61. For an account of the early and rapid impact of CNN, see Bruce M. Owen and Steven S. Wildman, Video Economics (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992): 172–178. 62. There is now an excellent account of C-SPAN; see Stephen Frantzich and John Sullivan, The C-SPAN Revolution (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1996), on the demographics of who watches the channel, pp. 219–253. 63. “Multichannel News: Industry Networks,” in Multichannel Online, http://www.multichannel.com/networks. 64. Wolf, The Entertainment Economy, pp. 109–110. 65. Based on a Pew study summarized in a press release it issued on June 8, 1998, “Pew Study: Cable-News Viewership Up,” at http://204.243.31/cgiwin/csearch.exe…y%2fl1998%2fjune08%2 fpew24d%2ehtm, or simply go to the home page for Multichannel News that carries TV industry press releases (http://www. multichannel.com). 66. Staci D. Kramer, “How Top 10 Network Gainers Did It,” Multichannel Online, June 14, 1999, http://www.multichannel.com. 67. Wolf, The Entertainment Economy, pp. 288–289. 68. “MTV Study: Young Are Living Convergence,” Multichannel Online, http://www.multichannel.com. 69. Bruce M. Owen, The Internet Challenge to Television (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999): 40. 70. Ibid. 71. Owen’s book explores the economic and business models for satellite and wireless communications very thoroughly, using very current data, Ibid. 72. For example, see Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (New York: Viking, 1986), How to Watch TV News (New York: Penguin, 1992), and Technology: The Surrender of Culture to Technology (New York: Vintage, 1993). 73. Jorge Reina Schement and Terry Curtis, Tendencies and Tensions of the Information Age: The Production and Distribution

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of Information in the United States (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1995): 183. This is an outstanding book on the role of information workers and emergence of the American version of the information-based economy. 74. Steven M. Gelber, Hobbies: Leisure and the Culture of Work in America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999): xi. 75. Ibid., 23.

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INFORMATION AND RELIGION

Morality is necessary for the existence of republican government. Religion is necessary for morality. Therefore, religion is necessary for the continued existence of the republic.

C

—ANGELIQUE DE TOCQUEVILLE, 1835

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heck into any hotel in the United States and open the drawer of the nightstand and you will find a Bible, published by the Gideons and donated free to the hotel. For decades this has been a practice across the entire nation. In fact, one cannot imagine a hotel room fully furnished without that Bible. Why do we have this custom? The American nation places special emphasis on religious matters, with Bible societies constantly looking for ways to reinforce pious religious practices and convert the wayward. The Gideon Bible is as American as apple pie and the Fourth of July. Now, contrast that with a church in Texas, about which we will have more to say in the pages ahead. Pews are connected to the Internet, the church has a Web site, and it points to other religious 249

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sites. Many editions of the Bible are now available online on the Internet. In fact, Internet-based religious activities have become the hot new area in American religion, similar in scope to the surge in the 1960s of folk services with guitars and drums. From the beginning of this country’s history, information has played a consistently prominent role in religious affairs. The attitude of Americans toward religion is analogous to their law-abiding practices and their general willingness to voluntarily pay taxes. They take their religion very seriously, usually respecting the variety of denominations that dot the American landscape. They place great importance on the role of religion in their lives. Americans are also some of the most extensive users of information technology in their religious practices. Polls and studies by religious, commercial, academic, and government agencies overwhelmingly point out that they are active in all kinds of religious affairs. The studies have looked at rates of attendance at organized religious events (such as church services on Sunday), and the extent to which Americans say they believe in religion, a God, and are members of specific religious denominations. Put in less prosaic terms, religion has always played a very important role in American society.1 De Tocqueville observed essentially the same thing in the 1830s. The role of information, publications, and electronic media, including the Internet, in American religious activities reflects the same patterns of high info-content evident in the work and leisure of the nation. Indeed, the classic example of an early information worker in the United States is that of the minister, often one of the best read, most highly educated members in a community until well past World War II. Understanding the role of literacy in communicating the values of religion, particularly of Christianity, is essential to any appreciation of how information is used in the United States. In fact, if we were to arrange the chapters of this book in descending order of importance, the one on religion would appear before Chapter 5, the one on work. But can that be true, given all the evidence we have of American society becoming hedonistic or, at a minimum, obsessed with material possessions and entertainment?

CHAPTER 7 • INFORMATION AND RELIGION

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By looking at a few pieces of information, we can begin to measure the extent to which religion is such an important feature of American culture. Over 90 percent of Americans report that they believe in God and in an afterlife. Even the most pessimistic surveyors today say three-fourths believe in life after death. Routinely, Americans report to pollsters that over half of those surveyed attend some sort of religious service on a regular basis, a fourth only on occasion.2 George Gallup Jr., the president of the Gallup Organization, one of the most prestigious polling agencies in the United States, interviewed in December 1998, said that the degree of belief in God and participation in religious activities had remained fairly constant over the past half century (close to 95%). Gallup, who is not prone to forecasting, suggested that his data pointed to a newly emerging emphasis on religion: I think this is a new era of discovery we’re about to enter. The emphasis in this century has been on outer space. I think it’s going to shift to inner space. If you really haven’t dug into the power of prayer, the importance of religious experiences, the quality of saintliness, you know all of those areas have been sort of off-limits [in] this century. I think there’s going to be a really, really new dramatic focus into the power of the faith factor.3

The high degree of belief in a God, and in an afterlife, normally in the United States described in Christian terms, points to the fact that religious belief is so common that religious belief is a fundamental feature of this nation’s values. While this element has ebbed and flowed over time, and many of its manifestations have too, it remains today, nonetheless, a characteristic of sufficient importance to warrant being studied alongside such other topics as work, entertainment, and politics. That people practice their faith in so many different ways simply confirms the polyglot nature of American culture. The practice included coming together on a regular basis for prayer and learning; in other words, for sharing information, reinforcing values, and enjoying common experiences. Religious patterns reinforce some of our earlier findings about

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how polyglot Americans work, play, and use information and their technologies. As in other aspects of American life, we see extensive evidence of reliance on information and every major available information technology tool at work. Diversity of religious expression contributes to our sense of the nation’s secularism, creating the perception that religiously influenced community life may not be as evident today as Americans thought once existed. Yet, in fact, Americans are more religious today than they were during the age of the American Revolution, when basic constitutional safeguards were imposed at the state and federal level to ensure freedom of religion.4 This is not the time or place to discuss the quality of religious life and beliefs, or the positive or negative consequences of the use of information technology. Others have done that well; many are cited in the endnotes to this chapter. What we have to accomplish here, however, is to gain an understanding of the role of information in American religious activities. This mission is made especially important because for so many decades the Bible was perhaps the single most important source of literacy and reading in the United States. While there always were many other religious publications, the Bible has played a special role in American culture. It has influenced the quality and extent of literacy, the role of books as the ultimate keepers of information, the widespread acceptance of books as artifacts of information, and it has provided a shared body of knowledge most relevant to daily life. Students of the role of information in America have usually underestimated the extent of the Bible’s use as a tool for dissemination of literacy, knowledge, education, and a widely shared set of social values. There will have to be a greater acknowledgment that the Bible facilitated the creation of a set of attitudes favorable to our reliance on information with which to conduct our affairs, particularly in the long period from the 17th century to the start of World War II.


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PATTERNS FROM THE AGE OF PAPER Most students of American history love to quote Alexis de Tocqueville because he did such a good job in the 1830s of describing those features of American society that have persisted to the present. His descriptions of American attitudes toward democracy and political freedoms, focus on work and the values of self-enterprise, and so forth were always right on target. He observed that the American people were religious; in fact more so than many other European nations. On this point, however, his equally bright younger sister, who never published a grand volume on American culture, criticized him for underestimating the role of religion in America. Angelique de Tocqueville minced no words: “On my arrival in America it was the religious aspect of the country that first struck me.” Further, “I observed at once one point on which all, or nearly all, were in agreement, including the Baptists, otherwise reluctant to employ the force of the state to enforce religious obligations. That was the duty to maintain the solemnity of the day associated with the Resurrection of Christ, the day described by statute as ‘the Lord’s Day’,” citing a Massachusetts law of her day.5 She noticed that throughout New England, laws required government officials to start public events with prayer. The same practice has continued to the present in the U.S. Congress, despite a raft of court rulings separating church and state. The central political issue Americans all call up is the care with which their society has separated “church and state.” Angelique, however, had a more defined insight than her brother, which should strike a reader at the start of the 21st century as very cogent. She is worth quoting at length: If I were asked what conclusions I would draw from the American experience in the half century it has been a republic, I would say first that the European expression “church and state” has little relevance in America; for there are many churches and many degrees of governmental power. Church and state, although the words occur in the constitution of Massachusetts, are not terms employed by the national constitution; by their abstraction and antinomy they obscure the overlap that exists. Rather than church and state they are persons who

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are, in varying degrees, believers in various forms of Christianity, and these persons are voters, legislators, and magistrates, both executive and judicial. Their religion often operates upon them to affect their action at the polls, in the legislative chamber, and in the executive and judicial branches of government. No watertight mental compartments exist by which their religious ideas are isolated from their civic responsibilities.6

One final observation by Alexis’s perceptive sister clarifies the essence of the value of religion and governmental policy toward it: The Americans have learned from the hideous experience of Europe and from a few experiences of their own as colonists that the persecution of Christian sects by one another is as destructive of religion as it is destructive of the charity that must distinguish the conduct of Christians. It is this experience that has been enshrined in their national and state constitutions’ recognition of the liberty of conscience and the right to exercise religion freely.7

This respect for and tolerance of various opinions and sects is directly linked to the American practice of allowing the free flow of information. They have long recognized that to constrain the flow of one was to deny access to the other. That is why, for over two centuries, Americans have routinely linked religious freedom to freedom of information, and access to information also providing freedom to follow one’s own faith. The variety of religious practices that could exist in the kind of political atmosphere described by de Tocqueville ensured that no one religion would ever dominate the nation’s politics, thereby avoiding the temptation of one sect to impose its practices and beliefs on the others. A little history provides additional context for understanding the role of information in American religion. First, for purposes of this chapter, religion refers to Christianity because the various denominations of this faith have dominated American life to the present. It is not until the second half of the 19th century that non-Christians came into the nation in number (e.g., Chinese), and it was not until after World War II that non-Christians become statistically significant as a population. What about African slaves? Their native religions were


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summarily stamped out by their owners and, in time, African Americans embraced Christianity with a reverence and enthusiasm that could shame many white citizens. But that is another story outside my point of focus.8

ORIGINS OF AMERICAN RELIGIOUS PRACTICES Early settlers in the New World, from the Spanish in what would later be called Latin America to the various English sects that occupied North America, always wanted to practice their brand of religion and to impose it on the Indians. Religion, government, and colonial elites, therefore, worked hand in glove all through the first three centuries of European occupation. Of special interest is the role of the Puritans, because so many New Englanders adopted their basic beliefs in one fashion or another. It was this community of Puritans that so profoundly influenced the role of religion in the future United States, working with Anglican neighbors in the southern part of North America. They believed that people had to rely on God for salvation. Second, the Bible was the ultimate authority; believers had to carry out the precepts of human behavior as spelled out in the “Good Book.” They also believed that God wanted society to operate as a unified whole, with religion and government, individuals and the public, all interrelated. In addition to church services, Puritans articulated their beliefs through the political practices of their communities, through the education they gave each other, and in a large body of writings. Historians of American religion are almost all in total agreement that the influence of Puritan beliefs on the religious practices of the nation was profound and enduring.9 The fact that the Puritans published so much goes far to explain their influence, but there was also one other consequence—it made their home city, Boston, the publishing capital of the United States until well after the Civil War. Many of the educational programs introduced to the nation also came out of Boston, covering all ages from elementary to universitylevel training, with much of it modeled on various aspects of Puritan practices reflecting their beliefs. We can blame the

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Puritans, for example, for our moral dilemma over the need to work versus our desire to go on vacation. One historian put the problem this way: “The Puritan moral vision was so strenuous that almost all Americans since have been forced to react to it in some way. Throughout the mid-19th century, Puritan morality was widely thought to provide the foundation for the great success of the United States.”10 Despite numerous attempts to push back Puritan ways in the 20th century, their moral energy has echoed down through the years. The requirement that Americans be able to read is an example. As early as 1642, the colonial legislature in Massachusetts passed a law requiring that children be taught to “read & understand the principles of religion & the capitall lawes of this country.” In 1647, it passed a law mandating towns with populations of fifty households or more to hire a teacher. Therein lie the origins of the public education, but also an American expectation that its citizens must know how to read. By the mid-19th century, American public officials had also recognized that literacy was becoming increasingly essential for the functioning of representative government. The Puritans also reinforced the practice so evident even into the late 20th century that one should go to church on Sunday. By coming to a “meeting house” one could obtain instruction, develop networks and bonds within the community, and reinforce their shared religious beliefs. This practice of learning and praying together on a regular basis became a pattern adopted by all the major Christian denominations in the United States, a practice Christians also followed around the world.11 Because these were planned events, with organized topics of discussion, they differed substantially from the more hit-or-miss casual conversations that took place in post offices, which normally also took place about once a week throughout the 19th century. By the time of the American Revolution, patriots, and particularly their leaders, had acquired from Puritanism a serious purpose and tone applied to their devotion to public service. Thus the combination of personal virtue and responsibility, a desire for liberty ensured through public policy, and frugality, became basic ingredients in the newly formed society called


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the United States. The outlines of how the American political system firmly embedded in it freedom of religion is a familiar story. The U.S. Constitution has very clear language on the matter: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” What is not so clear is the religious paper trail that this section of the Constitution now made possible. Yet collections of such religious ephemera exist in great quantity. Religious publications had a profound effect on print media during the 19th century. The raw numbers of publications alone would guarantee religion an important place in the history of information in the United States. Between 1780 and 1830, for example, almost 600 new religious magazines were published. With the exception of Mississippi, citizens in every state could read locally published religious magazines. Some had large circulation, such as the Methodist weekly called The Christian Advocate and Journal and Zion’s Herald and a monthly nondenominational tract called the American National Preacher, each with a circulation of over 25,000 by 1830. Bible societies also published thousands of pamphlets and many editions of the Bible, often in highly affordable formats. The American Bible Society and the American Tract Society, in support of missionary initiatives, did an enormous amount of publishing of Bibles, religious tracts, training materials, and other publications. To sense the volume of publications involved, we have only to turn to the American Bible Society. In the period 1829–1831, it printed one million copies of the Scriptures. To put this achievement in perspective, the population of the U.S. was only 13 million people at the time. The other organization, the American Tract Society, in the same period published five pages for every human being living in the United States.12 That quantity of material, if it were to be published today (with a North American population of nearly 300 million people) would result in 1.5 billion pieces of paper. Historians of the period have looked at diaries, letters, and other records to see what effects this mountain of material had on the American population. They have concluded that it did make the population more pious than would otherwise

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have been the case; that these publications continuously reinforced religious practices (such as regular attendance at church services). They clearly documented that Americans also extensively used these materials in their educational programs.13 As an historian of the Bible, Paul C. Gutjahr, put it, “For well over two hundred years, if any book touched the lives of Americans, odds are it was the bible.” In fact, that was so much the case that when he set out to study the role of the Bible in American life from 1776 to 1880, he focused on the decline of the dominance of the Bible from nearly 100 percent of all reading to some lesser figure. But during the entire period of his study, the Bible still held dominant market share.14 Nineteenth-century evangelists also had a profound effect on American education in general. Such voluntary associations as the American Sunday School Union (founded in 1824 in Philadelphia), sent missionaries to wilderness areas on the frontier and published teaching materials for their use. Some 150 years later, the Southern Baptist Convention was publishing weekly training materials for its 17 million members in the United States, even using computers and satellites to do the job of distributing these publications. The American Sunday School Union established more than 70,000 Sunday Schools in the 19th century.15 In addition to these schools, almost all colleges founded in the United States before the Civil War were of some Christian denomination. The religious perspectives of the sects that founded these colleges influenced the curriculums and teaching materials they used. Prior to 1820, 70 percent of all colleges were Congregationalist, Presbyterian, or Episcopalian. By the time of the Civil War, Methodists and Baptists, the new up-and-coming denominations of the period, ran a third of all institutions of higher learning. Like their better-established rivals, these latter two denominations founded colleges to train ministers. A typical example was the founding of Randolph-Macon College in 1835 by Methodists in Virginia. The college is now the oldest continuously operating Methodist institution of higher learning. Until World War II, a very large proportion of its students had either started their studies with the intent of becoming ministers or actually went on to be ordained. Late in the 20th cen-


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tury, the college still provided relatively “free” education to those students who were preparing for the ministry. During the course of its history, this college, like so many others around the United States, required all students regardless of major to take some religious instruction (with a Methodist flavor) and to attend religious services and meetings organized by the college. Those practices continued for nearly 150 years before being eased.16 In addition to religiously oriented schools and colleges, elite intellectual magazines were predominantly religious in nature. Every major religion published them. After the Civil War, with the inevitable breakup of many religions into Northern and Southern variants, all continued to publish and circulate widely magazines and journals as hot publishing properties. Religious books consistently did very well throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. Every new wave of religious emphasis left a trail of publications. When for example, fundamentalism became popular again in the period 1930 to 1990, it used books as one way to reach audiences. Its advocates also used radio and television, about which I will have more to say in following pages. Even in recent times, religious books have continued to enjoy wide popularity. Americans buy many books on religious themes. In 1989, for example, they spent $737 million on this kind of literature. In 1995, after several years of steady growth in sales, Americans purchased $1.03 billion in religious books. Inflation did not fully account for the growth in sales because 131.7 million religious books were sold in 1989; 154.2 million were sold in 1995; up by 17.08 percent in unit sales, figures that exceeded the nation’s rate of inflation. In addition to sales of Bibles (21.3 million in 1989, and 25.5 million in 1995), there was a slew of different religious tracts: works of inspiration, biographies, autobiographies, histories, and theological discourses, accounting for faster sales growth than Bibles. Combined sales of Bibles and other religious books annually exceeded 170 million volumes by the end of the century. That quantity is almost one book for every two Americans each year. Almost every TV evangelist had a book out. In the same period, religious books accounted for just over 5 percent of all new book titles.17

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Newspapers, magazines, books, and teaching materials did not just enhance literacy, they helped mold the values of people living in the United States. As religions became pluralistic through the course of the 19th century, so too did the types of publications needed to support their activities. The paperbased sources of information on religions are very important because they also provided information and set expectations concerning values and ideas in the years before the arrival of radio and television. Print media, along with oral communications and family practices, sustained religious interest in Americans.18 Who was what in the 20th century? By 1926, 37 percent of those who reported going to church were Roman Catholic, another 16 percent said they were Methodist or Baptist. All other denominations had single digit representation. But clearly, the vast majority continued to be Christians. The big change in the 20th century was the growth of the Roman Catholic population, finally laying claim to being the largest denomination in what in the previous century had been an overwhelmingly Protestant nation. By 1988, in a nation of 246 million people, almost an even 55 million residents claimed to be Catholic. In the same year, nearly 15 million reported being Southern Baptists. Other denominations that did well in post-World War II United States (using 1988 data) included: Assemblies of God (2 million), Mormons (4 million), Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod (4.6 million), Evangelical Lutherans (5.2 million), Episcopal Church (2.4 million), United Methodist (just over 9 million), Presbyterian Church (slightly less than 3 million), United Church (1.6 million) and Disciples of Christ (just over 1 million). Every other denomination had less than a million members each.19 Once again, Christianity dominated the American religious scene. In each case, looking at the differences, for example, between the early 1800s and 1926, or between the 1920s and the late 1900s, every time a new denomination came along, or an existing one expanded, it published massive amounts of materials to support its congregations and to attract new adherents. Common patterns of behavior also persisted. Church attendance has long been considered by all denominations as a


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crucial strategy for ensuring that their key messages were delivered, because not everyone was going to sit down and read a religious book or magazine. Oral tradition was a powerful one in American churches, especially in poor congregations (e.g., Southern black churches). So having a Bible was never enough. During the American Revolution, attendance at religious services dropped from roughly 40 percent to about 10 percent from the best we can tell. During the 19th century attendance grew in popularity again and kept rising. Attendance remained relatively stable during the second half of the 20th century. We know from surveys that about 41 percent of the American public claimed they went to church in 1937. In 1989, 43 percent made the same claim. Attendance was a tad higher in the mid-1950s, and around 40 percent during the early years of the 1940s. The older one was, the more likely they would attend religious services. In the late 1900s, Protestant attendance at services kept rising (from 30% in 1940 to 37% in 1989), while for Catholics it dropped (from 65% in 1940 to 50% in 1989).20 Yet in 1989, more people claimed to belong to an established religion than attended (69% claimed membership in 1989). In the late 1980s, a Gallup poll indicated that 15 percent of adults read the Bible daily and demonstrated knowledge of the Scriptures. In 1950, 10 percent made that claim. Belief in the literal meaning of the Bible, however, declined in the last quarter of the 20th century, primarily among Roman Catholics who tend to follow theological interpretations of the Scriptures more so than to rely directly on the Bible as Protestants do. Yet, in 1988, despite the rise in Catholicism, over 50 percent of Americans polled believed in the literal message of the Bible as “God’s word,” without equivocation.21 That is one reason why we have to discuss the special role of the Bible in American life.

THE SPECIAL ROLE OF THE BIBLE Zed Chewning (1868–1966) was in many ways an ordinary man. He was raised in Spottsylvania County in rural central Virginia. He set out to seek his fortune in the 1890s by walk-

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ing along the railroad track from Spotsylvania Court House, site of an important Civil War battle, to the town of Orange, in the county of the same name. This county, too, was the site of many battles in the 1860s, from the Battle of the Wilderness to a cavalry duel right on Main Street in Orange. These events took place within the living memory of most adults senior to Chewning when he moved to the county seat of Orange. Many of his childhood neighbors had clear memories of life in antebellum Virginia that were the subject of household conversations as he was growing up. In the years that followed his move to Orange, Chewning, equipped with only a few years of formal education, built up a successful furniture business in a town of less than 1,000 residents. In time he married and raised children, including Zip, who went on to become one of the youngest colonels in the U.S. Army during World War II; he was still in his twenties. But Zed is the one we need to focus on. While the colonel was a graduate of the Virginia Polytechnical Institute (VPI), in part because his father valued education, Zed was not illiterate. During the course of his long life, as an adult he read the Bible every day. Before he died he had read it cover to cover just over 13 times. Zed was a businessman, a furniture dealer, a father and husband, and by his own reckoning, not a profoundly religious man. Reading the Bible, going to church, and attempting to be a good citizen were what one did in life. He normally did not read other books, but during his working years he read materials related to his profession and the Orange Review, his local weekly newspaper. Chewning’s central intellectual activity, the one that required his use of reading skills, focused on the Bible. He had his own copy, well-worn to be sure, and he claimed it was his most personal of possessions. A few years before his death in 1966, when he was about the age of 90, I asked him why he read the Bible so often. He replied, in so many words, “because it is the word of God.” The statement was absolute and confident. He told me that life’s lessons were to be found in that book. I am sharing Zed Chewning’s experience because his was a voice I could hear literally from both the 19th and 20th centuries. His habits, as he told me, were those of his childhood family; they too read the Bible when he was growing up in


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post-Civil War America, although they read it out loud with the entire clan listening. In his old age, he read quietly to himself for several hours each day. His son and wife attended Sunday services at a nearby church. For years, his next door neighbor was the Baptist minister. The Bible was central to Zed Chewning as it had been for so many members of his parents’ generation and of his own time. The universality of the authority attributed to the Bible has a long history in the United States, just as it did in postReformation Europe. But before we get to that, we should also recognize that the Bible remains a special document, an important source of information for Americans at the start of the 21st century. Before the reader thinks otherwise, another little story gives us a peek at the special role of the Bible. A century after Chewning walked along the railroad tracks to Orange, CNN reported on what it called a new financial trend, Biblioeconomics, citing a new “gospel of finance,” in which “groups using [the] Bible as guide to money management are flourishing.” The idea is simple: draw financial lessons from the Bible to govern what we do today. Organizations such as Crown Ministries and Christian Financial Concepts, two nonprofits, teach people how to manage their funds using Christian principles. They cite the fact that the Bible— the central source of their teachings—has between 1,600 and 2,500 references to personal finance. These teach such lessons as avoiding debt, paying it off if one is indebted, and managing assets effectively, recognizing that asset management is a form of stewardship.22 Larry Burkett, founder of Christian Financial Concepts, is also the host of a half-hour radio program called Money Matters. His broadcasts are carried by 400 stations across the nation. About 110,000 people called in to the program in 1998, and he was on track to receive that many calls in 1999. The Crown Ministeries reported that in that same year of 1998, 27,000 people had enrolled in its 12-week Bible-centered training program on budget management. Burkett’s Web site is visited about 1 million times a month, while donations to his organization have grown from $4.5 million in 1996 to $7.1 million in 1998. He points out to his listeners that “the Bible

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teaches us that when we borrow money, we can’t be late in paying it back.” He argues that being debt-free is the best financial strategy, citing various admonitions within the Bible as justification: “If you look at many of the economic textbooks from the turn of the century, from Harvard University for example, they still quoted the Bible a lot.”23 While such training programs and admonitions had been a common element in American religious practices for decades, CNN reported that interest in such teachings had been steadily increasing during the 1990s. Interest in religious matters also extended to press coverage, a topic important to observers of the American scene today because of the impressions it leaves us about so many topics. The Center for Media and Public Affairs looked at religious coverage by the American press for the period 1969 through 1998, examining such publications as The New York Times, Washington Post, and Newsweek, and such electronic media as ABC, CBS, and NBC evening newscasts. It found that press coverage ranged from secular issues related to, for instance, political issues tied to religion, to topics concerning faith and spirituality. Protestants still received the majority of coverage (38%), Catholics were next (28%), but the press reported on all major faiths. The national American press during most of the 20th century did not appear overly interested in religious topics when they had wars, scandals, and politics to discuss. But their interest grew at the end of the century. This same study found that the proportion of major media reporters and journalists who regularly attend religious services went from 14 percent in 1980 to 30 percent in 1995—hard evidence that the liberal, agnostic reputation of the American press was inaccurate. The number of reporters claiming to have no religious affiliation declined from 50 percent to 22 percent.24 Throughout American history, arguments for or against political, social, and economic issues were often buttressed by referring to passages in the Bible. A learned person was always someone who could deftly quote from the Bible. No Christian sermon was ever complete without quotes directly from the same source. In fact, ministers of all Christian faiths have rou-


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tinely been taught how to prepare sermons rooted in lessons from the Bible. During the Civil War, the “nation’s book” was often used as a source of confirmation that either the North or the South was just in its cause. Slavery, preservation of the Union, and military events were defended and understood on the basis of the “Good Book.” Lincoln, in his second inaugural address, stated the obvious: “both sides read the same Bible and pray to the same God.” The great historian of American Christianity, Mark A. Noll, observed that use of the Bible in the Civil War was similar to the role it played at other times: “Northerners and Southerners both exploited the Bible for the conflict.”25 By the time of the Civil War, when Zed Chewning’s parents were coming of age, the Bible had become the major source of instruction on Christianity. Sales figures cited earlier in this chapter hinted at the trend. In fact, one of the reasons why so many new denominations, such as the Adventists, Mormons, and others, could appear in the United States between the end of the American Revolution and the start of the Civil War, was because each was able to provide different interpretations of the Scriptures as presented in the Bible. In short, religious discourse in America became rooted in discussions about the contents of the Bible during the early years of the Republic. Between 1777 and 1957, more than 2,500 different English-language editions of the Bible were published and distributed in the United States. The two most popular editions were the King James version for Protestants and the Douay-Reims for Catholics. In 1901, Americans began reading editions that departed from the antiquated English phrasing and tone of the King James with publication of the American Standard version. However, not until after World War II did that version become widely popular in the United States. In recent years, among a large variety of new translations, some of the most popular included the Living Bible and the Good News Bible. Noll observed that by the 1980s “the study and reading of Scripture has [sic] now become a nonsectarian free-for-all in which Catholics are unusually active.”26 Often one member of a family gave a Bible to another. Bibles were also given away

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by organizations. The American Bible Society does this as part of its missionary work. The organization claimed the prodigious accomplishment of having distributed nearly 4 million Bibles since its founding in 1816. The Bible influenced how Americans spoke, wrote, and talked, even how they perceived themselves. Parents named their children after people in the Bible. New communities took their names out of the same book—communities such as Zoar, Ohio (from Gen. 13:10) or 47 different American towns called Bethel. Salem has been used 95 times, and Eden by 61 towns. Americans cited the Bible in defense of their political positions, as we saw with the Civil War. Slave owners preached how their subjects should obey them, citing the Bible. African Americans were especially drawn to the Bible, particularly to the Old Testament and the likes of Moses, drawing analogies to Biblical slave stories and journeys out of bondage to the “Promised Land.” These were references to hope and to a better future. Politicians, philosophers, and scholars have all used the Bible to define the United States as the “New Eden,” “New Israel,” a “New World,” and the “Promised Land.” Our “New Canaan” was a rich land with abundance of food, wealth, and freedom. After studying the role of Christianity in America, Noll concluded that “the Bible has become part and parcel of North American culture because it has been constantly read, discussed, and studied.”27 His observations about this source of information are worth quoting at length: The most prominent role of the Bible in American history has almost certainly been its presence as the source (or at least a reference point) for sermons, homilies, meditations, or harangues in church after church, week after week, throughout the length and breadth of the land. The Bible has informed the spirituals of blacks and Shakers as well as more formal hymnody, provided material for artwork appealing to elites and the masses, served as a textbook in many schools and a decisive influence on the curriculum in many more, been a factor in legal decisions and jurisprudential reasoning, and provided the raw material for historical novels, plays, mass art, country music, humor, broadcasting, children’s literature, and much more.28


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As late as the mid-1980s, 47 percent of adult Americans claimed to have read the Bible at least once a week, while 20 percent reported doing so two or three times a week. More important, 55 percent of those interviewed by Gallup claimed the Bible was the “actual” or “inspired” word of God, just like Zed Chewning said. These same people could name the four gospels and knew that Jesus had preached the Sermon on the Mount.29 The Bible also played a different information role of a distinctly nonreligious nature. Probably because of the lack of paper and notebooks in many American homes in the 19th century, families recorded births, marriages, and deaths either on the pages (often blank or printed for this purpose) that separated the Old from the New Testaments, or inside on the front and back covers of the book. The “Family Bible” was more than just the book read by the family together throughout that century; it was also the record book of the ebb and flow of family members. That practice continued long past World War II. In addition, it was not uncommon to sandwich within the pages of this book other important family documents such as wills, an old photograph, a newspaper article (such as an obituary), a letter, and even a pressed flower or two. Thus the family Bible also served as a file cabinet for a few precious documents important to a family. These traditions were established early in the 19th century and practiced by all Christian faiths and ethnic groups. When the Bible was filled up with birth and death data in those pages between the Old and New Testaments, it would often be the occasion for the family to acquire a new Bible, keeping the old one as a legacy. You can find big German-language Bibles with such inscriptions in Minnesota and Wisconsin, and similar English-language Bibles in such Southern regions as Virginia and Alabama. Because the Bible was the source of so much practical information, Americans had long been in the habit of giving copies to people starting new phases in their lives. Newly married couples invariably were given their “Family Bible” to help them raise Christian families and in which to record the arrival of children. Young Catholics celebrating the sacrament of

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Confirmation were frequently given a Bible by a relative, a practice still widespread at the start of the 21st century. The custom of giving a Bible to children, newlyweds, and travelers, like the practice of recording births, marriages, and deaths, existed within all Christian denominations and ethnic groups, cut across the entire continent (including Canada), and dates back to the founding of the United States. In short, the Bible was both a widely used religious source of information and an information artifact that provided data about living practices and family history. If a family had only one book in the house, invariably it was a Bible.

ROLE OF RADIO AND TV The clergy in America was not shy about adopting every new information technology that came along, including radio and television. “The unprecedented linking of 20th-century technology with Christ’s commandment ‘Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature’ (Mark 16:15), has created a dynamic new phenomenon that I call ‘the electric church’.”30 Ben Armstrong, an advocate of using radio and television to promote Christianity in the United States, formulated the label “electric church,” which describes the American penchant for applying simultaneously various technologies in support of religious behavior. Alongside such Age of Paper information tools as the Bible and teaching manuals, it did not take long for Americans to use radio and television as ways of practicing their faiths, learning about religious issues, and promoting their views. We have even coined a term for it: televangelism. At the same time that Americans turned to the radio for music, baseball games, and political news, ministers began preaching over the airwaves. Americans tuned in to their programs, making some of them national celebraties. Later they did the same with television. But getting on the air in the 1920s was not a simple task for any minister. It was easy enough to publish guest homilies and church service schedules in local newspapers; in fact most still do that today. But with few radio stations and the need for large audiences to jus-


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tify the expense and the required fund raising, radio programming reflected the economic realities of the new medium—delivering one message to many, rather than many messages to many (a feature, made possible later, however, with the Internet). On the one hand, it was this feature of being able to deliver a consistent message to many that led ministers to view radio as a way of expanding denominations, getting a consistent message out to listeners. On the other hand, that uniformity also allowed listeners to share common messages, views, and identity. Until the radio became available to ministers, the only consistent message delivered to Americans came either from what the Bible contained or from the Catholic Church, which communicated through its highly disciplined delivery of its own theology.31 Radio made it possible for Americans to participate in a renewal of religious integrity and practices, leading to such terms and movements in the 20th century as “revivalism” and “born-again.” In this tradition of urban religious renewal grounded in electronic communications, a raft of new religious celebrities emerged. These included Billy Graham, Oral Roberts, Rex Humbard, and Jimmy Swaggart. Some, such as Graham and Roberts, remained highly respected Americans, revered for their sincere Christian ethics, while others, such as Swaggart, fell prey to their celebrity status and the temptations that came with it. However, leading electronic preachers used both electrical means and such traditional forms as books and magazines to deliver their messages. The lessons learned using radio were later carried over to television by these same preachers and the networks that broadcast them. This is not the place to go into a detailed history of religion on the radio, but it is important to recognize the role this new medium played in teaching Americans about their religious beliefs. Radio promoted various perspectives on religion, and, depending on the effectiveness of an on-air preacher, could influence the expansion or contraction of interest in a particular aspect of religious belief. This pattern was most obvious with the increased interest in fundamentalism evident within Protestant circles during the 20th century. By the mid-1920s it had been in decline after nearly a half century of growth. Its

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anti-intellectual and rural orientation bumped up against an age of rapid urbanization. Then along came the radio, which became a wonderful tool for communications. Fundamentalism became nondenominational as people of various faiths listened to the same programs on the radio, particularly in the 1930s as the number of radios in American homes climbed. The radio made it possible for people to participate in religious activities without having to go to a physical church; thus bypassing an established denomination. It could happen in a car, at home, in a bar and while on vacation. Programs reflected a broad range of offerings, including music, preaching of sermons, and teaching sessions on various religious themes and aspects of the Bible. Radio brought mass media to religion. In the 1930s, for example, Charles Fuller became a hot property with his radio program The Old-Fashioned Revival Hour. It combined music and fundamentalist perspectives that were transmitted to thousands of listeners, thereby continuing the old tent-show techniques of the 19th century. Often, coordinated print and radio campaigns were carried out, as in the case of Billy Graham, beginning in the 1940s, with his Billy Graham Crusades.32 Americans listened, sent in their contributions to pay for the broadcasts, and a new form of religious communications and entertainment became a mainstay of American life that is still popular. Fuller and the others learned to combine radio broadcasting with mail appeals and printed publications. The Communications Act of 1934 required radio stations to broadcast nonentertainment programs; religious broadcasting fit the bill and so owners of stations looked for programming, leading to everything from classes on the air to traditional religious services that could be beamed out. Once in a while a political problem would occur, such as the notoriety of Father Charles Coughlin. In the late 1930s he became the first radio religious broadcaster to be embroiled in national politics. His case led the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), which licensed radio stations, to issue guidelines in 1941, imposing a semblance of political neutrality on certain types of broadcasting.33


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While radio remained a major source of religious information and activities for many Americans for most of the 20th century, most were even more drawn to television. Radio broadcasters and preachers applied lessons learned to television. However, Americans learned a few lessons too. For example, they were conditioned between the 1920s and the beginning of the1950s to receive some of their religious instruction across the airwaves, so when television came along they were prepared to accept additional religious messages in this new electronic format. In fact, it now was better because one could see the preacher, singers, settings, and text broadcast over the air. Television was closer to the physical realities of the normal church experience than was radio. Often, Americans would listen to both radio and television. Listening to the radio in automobiles not only ensured that radio-based religious programming would remain important to the present, but accounts significantly for the continued popularity of radio broadcasting in an age of television and the Internet. Radio in the 1990s had larger audiences than at any time in its history, with programming dominated by two elements: music and information/news. Some of the leading lights of radio religion, such as Roberts and Graham, made the transition to television. If people liked Graham over the radio they loved him on television, where they got to see him, not just listen to his voice. The formats developed for radio continued on television, such as, preaching, music, Bible instruction, fund raising, mailings, and sale of books and magazines. But the new medium also made possible other options, such as an increased use of such “show-biz” entertainment, as more elaborate music, attention to how people are dressed, and stage settings. What became possible with television is illustrated by the case of Bishop Fulton J. Sheen (1895–1979). He is a good example to look at because he was one of the first mass media (TV) celebrities in the field of religion. He is credited with having been the first person to conduct a televised religious service, done in 1940. In the 1930s he had been widely heard on the radio, primarily on the Catholic Hour, broadcast on

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Sunday evenings by NBC. The program was very popular, routinely listened to by 4 million people. So he had a base of popularity that, when television came along, gave him both an audience and experience to move to the new medium, which he did in 1951. This Catholic bishop began a weekly program called Life Is Worth Living. Listened to by millions, he preached Christian (Catholic) messages, answered questions about Christian subjects and, because of his excellent speaking skills, entertained. His messages were further spread through newsletters, articles, and audiotapes all through the 1950s and 1960s.34 Sheen was not alone on the airwaves. Billy Graham was there too, probably one of the best known of the TV ministers. Religion on television has been extensively studied. It represents one of the most consistently popular genres of broadcasting, if only to a limited yet repeat audience representing 10 to 20 percent of the viewing public. There are those who argue that television has had a greater effect on how religion is practiced in the United States than has religion on TV. This school of thought argues that denominational differences were broken down as TV evangelists delivered messages that were not particularly Methodist, Baptist, or Catholic, for example. This argument included reducing differences between Jewish and Christian beliefs. Politics and religion get mixed as well with, for example, the “Christian Right” mobilized to vote for conservative politicians.35 According to national surveys, viewers are older Americans, religious, and politically conservative. Hard figures on audiences are difficult to find, but the data cited tend to be accepted by those knowledgeable about the topic. What we do not always realize is that televised religious programming is part of a larger series of religious activities of American viewers. They go to church and view television programs. The less mobile substitute televised religious services and instructional programs for their weekly practice of going to church. They also tend to watch these programs on Sunday morning. These are the same people who have always treated religion as an important part of their lives. Television did not extend religion to new groups that have traditionally paid less


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attention to religion anyway, such as teenagers or young adults. To be sure, there are exceptions, but the poll data suggest that, as Americans had always done with other information technologies, those interested simply added use of TV to their other mediums. In this case, they watched TV and read the Bible, attended church on Sunday, and read religious books and magazines.36 Lest we dismiss religious broadcasting as a fringe activity, we need to acknowledge that it reaches into every community in the nation. Syndication statistics help us accept that fact. Oral Roberts was syndicated on 151 channels in 1951, 185 in 1981. Robert Schuller was on 29 in 1951 and on 165 stations in 1981, and added more in the 1980s and 1990s. ABC, CBS, and NBC all had religious programming during these same years. All major denominations broadcast programs as well.37 One of the most popular religious programs of the late 20th century that disseminated information, not religious ceremony, was the 700 Club. It is worth discussing because many readers have probably seen at least snippets of the program while exercising their TV channel changers (clickers). We know that by the mid-1980s, as many as 40 percent of households in the U.S. had watched at least one religious program per month. While not sufficient to sustain the religious television broadcasters, this level of attention suggested that a wide audience existed for at least the mildly religious programming offered by such programs as the 700 Club.38 It proved to be consistently popular for many years, serving as a window into American interest in quasi-religious television programming. So what is the 700 Club? Hosted by Pat Robertson, a wellknown TV personality and political conservative (well-known thanks to his TV program), it uses a “talk-show” format and music. It feels very much like a TV news magazine show with stories about moral behavior, national and international events, politics, and economics. Depending on where one lives, it airs every day. Robertson does not preach on this program as one would think a minister does, as Robert Schuller does on his program, Hour of Power. Using a more conventional TV format, he sometimes will have an instructional segment, often about politics or news topics. The program

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includes interviews and other human interest stories, yet these too are less overtly religious. His religious values, however, come through in his comments. More religiously overt are his direct appeals for membership in his program and in fund raising. In short, the program looks more like secular programming than the hard core preaching that characterized early TV evangelism. On the other hand, there are those, such as Schuller, Swaggart, and Falwell who, in the 1970s and 1980s, used church settings and crusadelike themes to deliver their messages. Of the three, Schuller is the only one to have survived, although at the end of the 1990s, Swaggart was back on the air after a decade of scandals. One student of the nature of religious broadcasting demonstrated that of the several types of religious programming (e.g., pulpits and prophets) electronic education had become a popular format, a category in which we can comfortably place Robertson. In this venue, Jesus is viewed as a teacher—a common theme in all Christian denominations—and as the instrument for reaching salvation that comes from understanding truth. In this view, God is friend and teacher, as well as the source of salvation, hence the need to learn, to gather information, and to gain insight on modern events through a religious lens.39 Often such programs are objects of suspicion, particularly by groups on the political left. About 85 percent of the American electorate claim to be Christian. Yet suspicion surfaces in the ranks of political liberals and even among members of the Democratic Party. This was so particularly in the late 1990s when Democrats realized that a substantial portion of the conservative political community, often called the Christian Right, was highly organized. It had a very strong hold on the leadership of the Republican Party, and was seen as having far more political influence than their numbers warranted. Religion is the glue perceived by many observers to hold the organization together. The Pew Research Center studied the issue, concluding that, “Regardless of denomination, people who express more faith are more conservative.” However, religious television is seen as a far greater influence on conservative religious practices than is actually the case. We know from studies that


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served as the basis of this chapter that religious television is more an extension of an already existing interest in religion than it is an influence in recruiting more adherents to a particular religious faith. The Pew Foundation discovered that depending on which denomination one associated with, political views varied in shade, although they tended to remain conservative. The Pew researchers confirmed the factual basis for the concerns of the Democratic Party and the political left, namely, that by 1999, 24 percent of all registered voters said they were white evangelical Protestants.40 Americans are reporting a greater amount of political arm twisting from religious sources. But this pattern of behavior is not limited to religious programming. It extends to the actual church pulpits of all major denominations. As a result, information about political issues (e.g., abortion, prayer in school, policies toward hunger, and President George W. Bush’s proposal to fund charitable activities run by religious institutions) is distributed through all religious mediums, not simply by radio and television. A recent survey pointed out that as many as 60 percent of churchgoing Christians learn about abortion from their religious providers, and 56 percent about prayers in school. Catholics hear the most—75 percent on abortion and 38 percent on right-to-die topics—while on a very different topic, black Christians report that 62 percent hear about health care reform. Across the spectrum of all denominations, 20 percent of American churchgoers report that their clergy talk about candidates and elections, even though intensity varies by denomination. Today there is more public acceptance of the role of religion and clergy in politics than in the late 1960s. Political divisions on issues are increasingly breaking along denominational rather than political lines.41 I conclude from all the evidence that Americans are tapping into a variety of information sources within their religious circles for data and perspectives with which to make decisions concerning a wide variety of issues that historically might otherwise have been thought to be strictly secular or political in nature. Second, as we saw with work and leisure, Americans have not hesitated to use a variety of technologies and institutions from which to draw the information they

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need and want. Third, Americans welcome, and indeed go out of their way, to collect information on the issues of interest to them from a wide variety of sources—from newspapers and television, from public libraries, bookstores, the Internet, and yes, religious sources. Given what we know about the extent of religious TV viewership, one can also conclude that it is not the dominant source of religious perspective on secular issues because the number of viewers is just too small, even if they are a loyal and enthusiastic band of Americans.

CYBER-RELIGION: RELIGIOUS LIFE AND THE INTERNET Whenever you have a brand new information medium, trying to figure out how it is being used during its early stages is always a difficult thing to do. Obviously users want to know right away how best to use the medium, adopting best practices and insights, but these are never in place at the beginning. What we have are situations analogous to earlier experiences. In the case of religion and the Internet, since religious activities in this medium are of very recent vintage, we have only the previous experiences with other forms of electronic communications to help anticipate patterns of usage. Yet even here we are not served well, because the Internet combines so many technologies and functions, including video, text, graphics, the presentation format of radio and television, and so forth. But the biggest issue is that it is still a very new medium, and we are all just getting our initial exposure. On the other hand, we do have over two decade’s worth of experience with this technology, much of it drawn from such other widely varied phases of life as work, games, pornography, entertainment, academic activities, and communications among the military and defense contractors. What is already appearing on the Internet related to religion mimics patterns of behavior evident in other spheres of life. These actions involve every major denomination (not just Christian) rushing onto the Internet with Web sites, enhanced by making a great deal of material about their faith available on these sites, finally followed by chat rooms and other venues for communi-


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cating interactively with those of like-minded interests. A second pattern evident on the Internet is the effort made by various organizations to collect and present references to other sites and data in a systematic fashion. A third practice is the migration over to the Internet of religious information that was previously available in digital form. If something was available on a CD-ROM, or on a large mainframe computer, for example, that material could be transported to the Internet very quickly and, therefore, was frequently ported over to the new medium. What we have are Americans using the Internet for religious activities in the same way they use it at work. Not yet clear is the extent of use in the religious sphere. What is very obvious, however, is an enormous amount of activity. There are thousands of U.S.-based Web sites. One is left with the impression that many, if not most, large congregations have their own Web sites to which they post newsletters, calendars of events, and so forth. A few examples of what is going on suggests that the Internet is becoming a tool of choice for disseminating huge amounts of information on religious topics. A cruise on the Internet gives one the feeling that religious activity in the United States has an informationintense quality to it. Begin with news stories on religious issues. The Christian Webmaster says its purpose is “exalting Christ in cyberspace.” It offers national religious news from around the world, just like AP, UPI, or CNN would. The site provides denominational news by linking to Web sites of such organizations as the Presbyterian News Service, The Baptist Press (SBC), and the Catholic Church’s Eternal Word Television Network News. It also offers its users the Yearbook of American and Canadian Churches, complete with a database of membership of all the major denominations in North America. It points to other sources of information on religious themes. The site also offers research services.42 A second important site is the Religion News Service (RNS), going online with material it had provided in other formats before arrival of the Internet. Christian Webmaster has news stories, book reviews, calendars, gives readers the ability to send e-mail to RNS and so forth. Like many companies in business, and other institutions in Ameri-

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can society that have been around for many decades, RNS went online with its existing services. Established in the 1930s, over time it became one of the primary sources of religious news in the United States, covering Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Asian religions, private spirituality, New Age, and tribal beliefs. By going online, it began reaching people who had not previously used its services.43 If you thought religion was not an information-intensive subject in the United States, take a look at Academic Info, touted as “your gateway to quality Internet resources.” Tailored to the needs of both high school and college audiences, it is a collection of materials on a vast array of subjects—not just religion—and other Internet sites. It has an annotated directory of Internet resources for the academic study of religion. What is amazing is how many sites it has collected around that subject. These include online religious journals, major databases of religious texts, digital Bible libraries, a whole section on cults, and religion by country. Of particular interest is how many religious texts are available online, along with instructional services, many of which can be found by going through this site. It is of interest because the number listed is not small; they cover virtually all aspects of religious studies. Religious Internet sites referred to at this site come from all over the world, although the majority are American. It is a virtual, digital electronic shopping mall and library for religious material.44 The Bible and many related supporting materials are also on the Web. Academic Info listed over a dozen, with comments about their features, much like short book reviews. You can go out to the Bible Browser Basic Home Page, for example, and, according to Academic Info’s review of the site, “retrieve passages by book chapter and verse reference. You can retrieve passages by word, word-part, or word-pattern.” It also has audio tutorials.45 The Book of Mormon is out there, along with more than half of the original text of The Catholic Encyclopedia, all 38 volumes of the Christian Classics Ethereal Library, a variety of editions of the Bible, and more than 1500 essays on the early history of the Church, being written as part of a hypertext project called the Ecole Initiative.


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Because of the interactive quality of the Internet, Biblical dialogue has become an active feature of online religious activities. People can go to the Synoptic-L Web site, for example, to engage in an e-mail conference on the interrelationships of the Synoptic Gospels, or go to the Jesus Seminar Program. The American Religious Experience Project and the American Religion Data Archive (ARDA) contain material primarily for academics studying the role of religion in the United States. Even Princeton University, the base for much great scholarship and creation of information, is host to a site called the Center for the Study of American Religion. Every major religious denomination in the United States also has tutorial sites as well for engaging in e-mail dialogues and for disseminating information. Examples of organizations with sites include the Catholic Bible Association of America, New Thought Movement Home Page, Christian Science on the Web Announcement Center, Institute for the Study of American Evangelicals, JW Net: A Forum for Jehovah’s Witnesses, Church of the Lutheran Brethren of America, Orthodox Church of America, and The Quaker Corner. The Quaker site includes genealogical materials on Quakers and a discussion group on the topic. To demonstrate even further what is out on the Net, one can look at the American Religion Data Archive, better known as ARDA. This site has surveys of national religious practices, much like the material collected by Gallup and the Pew. It does surveys by denomination, religious professionals, and geography. All its studies eventually wind up on the site, from its analysis of anti-Semitism in the United States, done in 1964, to surveys completed in the late 1990s on politics and religion. It also includes material from Gallup Poll surveys of various denominations. Some of ARDA’s studies are very useful in understanding the role of religion in America. Here are some samples: “Survey of African-American Priests and Seminarians” (1992), “Survey of American Catholic Priests” (1993), “Survey of Alumni/ae of Presbyterian Theological Schools” (1990), “Women of the Cloth” (1993), and a whole series on “Church and Church Membership in the United States,” which looks at memberships by county and state. ARDA’s researchers have been conducting these studies since 1952. ARDA also

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links to other related Web sites to help get its messages out further by leveraging a common feature of the Internet—use of pointers to draw people to one’s site from another or as a way of “pointing” to other sources of information.46 The number and range of online religious journals accessible via the Internet is also impressive: Biblical Archaeologist, Jian Dao Journal, Journal for Christian Theological Research, Novo Mesto, and the Union Seminary Quarterly Review are just a few. Many large congregations now publish their newsletters on their own Web sites. Some newsletters are nondenominational, such as material from the Internet for Christians (IFC). It contains articles much like what one would expect from a printed newsletter on crusades and conferences, sources of information on wellness and ministries, others on personal growth and evangelism, and about products and publications. It includes a section called “Ministries in the News,” and another on e-mail and mailing lists.47 Much of what is currently appearing on the Net are extensions of outreach programs that established churches and their related marketing/missionary institutions have always sponsored. Therefore, we see with the Internet what has been done by companies, museums, schools and universities: going to the Web initially with what they always had and then over time modifying what they did to exploit features of the new technology, such as adding chat rooms. Their pages on our PC screens look just like those for book sellers and stockbrokers. For example, Lightsource.com carries news stories down the middle of the screen, and on the left options one can click on for additional information (e.g., music, radio stations, and news and politics). On the right are ads and publicity blurbs: “Jesus Video Project,” “Hear your church on Lightsource,” “Country Crossroads: Catch the latest country music megahits and go behind the scenes with big-name stars and top industry execs.” On the same page was an announcement on where one could go to get program listings for such programs as the 700 Club and the Christian Pirate Radio. And, of course, the Bible is present with a short blurb in the middle of the page:


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Back to the Bible Just Launched! Looking for solid Bible teaching? Get back to God’s Word with Back to the Bible, featuring Bible teacher Woodrow Kroll. A 25-minute daily radio program, Back to the Bible provides in-depth Bible study and practical ways to incorporate God’s Word into your daily life. Whether you’ve been reading the Bible for years or a few days, Dr. Kroll shows that God always has something to say to you.48

Even Wired, the hot secular Internet magazine of the late 1990s, carried articles on religious themes. With an advertisement for one of the new VW Beatles at the top of the screen in 1999, and buttons along the left side to get stock quotes or to subscribe to Wired, a writer was commenting on religion: Bless me Father, for I have spammed. It has been 13 million cycles per second since my last Hail Mary. In that time my prayer was routed via T1 to a local Ethernet and transported to SprintNet via multiple hops, circuitously passing through MAE East to arrive at a Sparc station running Apache.

After a few additional takeoffs on Catholic verbiage, the article describes the arrival of a computer-based prayer wheel that can generate prayers on demand. And because the United States is also so legalistic in its business/religious behavior, the piece ends with the admonition: “We make no warranties or guarantees or implied guarantees that the prayers said will be heard or granted by God.”49 One is almost tempted to say, “Ah, Only in America!” On a more serious note, this magazine also reported on a conference held at MIT in 1997 to discuss the relationship between religion and computers. “In the minds of many anxious congregations, the news is not good: The cubicle has become the new church, and “God” is beginning to look a lot like the great ENIAC in the sky.”50 Some Americans are beginning to turn their attention to the role of the Internet and computing in their religious lives, having to sort out how to use this technology much as they had to figure out the role of radio and television in earlier times. The Internet is still so new that they are in the process of resolving the issue. As normally happens with any issue of

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consequence, a trail of publications is left behind to document it. We are beginning to see that happen with the Internet. Jennifer Cobb, who attended Union Theological Seminary and spent most of the 1980s and 1990s as a communications consultant (one of our knowledge workers), has published on religious themes. She lays the problem out in a very American way in her first book on the subject of cyber religion: “This book was born of my attempt to find spiritual wholeness in a computational world.” She concludes that the technology can help foster “wisdom of divine spirit and self-knowledge.”51 The more tactical, clear-thinking writer on religious themes for American news publications, Phyllis A. Tickle, observed that, while many Americans began to retreat from formal religious education from traditional denominational programs, such as Sunday Schools, they nonetheless turned to the Internet for data and insight. Up to the time of the Internet, Americans had to rely on such intermediaries as priests, teachers, churches, and schools for information on religion and even for the interpretations of text. The PC on the one hand, and later the Internet on the other, made materials available to the “experts” just as accessible to the novice. So much is available online, inexpensive or with no expense involved, and convenient to get to, that Americans are probing religious issues as never before.52 Tickle’s own studies, and a survey by America Online (AOL), indicated that by the end of 1995 religion had become one of the top three areas of interest among Internet users in the United States. AOL, the nation’s largest Internet access provider, reported that one site, Christianity Today, was receiving more than 750,000 “hits” a month by late spring 1996. Gospel Communications Network, an Evangelical Protestant organization, claimed it had received 4.7 million visitors to its various sites at that same time. Gallup reported very high volumes as well to other religious sites during the second half of the 1990s. Lycos, another Internet access service, knew it had 56,000 religious locations that its users could get to in the late 1990s, with at least 15,000 where one could worship online.53 The first widely used guide to religion on the Internet, God on the Internet, reflecting data from 1995, was a book. It needed 336 pages to describe already existing sites.54 Since then, the number of sites has gone up, as


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suggested by AOL and Lycos. The truth is, we only know there are thousands; nobody really knows how many there really are. We do know, however, that the major ones get hundreds of thousands of visitors. As with work and play, Americans can obtain information fast on the Internet and we are beginning to see that happen with religion. The consequences are not only quick to appear but also suggest that the Internet is already having an important effect on some religious activities. A now-classic story illustrates the point. Gustav Neibuhr, a religion reporter, published on the front page of The New York Times in August 1996 a story about a Rev. Richard A. Rhem, an ordained minister in the Reformed Church of America. At the time Rhem was serving as pastor of a church in Spring Lake, Michigan, with a membership of 1000 souls. The article led church leaders in the region to consider heretical comments made by Rhem. Within weeks they censured him, but his church voted to secede from the denomination in support of their minister. His heresy consisted of believing that “God’s mercy extends beyond the Christian community.” Within twenty-four hours of publication of the article by The New York Times, copies were on various religious Internet sites, had been crossreferenced to other sites and articles, and chat rooms emerged to discuss what rapidly became known as the Rhem Affair. Thousands of people all over the United States had become involved in the issues triggered by the article and sustained by the censure and vote. It was one of the first examples of the Internet engaging people in a controversy. Religion reporters were amazed at the speed with which the original report was disseminated, the extent to which people became involved, and pondered the effects not only of their writing, but on religious practice itself, because chat rooms went beyond discussing poor Rev. Rhem. They engaged in debates about the proper role of prayer, church censorship, and even on the theological topic that got Rhem into hot water in the first place.55 What probably was the first major survey of how synagogues and churches in the U.S. used the Internet was conducted in 2000 by the Pew Internet and American Life Project, which is documenting the American experience with

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this information medium. Over 1,300 congregations participated in the study and what came back was the fact that churches used the Internet the people did at work. These religious institutions used the Internet “to strengthen the faith and spiritual growth of their members, evangelize and perform missions in their communities and around the world.” Eightythree percent reported that the Internet played a positive role in their efforts, while 91 percent reported that it made possible closer ties between congregations and their flocks (e-mail). Like companies, they posted their mission statements and texts (77%), had links to other sites (76%) or to scripture studies and other devotional material (60%), and over half (56%) posted their schedules of events and other announcements that historically were the grist of church bulletins. More than 75 percent of the clergy used it for a variety of informationgathering activities, while other studies of the Pew Foundation noted that some 20 percent of all Internet users in the U.S. have at one time or another used the Web to get information of a religious nature. Middle-aged African American women used the Internet the most to get information on religious topics (33% of online blacks versus 20% of online whites). Southerners are more likely to use the Internet for religious purposes (22%), while residents of the Northeast the least (14%). These 1,300 respondents represent a small, yet statistically relevant group. There are 336,000 places of worship in this country, or roughly 1 for every 818 Americans.56 Is there a difference in extent of use by denomination? The answer is, kind of, but everyone is playing in the Internet game. The Pew study reported who participated but it could be that some active denominations participated less in the study, so percentages of respondents can be misleading. However, all the major denominations are using the Internet, even those that one might consider too conservative (e.g., Reconstructionist Jews, Greek Orthodox, or the Church of God in Christ). Denominations that have attracted middle- and upper-class Americans, who were early users of the PC and the Internet, are active users of the Internet (e.g., Methodists, Lutherans, Presbyterians, and Episcopalians). The point is, as in business, if denominations were industries, we would be able to say all industries were active.


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Congregations act like skilled info-junkies. For example, 53 percent reported that they track the number of hits to their sites. Nearly half have had sites on the Web for over two years (44%), 78 percent for at least one year, which tells us that many congregations are just now getting on the Net. Therefore, if they mimic the pattern evident in other aspects of American life, we shall see more use of the Internet by congregations in the immediate future. Overwhelmingly, congregations used the Internet to do whatever they had been doing before, just now electronically and perhaps more. The killer app here is e-mail, which allows clerics to stay in closer and more frequent contact with their congregations. Respondents said 89 percent use e-mail to communicate with parishioners, while 81 percent of parishioners said e-mail improved the quality of their religious life.57 And then there are the extreme cases. I offer you the case of the Potter House Sanctuary, billed as the “Smart Church of the 21st Century,” and located in Texas (although in the age of the Internet that is a trivial fact). It sports a brand new church of some 191,000 square feet, not small by anyone’s standards. In fact, the main sanctuary is larger than two football fields! However, in addition to being on the Web with a plethora of applications and collections of information, it has a sound system such as those used by Elton John and Tom Jones that is all digital so that it can transmit to the entire building and possibly beyond. Two hundred of the pew seats are wired with data terminals that “provides the capability of computer interaction between the stage and audience.” The church’s Web site reads like a business Web site: “A presenter can give a PowerPoint presentation from his or her own computer on stage.” Of course “persons in the seats with power and data connections can download the presentation to their laptops!”58 The story about religion and the Internet is at best a collection of impressions and scattered bits of evidence about what is happening. But we have enough evidence to conclude that the Internet is beginning to be used in the religious activities of the nation, alongside other forms of information handling. A church today, along with its members, uses telephones,

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radio, television, newsletters, books, pamphlets, sound systems, PCs, and computers to do the work of religion. There remain open questions of interest and they center on volume of use, quality, and consequences. We don’t know fully how many people are using some of these technologies, most importantly, the Internet. But it really does not matter. Economists, nose counters, and pollsters will eventually give us a believable answer. Of greater importance is use. As we saw with work and play, when a technology comes along that adds new capability, such as ease of use and access, or useful information, Americans are quick to adopt it. As with work and leisure, they have a taste for additional volumes of information when it comes to religion. It is not enough just to listen to a minister, or even to read a Bible. Americans are accessing Greek texts, important theological documents, and engaging in online discussions about religious themes. Just the sheer number of radio, television, and Internet events and sites suggests this, and the data on rates of participation confirm the practice.

CONSEQUENCES AND POSSIBILITIES We know from other technologies that new information sources and tools affect behavior. For example, the availability of inexpensive books beginning in the second half of the 19th century—thanks to new printing technologies—made books and newspapers affordable by the vast majority of the American public. They did not hesitate to buy religious literature. When radio and television came into the home, primarily to entertain families, people began to receive some of their religious training and to exercise part of their religious behavior through these electronic means. Over time, people enriched their religious experiences with additional sources of information and used more than before. It was a pattern as evident today as it was two centuries before. Availability of information, which flowed freely with few legal or economic constraints, made it easy for Americans to get into the habit of using more data, working with it intensely. From evangelical tent sessions in the 19th century and the more routine Bible


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classes so many millions attended weekly for over two centuries, to the Internet-based chat rooms of today, the pattern remains clearly evident and similar. A long-standing aspiration of American churches, dating back to when the first Spaniards stepped off a boat in the New World in the 1490s, has been to create “communities in God,” in which the Church was the center of life, and daily living reflected the values of one’s religion. The notion was not limited to Christian denominations; clergy in most other religions and all over the world had the same aspirations. The problem, of course, is that there has always been more to life than churchbased activities. So there has always been a struggle to pull people into church-driven activities and to apply religious values to daily life, while simultaneously Americans lived in a society in which entrepreneurialism and market-based capitalism dominated their economy. Enveloping this varied and vibrant economy was a sheltering political environment in which personal freedom has been the most extensive in the history of humankind. Yet we are still left with a basic question: Will the Internet facilitate a closer bond between church and citizen? We know Americans are very interested in religion and that it plays a role in their lives, but clerics also recognize that the goal of people working together within a religious centered community is still unrealized. The potential of the Internet lies in bringing people back into the daily activities of their congregations through chat rooms, news sites, ability to buy and learn online, and so forth. If that happens, churches will regain some of the central role they played in American lives at one time, particularly in the 17th and 18th centuries. I doubt it will ever get quite to that point of intimacy because unlike then, churches today are not as tightly linked to government and business as they once were. We also have such a polyglot society, with dozens of major religions and literally millions of nonreligious ways to spend our time—two features not evident, for example, in 18th century New England or Virginia. Nonetheless, in combination with the aging of the nation’s population and increases in the use of computing, one can expect that cyber-based ties to church and to more pronounced religious

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feelings should increase. In fact, we can bet on it because the survey data from Pew Foundation and Gallup indicate that this process has already begun. This chapter has been heavy with data on volumes and extent of deployment because, of all the major facets of American life discussed in this book, the role of information in religion is the one that has routinely received the least amount of exposure (hence its role is least understood by the general public). It is a very sensitive topic within American society and sets off emotional responses. But we cannot ignore some realities. About 20 percent of Americans use radio and TV to augment their personal religious activities, half say they participate in organized religious services, and nearly 95 percent claim to have religious beliefs. The numbers are just too large to ignore. The ephemera of a religious nature, from old Bibles to tapes of radio and TV programs, are so extensive that we must accept the notion that Americans always used new forms of information handling equipment, technologies, and formats in support of their religious activities. Many of the tactical applications were similar to what they did in business, e-mail, mailings, publication of newspapers, magazines, anthologies, readers, and so forth. What Americans learned to use in one facet of their lives they quickly applied in others. Religious activities ebb and flow. As the age of this nation’s population increases, one can reasonably expect that religious activities will too. That means Americans will increase the amount of information on religious themes present in their lives. Practices, policies, and politics of information processing will thus be affected by religious considerations in ways not seen since the introduction of radio or television. Americans are different than they were in the early 1800s, but their commitment to religion is a remarkably similar pattern to what has appeared to one extent or another for over two centuries. It is what makes highly probable the forecast of an increased role for religion in matters related to computing and telecommunications. What facilitated the richness of religious behavior and the free flow of information on religion is a political environment that tolerates diversity of opinions by protecting thought and


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expression. It is not an idyllic environment, with all perspectives perfectly protected and nurtured, nor one in which the quality of the material is evenly of high caliber; nonetheless, it demonstrated the persistence of information as a major element in religious life. A parallel pattern is evident in the political/legal environment. That is why it is crucial that we understand the political/legal use of information if we are to have any substantive appreciation of why Americans have this great taste for information, which they apply to so many aspects of their lives. It is to this crucial element of public policy, therefore, that we must turn. That is the subject of Chapter 8.

ENDNOTES 1. The role and its political and social underpinnings are brilliantly explained by John T. Noonan, Jr., in The Lustre of Our Country: The American Experience of Religious Freedom (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). 2. Surveys abound. See, for example, B.A. Kosmin and S.P. Lachman, One Nation Under God: Religion in Contemporary American Society (New York: Harmony Books, 1993); George Gallup Jr. and S. Jones, A Hundred Questions and Answers: Religion in America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Religion Research Center, 1989). 3. Quoted in William R. Wineke and Andy Hall, “Spirituality High in a World of Distractions,” Wisconsin State Journal, December 6, 1998, 1A, 3A, quote on p. 3A. The same article pointed out that 90% of the citizens of Wisconsin believed in God, a finding Gallup said “very closely parallels what we’re finding nationally.” 4. This point is well explored by R. Finke and R. Stark, The Churching of America, 1776–1980: Winners and Losers in Our Religious Economy (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1992). The role of pluralism has been understood for some time, H. Cox, The Secular City (New York: Macmillan, 1965): 2. 5. Her comments on religion were published (with translation into English) by Noonan, The Lustre of Our Country, 95.

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6. Ibid., 112. 7. Ibid. 8. Will B. Gravely, “The Rise of African Churches in America (1786–1822): Reexamining the Context,” Journal of Religious Thought 41 (1984): 58–73; C. Eric Lincoln and Lawrence H. Mamiya, The Black Church in the African American Experience (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1990) describes the Christian culture as it evolved, including the role of oral traditions that were essential in a community where illiteracy was extensive. 9. Mark A. Noll, A History of Christianity in the United States and Canada (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1992): 32–35. 10. Ibid., 40. 11. Ibid., 40–44. To be sure the Roman Catholic Church in Europe for centuries had required the faithful to attend Mass on a regular basis. But what made the American experience different was the addition of other events to the celebration of Mass, such as scheduled religious instruction for all age groups, and discussion of civic and governmental sectarian topics. 12. David Paul Nord, “The Evangelical Origins of Mass Media in America,” Journalism Monographs 88 (1984): 1–30. 13. Noll, A History of Christianity in the United States and Canada, pp. 225–229. 14. Paul C. Gutjahr, An American Bible: A History of the Good Book in the United States, 1777–1880 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999): 1. 15. Ibid., 230. 16. James Edward Scanlon, Randolph-Macon College: A Southern History, 1825–1967 (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 1983): 154, 174, 414. 17. Albert N. Greco, The Book Publishing Industry (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1997): 24, 132–133. 18. For an excellent account of the evolution of published religious material and hence of the decline of the reading share of the Bible, see Gutjahr, An American Bible.


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19. Data collected by Noll, A History of Christianity in the United States and Canada, 465. 20. Charles R. Morris, American Catholic: The Saints and Sinners Who Built America’s Most Powerful Church (New York: Times Books, 1997): 301–321. 21. Data summarized in Ibid., 477. 22. “The Gospel of Finance,” July 20, 1999, http://www.cnnfn. com/1999/07/20/investing/q_church. 23. Ibid. 24. “Media Gets Religion, Study Finds Religion News and Journalists’ Church Attendance Doubled in 1990s,” press release of Center for Media and Public Affairs (CMPA), April 20, 2000, http://www.pewtrusts.com/Programs/DocDisplay.cfm?DocID=350 &Program=Rel. 25. Noll, A History of Christianity in the United States and Canada, p. 333, Lincoln’s quote, p. 331. 26. Ibid., 402–403, statistics, p. 401. 27. Ibid., 407. 28. Ibid., 407–408. 29. Gallup’s 1990 survey is one of the most important recent contributions to our understanding of religious practices in the United States: George Gallup, Jr., Religion in America 1990 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Religion Research Center, 1990). 30. Ben Armstrong, The Electric Church (Nashville: Thomas Nelson Publishing, 1979): 8. 31. It was the inability of established Protestant denominations of the 17th and 18th centuries to maintain a theological discipline across all of their congregations that made it possible for new ones, such as the Baptists and the Methodists to develop. 32. The crucial role of radio in making fundamentalism possible in the 20th century is described in Stewart M. Hoover, Mass Media Religion: The Social Sources of the Electronic Church (Newbury Park, CA: SAGE Publications, 1988): 35–54; and in Daniel A. Stout and Judith M. Buddenbaum, Religion and Mass Media: Audiences and Adaptations (Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, 1996): 74–84.

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33. Ibid., 54–55. 34. Fulton J. Sheen wrote his memoirs of his TV experiences, The Autobiography of Fulton J. Sheen (Garden City, NJ: Doubleday, 1980); it became a best-seller. 35. Hoover, Mass Media Religion, pp. 234–235. For an example of the analysis of religion and politics mixed, see “The Diminishing Divide . . . American Churches, American Politics,” published by The Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, http://www.people-press.org/relgrpt.htm. 36. Hoover, Mass Media Religion, 64–69. 37. The most thorough study of television audiences for religious programming, circa 1950s–1970s, was done by Peter G. Horsfield, Religious Television: The American Experience (New York: Longman, 1984), 101–125. 38. Data cited in Razelle Frankl, Televangelism: The Marketing of Popular Religion (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1987): 18–19. 39. On Robertson’s program, see Ibid., 88, 89, 91–92, 99. 40. Pew Research Center, (see note 31 for Internet citation). 41. Ibid. 42. The home page address is http://www.njWebworks.com/ churchWeb/newsroom.html. 43. To get to this site go to http://www.religionnews.com. 44. Its address is http://www.academicinfo.net. 45. Ibid. 46. http://www.arda.tm. 47. http://www.gospelcom.net/ifc/newsletter. 48. All the material in this paragraph is from the main page of broadcast.com, July 23, 1999, http://www.broadcast.com/ lightsource. 49. Joanna Glasner, “Spamming God,” Wired News, June 21, 1999, http://www.wired.com/news/calture/story/20313.html. 50. Austin Bunn, “Coaxing God from the Machine,” July 17, 1997, Ibid.


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51. Jennifer Cobb, Cybergrace: The Search for God in the Digital World (New York: Crown Publishers, 1998): first quote, p. ix, second quote, p. 239. 52. Tickle documents this phenomenon carefully, dating the surge in interest in religious information to the late 1980s when PCs were widely available in American homes; Tickle, God-Talk in America, 133–152. 53. Ibid., 141–142. 54. Mark Kellner, God on the Internet (Boston: IDG, 1996) as one of its “For Dummies” series. The book sold well, but quickly went out of print because it became dated so rapidly. 55. The story is nicely summarized by Phyllis A.Tickle, God-Talk in America (New York: Crossroad Publishing Co.,1997), 148–149. For additional commentary on the case, see “RCA Rebukes Pastor, Church,” Christianity Today, October 7, 1996, p. 86. 56. Wired Churches, Wired Temples: Taking Congregations and Missions into Cyberspace (Washington, DC: Pew Internet and American Life Project, December 20, 2000), http://www. pewinternet.org. 57. Ibid. I normally do not get excited about my sources, but if I had to recommend one for anyone reading this book to read because of how fascinating the material is, read this report. You can download it off the Pew Website, and although it is 22 pages long, it is a quick read. 58. Quotes and data extracted from the first page, http://www. tdjakes.org/home.html.

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PUBLIC POLICY AND INFORMATION

I am for the First Amendment from the first word to the last. I believe it means what it says.

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—JUSTICE HUGO LA FAYETTE BLACK

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n many important ways the American government has facilitated access to information that Americans have used for work and private purposes since the founding of the Republic, and never more so than during the 20th century. It has also influenced profoundly the amount of information and its flow through the economy during the whole course of the history of the United States. While state and federal legislators and administrators preferred a lesser role for government in the development and dissemination of information and its required infrastructures, they nonetheless realized that both were too important to ignore. Collectively, generations of officials have seen advantages for the nation in their direct involvement in information policy issues. The lead author of the U.S. Constitution, James Madison, proposed to 294

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his colleagues language that has fundamentally defined American government policy for more than two centuries: “The people shall not be deprived or abridged of their right to speak, to write, or to publish their sentiments; and the freedom of the press, as one of the great bulwarks of liberty, shall be inviolable.” During debates on the Bill of Rights, he linked freedom of speech and conscience (read, religion) as essential to the free flow of ideas, hence expression, the public dialogue essential to the functioning of a representative government. To encourage the free flow of information is why, for example, the U.S. government went to such great lengths to build a network of post offices so early in the history of the nation. While presidents came and went, along with various political parties, they did not essentially alter the pattern of investment in this infrastructure across the 18th and 19th centuries. The fundamental basis of American policies concerning information flows from the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which went into effect in 1791: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

On January 6, 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt stirred the nation with his Four Freedoms Speech in his message to Congress: “The first is freedom of speech and expression— everywhere in the world.” In short, he reaffirmed that Americans had long continued to support the free flow of information, evidence that after 150 years the sentiment was the same. Federal courts have normally been the most vociferous defenders of the First Amendment even when it often made little sense to the American public, as in cases involving the burning of the American flag or when courts ruled against the use of prayer in classrooms. Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black minced no words in 1962, when he commented on the Bill of Rights of which the First Amendment is a part: It is my belief that there are “absolutes” in our Bill of Rights, and that they were put there on purpose by men who knew what words meant and their prohibitions to be “absolutes.”1

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The founding fathers also recognized the value of protecting creative expression and encouraging innovation and economic advantage for inventors, even if those protections constrained the absolute unbridled use of information. That is why they provided for copyright and patent protection. The dual policy of openness (with access) but also protection created tension in the flow of information. Music—yes, it is a type of information—is a form of expression, providing an example of the tension in the system. Today we can copy music off the Internet as a perfect replication of what is published on a CD, thereby avoiding payment of fees to the musicians and publishers of the CD. It is a problem, because on the one hand, policymakers want Americans to have access to the music but, on the other hand, they also want to protect the right of the musicians and their publishers to make a profit from their creative efforts. That is why, also at the start of this nation’s history, the founding fathers knew the nation needed both freedom of expression and protection of expression and innovation, prescribing copyright and patent protections. More than two hundred years later, and after many laws were passed and numerous Supreme Court cases judged, the government is still charged with protecting the free flow of information while encouraging expression of ideas and development of new information-handling tools and technologies. It is why, on the one hand, the antitrust division sued Microsoft (in the belief that it constrained trade and also people’s choices in how to get to information on the Internet) and on the other, continued to implement policies to further development of technologies, many rooted in silicon and hence information technologies. To be sure, there is an unstated but longstanding collective belief that the development of technologies is generally good and useful for the economy because, to quote the preamble of the Constitution, we want to “promote the general Welfare” of the American people. The national impulse has generally been to allow citizens considerable amounts of flexibility and freedom to express their ideas. That is why such issues as freedom of expression, religion, patent protection, and capitalist economic practices are hallmarks of the United States.


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To be sure, implementation has never been perfect. Interpretations varied, and Americans have lived in periods of more or less flexibility. What is remarkable, however, is the relative consistency in the belief of the majority of the nation’s citizens that national, state, and local governments should preserve and protect the maximum amount of freedom of expression, including channels for distributing those expressions. They also wanted government to play a minimalist role in the economic affairs of the nation. To be sure, Democrats and Republicans (since their formation in the 1800s) differed on the definition of what minimalist means. This has especially been the case since the days of the Roosevelt Administration of the 1930s and 1940s, and the acceptance of Keynesian economics, when the U.S. Government began a long period of increased involvement in the economic affairs of the nation. Members of both political parties supported increased involvement in the belief that it was essential to the nation’s welfare. Yet, in the process, belief in free expression and flow of information remained a bedrock staple of policymakers and voters. The role of policymakers has been conditioned by many of the immediate realities presented by information technologies. Over the centuries some common patterns of policy, legal judgments, and practices perdured, although they varied depending on the technologies through which information became available to the public. Printed materials, such as newspapers and books, have historically not been regulated by the government. This is the freedom of the press issue addressed specifically in the U.S. Constitution. Radio and television are protected in their expressions, just as are paper-based printed materials. These electronic mediums have been regulated, however, because their channels—number of airwaves—always remained limited. To insure maximum diversity of expression and access, the federal government has had to play an extensive role in this arena, primarily through the Federal Communication Commission (FCC), established in 1934, but really in some form or another since the invention of the telegraph nearly a century earlier. Mail and telephones have been subject to rules designed to make universal access ubiquitous, that is to say, available to everybody, at a cost such that even

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the poorest would have some ability to use them. The government encouraged development of technologies as a consistent national policy, implemented through national patent practices and, during the last seven decades of the 20th century, through direct investment in the development and use of information technologies. Various government agencies, most notably the armed services and the National Science Foundation (NSF), made investments. Then came the Internet, about which we will have more to say, presenting its own unique public policy issues.2 Policymakers, including judges and legislators, approached each new form of information technology with two basic strategies. First, they drew an analogy with something that came before it, such as the telephone to the earlier telegraph, television to the earlier radio, and so forth, saying something like “let’s begin by assuming television is like radio.” Then, as the new medium demonstrated different characteristics, and policymakers better understood the technology, they began developing policies to meet the realities of a specific technology. The legal and policy mind-set always inclined toward imposing existing policies, practices, and juridical principals on new information technologies until circumstances warranted new approaches. Innovations were invariably evolutionary, with a consistent impulse to transform a prior practice rather than to invent a radically new one. We are seeing that happen again, this time with the Internet as the latest new information technology. Policymakers balance freedom with control. On the one hand they are faithful to the notion that information needs to flow unfettered throughout society, and always support proactive steps taken by public officials to make that free flow possible, such as through the construction of roads, establishment of the post office, and the expanded deployment of the Internet. On the other hand, there always seem to be some exceptions to the free flow of information, such as in times of war or when it comes to what children can read or see. The balance has always been precarious and the tension that results always present. That tension, that precariousness, influenced governmental practices, leading, for example, to a second strategy that was a variant of the first.


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The second strategy relied on the basic principles outlined in early American policy creeds, primarily the U.S. Constitution, but also on other political and legal documents. These included Madison’s interpretations of the Constitution as expressed in the Federalist Papers, comments of other founding fathers (especially Thomas Jefferson and James Madison), and even on the earlier Declaration of Independence. This last document is important because it expresses the philosophical principles behind the terms and conditions outlined in the Constitution and in the thousands of judicial rulings and legislative initiatives that followed. In this chapter I review the role that national government policymakers play in making available information and access to it. Their role, grounded in the principles laid down in the U.S. Constitution, has been an essential reason why Americans could be info-junkies, applying all manner and quality of information to all aspects of their lives. In the next chapter I review the role and effects of information and information technology on the exercise of democratic government. That next chapter is where, for instance, I discuss the role of online voting, the role of polls, and so forth. The chapter you are reading concentrates primarily on regulators, legislators, and the work of government officials in general. The subject of information and the practice of democracy is as important as the support role played by government officials although, because most Americans bump into the regulators more often than presidents and congressmen, I chose to discuss policy issues first.

ORIGINS OF POLICIES AND INFRASTRUCTURES IN THE AGE OF PAPER It all began with the only information technologies available at the birth of the nation, paper-based items such as letters, broadsides, newspapers, pamphlets, and books. The first electronic forms of information—telegraphic messages—did not become a policy issue until the 1840s, nearly six decades after the establishment of the United States. So all the initial policies, their interpretations, and implementations really occurred in an Age of Paper. Yet, is there more to say, given the

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discussions we had in the first seven chapters of this book, especially in Chapters 1 and 2? The question is made even more urgent because so many of the major commentaries about information, public policy, and rights of Americans are centered on electronic media such as television and, most notably, the Internet.3 Yet we still have paper-based information. But first, let’s summarize what happened prior to the arrival of electronic forms of information. In the beginning, publishing centered in New England, home to the largest concentration of Anglo-Saxon residents. Some publishing occurred in the South, most notably of newspapers, broadsides, and pamphlets. People also wrote letters and businessmen mailed invoices, letters of credit, and orders for inventory. The challenge, of course, was distribution, and to solve that problem the American government began its aggressive program of building a network of post offices, canals, and roads across the nation. As the country became larger, with more communities, along came more post offices, canals, and roads. Until the end of the 19th century, when the continent was fully occupied and the frontier declared “closed,” the process of building infrastructure for the physical movement of paperbased information continued.4 New towns set up newspapers, and eventually, as large cities formed, the publishing industry spread from coast to coast. Today there are book and magazine publishers in every major and most midsized cities in the nation, from Boston to San Francisco, from Miami to Chicago, including Indianapolis, Nashville, and Milwaukee, to mention just a few. And of course, we have thousands of newspapers and magazines published across all 50 states. The post office circulated newspapers, and eventually bookstores appeared in most large communities. The infrastructure for distributing materials expanded to the use of railroads, beginning just before the Civil War, and increased dramatically in the middle decades. When airplanes came into existence, airmail did too. By the end of the 1920s, aircraft routinely delivered mail across the nation. Stamp collectors celebrated every new air mail delivery route by issuing cached envelopes carried by the pilots on their initial flights.


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Libraries became an integral part of the infrastructure. The public library movement of the 19th century has continued to the present. The private lending libraries of the 1800s, often the creation of self-help organizations, frequently became the nucleus of public libraries. To cover even more ground, reaching potential readers who might not otherwise be able to get to a public library, the bookmobile began its rounds at the dawn of the 20th century. As colleges and universities sprang up all over the land, one of the first and continuously central activities of these institutions was the establishment and expansion of campus libraries. Today, some of the largest university libraries in the world are located in the United States. Well-established universities like Harvard and Princeton each have more than 10 million volumes, while it is not uncommon for land grant state universities, such as the University of Wisconsin or the University of California– Berkeley to have 3 to 4 million volumes apiece. Add to that accumulation the private collections, company libraries, national military park libraries, and the holdings of research institutions and think tanks, and one sees a complex network of libraries crisscrossing the nation. Odd things also were tried. The famed Pony Express in 1860–61 operated for sixteen months until the Civil War disrupted its speedy service. Air balloons proved to be unreliable, had insufficient capacity, and were too slow when compared to what railroads could do. But for the most part, all major new forms of transportation that came along were used to move paper-based materials. Trucks, cars, trains, airplanes, helicopters, and even spaceships have been used.5 Improvements in printing technologies also meant that two things would happen simultaneously with the expansion of transportation and a network of libraries. First, the number of publications increased as the cost of their manufacture dropped, and the raw number that could be manufactured rose within any unit of time. Second, the cost to the consumer to purchase a newspaper or book dropped continuously throughout the 19th century, making it more affordable and possible for ever-increasing portions of the American public to

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acquire printed materials. Over time, as the statistics demonstrated in Chapter 6, they were able to acquire more items per capita. Innovations ranged from printing presses that could produce multiple copies of newspapers or books to the ability to print pictures with text, and later color illustrations. All of these innovations made it possible for the nation’s readers to accumulate more publications, particularly throughout the 20th century. The same pattern of usage existed, of course, with electronically based information-handling devices in that century as well. Now we are seeing the pattern repeated with digital sources of information. Lest we forget, the Age of Paper is not behind us. People still buy newspapers and books. And because the Age of Paper is not behind us, policymakers still worry about policy and the printed word. During the McCarthy era in the 1950s, for example, staff members of the Wisconsin senator pointed out that various U.S. embassy libraries had books written by Communists or those accused of being Communist sympathizers. Some diplomats reacted by removing, and even burning, books in their embassy libraries. Some Federal agencies in the United States did the same. Nearly two decades later, during the Vietnam War, Americans faced another problem with the publication of the Pentagon Papers in 1971 by Daniel Ellsberg who, at the time, was an antiwar government employee with access to sensitive material concerning American policy on the conflict. President Nixon saw red. He wanted to know who leaked the papers and sought to punish the culprits. At that point his attitude was the Constitution be damned. It was a very public row. Nixon’s behavior did not mirror the noble sentiments behind the First Amendment, and his attack on Ellsberg stimulated an already virulent antiwar movement on the one hand, while on the other it spurred a renewed debate about freedom of expression and the public’s right to know.6

THE SPECIAL ROLE OF BOOK BANNING The free flow of information, clearly an American impulse, has not had an always stellar history. In every age there have been groups that wanted to restrict the flow of information in some


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form or fashion. The Postmaster General in the 1830s was not the first nor the last to attempt to restrict access to information when he refused to deliver antislavery literature. Yet, by and large, the activities of such people have proven to be the exceptions rather than the norm. No single class of restrictions better illustrates the darker side of the flow of information in America than book banning. It has long been joked by novelists and reporters that if you could get your book banned in Boston, it would be a bestseller. Very often they were right, because the shock of such a step generated so much publicity that people were curious to find out what all the fuss was about and would read the banned material. The central issue in book banning has always been one of balancing free speech rights of individual authors with a community’s desire to avoid exposing children in particular to material considered offensive to the public at large, material usually sexual in content. Americans faced the same issue again in the late 1990s with the Internet. Do we let children have access to sexually explicit Internet sites, or to other sites that advocate hate, or still others that show how to build bombs? The courts would say yes in order to protect everyone’s First Amendment rights, while politicians, parents, and other public employees, such as police and teachers, would argue for some sort of constraint. The American public first faced this issue in the 18th century whenever someone in a community wanted to express religious or political opinions out of sort with their neighbors. During wars, those who expressed ideas contrary to the community were locked up, shut down, or treated as traitors. The problem existed in the War of 1812, during the Civil War, again in World Wars I and II, less so during the Korean War, but definitely during the McCarthy witch hunts of the 1950s and during the Vietnam War. Constraining the flow of certain books presented a particular problem for policymakers from library and school boards to federal courts. A sexually explicit text might draw the ire of parents who wanted it removed from use by teachers, out of a school’s library, and even expunged from the local public library. But the battle of the books was less a policy issue for governments than one that needed to be addressed by the

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public. The First Amendment constrained the extent of government participation when compared to what it became involved with in electronic mediums. American attitudes toward what is or is not suitable to distribute have changed over time. In the 17th and 18th centuries censorship was alive and well in the New World. Bookwriters and newspaper editors just could not publish religiously heretical or politically inappropriate material. Everyone knew that if they attempted to do so they would go to jail or could even be burned at the stake (for religious reasons in the 1600s). By the time of the American Revolution, circumstances were changing with regard to political expression, but government-imposed censorship over religious commentary became more intense, in part contributing to the debate over what religious freedoms the newly established republic should create. All of these various activities built up a cumulative mistrust of the English government, especially of the colonial administration. One profound byproduct of the experience was the effect these troubles had on the founding fathers as they crafted the nuts and bolts of the new Republic. Protecting individual freedom of expression and worship became essential to a practical political structure. Genuine differences of opinion existed on how to manage such issues as censorship. Those differences concerned what to ban, what to do about sexually explicit materials, what and how to apply bans, and always, over which topics. By the early years of the 19th century, however, the national government had just about gotten out of the censorship business for both newspapers and books except, of course, during times of war. Constraint had shifted to the American public, where opinions changed over time. When the American Library Association was formed in 1876, made up of librarians, it decided not to collect controversial materials, making librarians “moral censors.” By 1939, when this same association adopted its first Library Bill of Rights, its members had decided that librarians had to be guardians of America’s freedom to read. Now the enemies were not so much public policymakers as they were library boards, local religious groups, and other appointed and


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self-anointed moral leaders in the community. Judges heard cases all through the 20th century concerning freedom to read.7 Other government agencies participated, overwhelmingly at the local level, as members of school boards and town and city councils. They were molders or representatives of local opinion. Judges represented state and federal constitutional practices. But we must come back to book banning in Boston because the city’s experience is instructive. Bostonians had long held strong opinions about what should be published or banned. The modern era of book banning in Boston—yes, we can speak of eras of book banning in Boston—began in 1873. By the start of the Great Depression, any avant-garde author not banned in Boston was, how should I say it politely? socially out of fashion, obviously not important enough to be taken seriously. Back in the 1870s, one Anthony Comstock, of New York, established the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice—in other words to suppress offensive literature. As a postal inspector he, like many other Americans, was alarmed at the growing amount of bad material being published that could corrupt people, material such as the popular Police Gazette, which he thought posed this kind of danger. His reaction was similar to that of Americans who thought Playboy corrupted American youth in the 1960s and 1970s, and Penthouse and Hustler in the 1980s and 1990s. In 1878, Comstock met with moral leaders in Boston and helped them establish the New England Watch and Ward Society. Their members were able to ban some very interesting books over the next thirty years, such as Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass in 1882, and a sex guide, benign by standards of the day, published in 1892, called Almost Fourteen by Mortimer Warren. In 1915 this society hooked up with booksellers to establish the Boston Booksellers Committee, which read and evaluated current fiction. If a book was not free of offensive language or discussion of sexual matters, booksellers were reluctant to sell it because the committee would bring charges that the offending dealer had violated Massachusetts’s obscenity law. By the mid-1920s this organization had banned between 60 and 70 books.

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Periodically, and down to the present, one group or another banned books in Boston.8 Banning has also continued in sporadic fashion across the nation. The NAACP in New York considered Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn racist in 1957. Over the years a library here, a school there, all around the country, periodically banned this book. The most famous modern case, of course, was D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, banned in Boston. The book dealer who first sold a copy, James DeLacey, was fined $800 and spent four months in jail.9 Banning took place for literary and moral reasons involving local “good taste” (sexual and ethnic). Judges over time demonstrated a willingness to delegate to local discretion definitions of “good taste.” That, in turn, made local opinions very important. We have seen that approach at play during the 1990s with the controversies over what constituted bad art.10 Books that have been banned at one time or another read like a list of great literature: Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, Brave New World, Grapes of Wrath, Great Gatsby, Gulliver’s Travels, Jack and the Beanstalk, Little Red Riding Hood, Lord of the Flies, Mother Goose, Naked Lunch, Of Mice and Men, Pentagon Papers, Random House Dictionary, Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, Slaughterhouse Five, The Sun Also Rises, Tarzan, Ulysses, and Webster’s Seventh Edition dictionary. Amazing! Some groups banned for political reasons, which of course, came closer to policy issues and, therefore, could not be taken lightly. Censorship of political views expressed in print come from many sources, not necessarily from an irate president who attempts to block circulation, for example, of the Pentagon Papers. These sources can be schoolteachers and librarians avoiding controversy, or school boards, churches, or political action groups. Battles are fought in the courts, with judges frequently freeing books to circulate. In one study of 105 banned books, reasons ranged from the sexual to the political. Quality of the material was rarely the subject, many were novels written by such established authors as Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, and Richard Wright. The history of bannings is less a story about government policy, and


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more about individual and group initiatives. The list of books censored in the past several decades covers everything from literature to history. A sampling of titles suggests the breadth of the banned books: John Kenneth Galbraith, The Affluent Society, Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front, MacKinlay Kantor, Andersonville, George Orwell, Animal Farm, Ron Kovic, Born on the Fourth of July, Dee Brown, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, Sinclair Lewis, It Can’t Happen Here, and George Orwell, 1984. Many were also banned in other countries.11 The last major source of censorship we need to recognize comes from public schools, often the target of local groups interested in such matters. Between 1950 and 1985, for example, the majority of complaints about a book came either from parents or school officials. Several hundred important cases occurred. Some of the most popular books caught up in these cases included The Catcher in the Rye, The Chocolate War, Forever, and It’s OK If You Don’t Love Me. Of the top 30 attacked in the United States, five were junior novels like The Catcher in the Rye, eleven concerned non-Anglo-Saxons or nonwhites, like Anne Frank or Black Like Me, while obscene or bad language would get a book in trouble faster than political or racial issues. Dozens of incidents still occur each year.12

THE SPECIAL ROLE OF THE PRESS Whenever I discuss newspapers in this book, I treat the subject differently than books, yet both enjoy the same constitutional protections and both are paper-based mediums. They also rely on similar technologies for manufacture and distribution. But newspapers are more immediate and influence public opinion about political matters more effectively than books. In many cases, therefore, they affect the nature of public policy in direct and immediate ways. In 1898, one of the reasons President William McKinley reluctantly agreed to declare war on Spain to free Cuba was the enormous effort of the “yellow press” to get that war launched. The actions of the Washington Post in reporting on the activities of President Richard Nixon made Watergate a cause célèbre and led ulti-

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mately to his resignation from office, the first time a sitting U.S. president quit his job. Print and electronic reporters brought President Clinton’s sexual adventures to the nation’s attention. In short, newspapers are part of the policy world of government. That is why “the press” is explicitly discussed in the U.S. Constitution. But “the press” constantly had to justify its freedom of expression, both to governments and to various groups within American society. The case for freedom had to be laid out almost from day one. In 1800, barely twenty years after the creation of the United States, Thomas Cooper became an early defender of freedom of expression. It seemed he was always in trouble, which is why he had to hone his arguments on behalf of the press. On watching the actions of government he noted that “the more we understand of the science of government, the less necessity we find for governmental secrets.” He argued that public officials needed to be watched to make sure they did the work assigned to them in an ethical manner. Newspapers were sources of information the public could use to keep up with political matters, essential for the operation of representative government. “It is the general diffusion of knowledge—it is free discussion, that eradicates the prejudices of the people.”13 Throughout the history of the nation, courts passed judgment on limits of expression for the press. Criminal libel cases, from Theodore Roosevelt’s prosecution of the New York World and the Indianapolis News in 1908, for suggesting that his acquisition of title to the Panama Canal was illegal and had corrupt qualities, to the present, loomed large in the minds of public officials and Americans concerned with their civil liberties. T.R. did not hesitate to go after the press. Nearly a half century later, in 1952, Justice Felix Frankfurter, in presenting the decision of the Supreme Court in a libel suit, argued that courts should demonstrate constraint in judging the wisdom of state laws, in this judge’s case, one regarding liability in Illinois.14 On occasion the post office would be given responsibility for making sure immoral and “bad” material, such as pornographic publications, did not pass through the mails. While


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this remains a touchy issue, because the USPS still has that duty, when it came to the press, the issue was more often settled in court. As early as 1835, for example, many Southerners were upset with a rash of abolitionist materials being mailed to their region. A near riot occurred when the post office delivered mail to Charleston, South Carolina on July 29, 1835, which included material from Northern abolitionist societies and newspaper articles on the topic. Government officials from Postmaster General Amos Kendall to such wellknown congressional figures as Daniel Webster and Henry Clay got into the debate about the free flow of this kind of material in the South. Congress passed a law that year prohibiting censorship of the mail by the post office, although local postmasters did exactly that on their own initiative for many decades.15 While such eruptions occurred from time to time, newspapers flowed through the information infrastructure of the nation with almost no interruptions. Despite immediate concerns, such as that of Southerners over proabolitionist publications, government agencies supported the free flow of information as a matter of course. In the case from 1835, the Postmaster General wanted to stop the flow of proabolitionist publications to the South, but Congress disagreed, passing enabling legislation to ensure movement of these materials through the mail. Wartime contingencies have been a concern for freedom of expression for two centuries. During the Civil War, an environment in which the Northern newspapers had an extraordinarily wide band of freedom to say whatever they wanted, probably more than at any subsequent time, led President Abraham Lincoln to suppress a few. He was of two minds on the matter, needs-of-war objectives to keep the press in tow, but also the impulse of the North to support freedom of the press. In the end he opted for occasional censorship, closing down papers that falsely reported orders emanating from his office. He did the same with telegraph messages. Two wars later, on June 15, 1917, Congress passed the Espionage Act, which became the basis for government policy and practice over the next half century through a myriad of political and legal instruments. The net of it was that the

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federal government did bar criticisms and detailed exposure of its activities during wartime. This power expanded, covering press activities under other circumstances involving national security. Unlike in the Civil War, where few military secrets were withheld from publication, during World War I the press demonstrated significant self-restraint in the interests of the nation. The same occurred during World War II. Even the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) had no complaints about freedom of speech. It reported that “The striking contrast between the state of civil liberties in the first eighteen months of World War II and in World War I offers strong evidence to support the thesis that our democracy can fight even the greatest of all wars and still maintain the essentials of liberty.” In a report written at the time, the ACLU continued, “The government has not resorted to prosecution or censorship on any appreciable scale.”16 Those who remembered the tense eras of the Korean War and the Vietnam War also recalled it was a time when the press could say pretty much what it wanted or knew. All through the second half of the century the personal, immediate problem for newspapers lay most at the doorstep of individual reporters. Federal employees, more than state and local officials, wanted from time-to-time to question a reporter about his or her sources of information, often to further a criminal investigation or, as in the case of Watergate, to quash press criticism about politically sensitive activities. Invariably, reporters would refuse; some went to jail, and almost invariably government agencies would not get the information they wanted. The logic was straightforward. If a reporter exposed his or her informants, those sources would dry up and the ability of the press to report on all types of issues would be compromised. That, in turn, as the logic goes, would destroy democracy. No such argument would be complete without appropriate quotes from Madison and Jefferson.17 Thomas Jefferson said, “I know of no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves, and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion.”18


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At best, governments would deny “alleged” stories, criticizing sources. In recent times we have seen that strategy deployed by Nixon, who scoffed at the thought of a break-in at the Watergate. President Ronald Reagon did the same over the Contra issue and, in the early stages of Clinton’s scandal surrounding Monica Lewinsky, White House officials reacted similarly. The press persisted. In the end reporters and editors were vindicated through public acknowledgments by each president that the reports were true. Consequences flowed: Nixon resigned, Reagan was compromised, and Clinton impeached (although not removed from office). During the 20th century the level of tolerance for differences of political and social opinion expanded far beyond earlier norms, with the result that courts and legislatures slowly began reflecting that improved climate in information policies. It was a painful process, with some agencies moving faster to a policy of more open records while others resisted. Thus we have, for instance, the U.S. Department of Commerce making extraordinary amounts of information available to the public, while courts were making rulings of a different sort. For example, the conservative Supreme Court of 1919 continued to restrict freedom of speech in rulings such as Schenck v. U.S., when it upheld the conviction of a Socialist Party member for mailing antiwar leaflets to young men. Several months later, judges on the same court began to speak about constraining free speech only when there was “a clear and present danger” of immediate harm. The purpose of going through this brief story is to recognize that the modern period of open tolerance of different ideas was linked to the flow of information related to those issues. Much of what was involved, of course, concerned political activities and access to information about governmental activities.

EXPANDING ACCESS TO INFORMATION An extraordinary development in the history of information in the United States occurred with the passage of a series of laws, beginning in the 1970s and continuing through the 1990s, that increased the rights of citizens to gain access to informa-

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tion about the activities of government agencies. These laws were passed at the same time that courts were expanding people’s protection and rights under the First Amendment. The most remarkable of the legislation to make information accessible was the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and the Privacy Act of 1974, both enacted at the same time. The first law, usually called the FOIA, said citizens had a right to request information from any federal agency about its activities with some exceptions, such as, data concerning national defense and foreign relations, trade secrets, and so forth. The second law, called the Privacy Act, gave people access to information about themselves, the authority to correct errors in those records, and the right to sue the government for violating that law. Here, too, there were some exemptions concerning criminal investigations and so forth. Both laws covered activities of executive departments of the federal government, but not those of Congress, the office of the White House, federal courts, or state and local governments. In the following years, however, most state governments passed similar laws with the result that by the early 1980s Americans had legal access to an extraordinary degree to information about governmental activities and to files kept on them. The values expressed in these laws were reinforced as recently as in January 2001, when one government report on the role of information articulated the right of Americans to have access to information when commenting about government-generated information: Public ownership of information . . . is an essential right. It not only allows “individuals to fulfill their civic responsibilities, but also contributes to an overall improvement in their quality of life. Current technology not only brings with it expanded opportunities for using government information. . . .19

Journalists trying to understand various activities of national and state government agencies initially used the law the most. As more Americans became aware of the existence of these two laws, individuals too requested information. By the 1990s, federal agencies were reporting that requests for information under these laws were increasing annually at between 14 and 15 percent. In fact, there were so many requests that agencies began to complain about the costs involved in com-


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plying with the requests. At the same time, these agencies recognized that senior government officials were committed to the maintenance of the two laws. For instance, John C. Dwyer, acting Associate Attorney General in the Clinton Administration, complained to Vice President Al Gore about the expense of carrying out the law at the Department of Justice, but also added, “I assure you of this Administration’s firm commitment to the Freedom of Information Act.”20 To be sure, many agencies resisted giving out information of a sensitive nature, attempting to exercise to some extent the exemption clauses in both laws. If reporters wanted access to FBI records on Martin Luther King or to data about some defense program, they might get whole pages of records blacked out and, of course, that was the story presented so often in television news programs such as 60 Minutes. Nonetheless, the laws existed. They supported the free flow of information, and government agencies complied. These laws were also updated as circumstances warranted. For example, Congress passed the Electronic Freedom of Information Act Amendments of 1996, which covered records housed in computers. The laws reflected the slowly evolving, nonetheless clear, long-standing trend of broadening access to information across American society that occurred throughout the course of the 20th century. Public policy mirrored public attitudes. The American public had always assumed responsibility for the activities of their print media in the Age of Paper. Governments generally maintained an environment of minimal control, deviating usually only during wartime. That was how the public wanted it. Americans understood wartime issues, but when constraint was called for, they did it through local means: the public library, the school board, or by not buying the published product. Regardless of circumstance, what they always seem to want is the right of access to information whether or not they actually acquired it. This attitude mimicked the issue of the right to bear arms: More people believed in the need for the right than actually had guns. Since there always remained a wide spectrum of opinions, tension existed between those who wanted a specific item of information (or

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perspective) and those who wanted it constrained. Conservative Republicans would have loved for the Washington Post to go away during the initial stages of the Watergate scandal, while anti-Nixon Americans wanted the newspaper to be deadon accurate in its reporting of the ugly problems associated with him. No self-respecting Republican would have publicly advocated arresting the editor, reporters, or shutting down the paper, especially after it became obvious that the president had done some very bad things. Private thoughts were another matter; taped conversations by the president suggested he would have loved to shut down newspapers and thrown certain reporters in jail. Ultimately, however, we have to conclude that Americans love their information and that government officials are willing to make it available.

POLICIES AND INFRASTRUCTURES IN THE ELECTRICAL AGE Policymakers operate in a very different environment when issues concern electronic forms of information. On the one hand, they are subject to the same legal and constitutional guidelines imposed on them regarding paper-based information. Freedom of speech, access to expression, and so forth apply in the electronic world, too. On the other hand, officials have always played a more extensive role in regulating the availability and deployment of electronic media. The essential reason for this involvement boils down to making electronic media accessible to the largest number of people. With radio and television there always existed technical limits on the number of transmissions one could have—bandwidth, as it is known—which meant the government had to parcel out frequencies to ensure that a number of conditions were met. These conditions included ensuring that in every region, multiple firms could operate radio and television stations. Regulators have been careful to ensure that no one firm or individual could dominate a region (governments use the term market to describe a geographical region) out of fear that diverse views would not have a chance of being expressed over the airwaves. They also mandated that existing radio and TV stations dedi-


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cate some programming time to alternative perspectives. Simultaneously, officials also wanted to foster competition, a difficult thing to do when there is a finite number of potential broadcasters due to the technical limitations of how many people can broadcast out of a pool of available frequencies. It is a problem of physics and science, not policy or law. Finally, in order to have all various electronic media work, someone had to establish technical standards broadcasters could conform to, such as AM or FM for radio. Electronic media has become diverse over the past 150 years, complicating the airwaves and the job of regulators. The first electronic media was the telegraph, which came onstream in the late 1830s, followed by the telephone during the last decades of the 19th century. By the early 1920s radio had expanded sufficiently to require the government to get involved in regulating and setting standards. Television came in the 1940s, computer-to-computer telecommunications arrived in the late 1950s. In the 1960s, satellites made their appearance. In the 1970s, the American government began to pick up the pace of privatizing telecommunications and increasing competition. After the breakup of AT&T in the early 1980s, competition in the communications world sped up, resulting in a large variety of new technologies emerging into products and services. At the same time, computer chips had advanced to the point where they could be used in communications. The result of better technology and a more competitive market led quickly to such new devices as wireless telephones (what we usually called car phones and later cell phones), pagers, and radio enabled PDAs, to mention just a few. All needed assigned frequencies with which to broadcast, and each required some common technical standards so that they could communicate with each other. Then, along came the Internet, which quickly created compelling business reasons for converging a number of technologies and communications methods together, such as TV broadcast over the Internet.21 If you were a government regulator in the area of telecommunications in the 1980s or 1990s, you were a very busy person.22 In order to understand how electronic media evolved, it is essential to appreciate the role of the Federal Communica-

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tions Commission, which has the responsibility for regulating the access electronic media has to the airwaves. This is a responsibility that immediately placed the FCC in that tenuous situation of having to provide access, but also capable of placing controls on the use of media, and by circumstance or design, even control over content. Today, the scope of the FCC’s activities is very impressive. A few numbers quickly tell the tale. There are 1,700 television broadcasters in the United States. There are more than 13,300 AM and FM radio stations, along with another 3,600 FM translator and booster stations. Another 1,252 stations were under construction at the start of 1998. The nation has 1,700 commercial and noncommercial educational television stations and more than 8,200 TV translator and low-power television broadcast stations. Add in satellites, all telephone companies, telegraph operators, and the Internet, and one begins to understand how much the FCC has on its plate.23 Some 98 percent of the residents of the United States either own or have direct access to some form of electronic media. Most spend more time obtaining information and entertainment from electronic sources than from printed materials. Therefore, the activities of the FCC have become more important than anyone would have imagined in the 1930s. State regulators played an active role during most of the 20th century in setting prices, parceling out cable TV licenses (beginning in the 1980s), and so forth. The Federal Government owned basic responsibility for licensing of media transmitters, protecting free speech and access, and promoting competition, all the while establishing and enforcing standards. The bulk of the national regulatory horsepower resided, as it does today, in the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). Established by Congress in 1934, its purpose was to “make available . . . to all the people of the United States, without discrimination . . . a rapid, efficient, nationwide wire and radio communication service . . . at reasonable charges.” The next major legislation came with the Telecommunications Act of 1996, better known as the Telecom Act. With this second law, Congress recognized that the fundamental basis of law and policy should be competition rather than pure regulation, which in the minds of many industry leaders and Congress,


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had focused too much in prior years on micromanaging the market and administering monopolistic regulations. The requirements to ensure access to the largest number of people and imposition of technical standards remained, however.24 The government began creating legislation to instruct regulators as early as the 1800s. In 1887, the Interstate Commerce Act made it possible to regulate telephony. In 1927, Congress formalized government regulatory authority over radio through the Federal Radio Act, which was the first major legislative initiative in the area of broadcasting. Following the pattern of providing new regulatory authority as additional technologies came along, in 1984 for example, Congress passed the Cable Communications Policy Act, which governed cable television. By the late 20th century, government regulators had a whole series of laws and policies allowing them to fulfill the goals expressed, for example in the 1934 law, yet tailored to the specific situations of multiple broadcasting mediums: telephony, cable, terrestrial broadcast, and satellite. In recent decades, with convergence of technologies, the FCC had to move away from merely technical standard setting to a different model, in its case to competition. Today, the FCC reports that its primary goal “is to promote competition throughout the communications industry, particularly in the area of local telephony.” A second goal is to reduce regulations as competition increases to make the markets more responsive to the American public. Yet, at the same time the FCC has to protect consumers from being denied access—the fear that led, for instance, to the nationally subsidized development of a postal network in the early years of the Republic— while also ensuring disreputable practices do not occur. The FCC is also charged with stimulating innovation, such as promoting implementation of high-speed Internet access for all Americans. One of the major initiatives of the Clinton administration, for example, involved installation of the infrastructure that gave students and teachers access to the Internet across the nation. The FCC also is required to stimulate global competition in communications in the belief that such policies would play to the advantage of American manufacturers and service providers while fostering free trade.25 In that last objective, it has been singularly successful.26

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The job of regulating has often been hostage to public morality and opinion, aided and abetted by political agendas. For example, in recent years the increased availability of sexually explicit material on both television and the Internet has drawn much nervous attention from various parent groups, religious constituencies, and public officials (including teachers) working with children. The whole V-chip discussion regarding television and kiddy Web sites on the Internet are specific cases in point from the recent 1990s. Television and the Internet come under the purview of the FCC. So what does a regulator do? Restrict access to television programs or Internet sites and run into First Amendment problems? Don’t such restrictions fly in the face of the FCC’s historic mission of providing universal service and access? On the other hand, without some control, children would be exposed to material widely considered objectionable. Normally the resolution of this conundrum involves creating market conditions that selfregulate the problem away. In the spirit of encouraging technological innovation and market forces to play out their hands, the FCC followed a most predicable path. In the case of television, it got behind the V-chip, and for the Internet, kiddy browsers.

V-CHIPS AND TELEVISION The V-chip controversy of the 1990s illustrates the issue. The V-chip was a computer chip that could be put in a TV to block pornographic and other undesirable material from appearing on a screen that a child might see. Here technology provides a potential resolution. The V-chip, when installed in a television, makes it possible for parents to block television programming they consider inappropriate for their children to watch. The FCC quickly embraced the idea, negotiated a set of standards, and scared all the various elements of the television broadcasters, networks, and manufacturers into endorsing the chip, along with a set of guidelines for rating TV programs developed by the broadcasters. If the entertainment industry had not gone along with such voluntary controls, Congress was in the mood to authorize the FCC to regulate them, bring-


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ing in movie rating systems of old in the dress of federal regulations. While the rating system that was adopted has a way to go in indicating accurately what material is to be broadcast, the V-chip is moving ahead because the Congress passed a law mandating that televisions manufactured after July 1, 1999 had to start phasing in the technology. The chairman of the FCC, William E. Kennard, puffed with pride on May 10, 1999: By this time next year, all new television sets will include V-chip technology. This technology, industry-rated programming and ratings information are the tools which empower parents to direct their children’s television viewing.27

It was one of the few times the FCC was not being publicly criticized for overmanaging an industry or perceived as constraining trade or expression. The entertainment industry put a good face on the situation since it was not about to give up producing sexually or violently oriented programming. Jack Valenti (president and CEO of the Motion Picture Association of America), Decker Anstrom (president and CEO of the National Cable Television Association), and Eddie Fritts (president and CEO of the National Association of Broadcasters) all grinned and bowed to the inevitable with the rating system, hoping they could sell it quickly before Congress jumped in with legislation.28 The Clinton administration had a political victory on its hands. For a brief instant political life was good for the president, who otherwise was under siege for his own personal behavior. At the end of the 1990s and the start of the next decade, a second, yet related, debate has gotten well underway about offensive material on the Internet. On the one hand there are those who want to regulate access to certain sites on the Internet, perhaps forcing access providers such as Netscape or AOL to somehow block children. Others, fearful of the constraint of the free flow of information, see the hand of big brother regulator looming with its highly politicized implications. The commissioners of the FCC obviously would like not to become gatekeepers on the Internet. It turns out there are nonregulatory technical options. A minor could be assigned a digital ID, such as a password, which a browser provider, such as Microsoft, AOL, Netscape or whoever, would then see is a child,

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thereby blocking certain types of sites from being transmitted to the terminal the child is using. In short, the idea of a kid browser is now making the rounds. There are a number of ways of determining what gets filtered out, such as parents telling the provider what types of sites to block. But the issue of kid browsers is still an open one.29

RECENT TRENDS IN REGULATORY PRACTICES While the V-chip and the Internet grab headlines, the regulatory landscape is conditioned by two fundamental realities that will continue to influence public policy long after this book is published. The first is the Telecommunications Act of 1996, so we need to visit that legislation one more time. Second, technological conversions generate many attempts on the part of corporations in disparate industries to merge, a process showing no signs of slowing down. When the Telecommunications Act became law in February 1996, government leaders, the FCC, and various segments of the telecommunications industry recognized that the convergence of new communications technologies and the computer chip was changing many things, often faster than the regulators could respond to them with effective actions. Until passage of this law, each segment of the telecommunications world was treated by law and practice almost as an independent entity: radio was radio, TV was TV, wireless communications differed from traditional wire-based telephone services, and so forth. One of the new law’s fundamental assumptions was that all of these types of communication were really part of one large market, what Alan Stone, an articulate student of the industry, has dubbed the “hypercommunications industry.”30 If one added up all the revenues generated by all segments of the industry covered by this new law in 1996, they would total nearly $1 trillion. The law also reflected the growing need to foster competition in order for the emerging technologies to surface quickly in products and corporations that made sense within the context of American capitalism and its free market conditions. The law did not allow, however, for a


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Wild West in communications; constraints were still kept, particularly for some recent arrivals to the world of communications. For example, cable companies were prohibited from buying telephone companies in large urban areas, but they could in rural communities. Guidelines for deregulating cable rates were established, leading to a gradual loosening of controls between 1996 and 1999. Ground rules spelled out relationships between cable and phone companies in providing combined services. The ability of television stations to broadcast programming of their choice loosened up as did their ability to acquire other forms of communications firms, such as, cable companies. The law addressed telephone market realities as well, paralleling many of the same rules now applied to cable companies. An important feature of the law, which created enormous contention and activity in the next half decade, concerned the clause that allowed local phone companies to sell long-distance services while allowing long-distance service providers to offer local phone services. Both were still subject to the regulatory practices of local state regulators, however, since local carriers had an implied monopoly because they owned the phone lines into our homes and offices. The law also touched on the Internet with some provisions concerning “indecent” material. However, in the next several years, courts across the United States ruled that the federal government could not block the transmission of such material, because to do so constituted a restraint of free speech. Again we see the basic principles of the 18th century First Amendment at work. The requirement for a V-chip, however, came out of the 1996 law, as did the requirement that the television broadcasting industry needed to develop a voluntary rating schema for their programs.31 The second trend—mergers caused by converging technologies—is both a byproduct of regulatory practices of the 1980s and 1990s and a consequence of the emergence of such new technologies as computer chips, personal computers, better and cheaper satellite communications, and improved television formats, such as what at the time was the impending arrival of high definition television (HDTV). The merger

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mania, as many commentators called it, occurred along several fronts, and to describe them all would take up a book in itself. However, three lines of activities are evident. First, telephone companies have worked to consolidate into larger entities to drive down costs, improve service, and gain market share. Thus, we have seen some of the Baby Bells, which spun off from AT&T in the early 1980s, merging together.32 That is how we got Ameritech in the Midwest, for example, a blend of Baby Bells from all over the region. Each sought to acquire local phone companies. Conversely, small local companies merged with other tiny firms. Tied to the telephone companies getting bigger has been an ongoing effort on the part of locals to acquire the capability of offering long-distance service and for long-distance phone companies to go local.33 A second line of activity involves cable television companies merging together to create national markets. TCI, for example, has been very aggressive in this arena, but by the end of the 1990s whole new conglomerates of cable companies were emerging, leading to a substantial consolidation of the American cable market. Cable firms flirted with phone companies because each sees value in bundling services to customers; that is to say, providing telephone and cable services in one offering. Cable firms also have reached out to what they call content providers for programming. A content provider is anybody who has programming that can be transmitted to a user, such as Disney with its cartoons or a movie studio with its inventory of old movies. Ted Turner of Turner Broadcasting did this quickly, acquiring an impressive library of old movies. Large, multimedia conglomerates acquired cable companies. Using Turner Broadcasting as an example, it was acquired by Time Warner, a firm that also has other electronic entertainment outlets and publishers of paper-based materials.34 Turner, like other executives in the telecommunications/entertainment business, is looking for ways to leverage assets in as many ways as possible. He told one reporter that his business paralleled that of a chicken processor: Modern chicken farmers, they grind up the intestines to make dog food. The feathers go into pillows. Even the chicken manure


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they make into fertilizer. They use very bit of the chicken. Well that’s what we try to do over here with television products, is use everything to its fullest extent.35

Regulators or not, the various segments of the communications industry became populated with highly creative and effective entrepreneurs. These ranged from the mercurial Turner to John Malone of TCI, Ray Smith of Bell Atlantic, Robert Allen and his successor Michael Armstrong at AT&T, and Craig McCaw, the founder of McCaw Communications. A third trend involves all major providers of communications—cable, TV broadcasting, and to an extent, radio—reaching out to the entertainment world for content. But tied to that is the issue of how to deliver content to customers, primarily into the home, which is why cable, telephone, and entertainment firms frequently held acquisition and merger discussions to form new alliances and companies to get the job done. The effort has been fraught with difficulties since each industry has a different business model, dictating how they operate and make money. Then there is the regulatory influence since, by law, mergers of regulated industries must be approved by government authorities. They, of course, look to see if the new firm will constrain trade, variety, access, or create a monopolistic condition. If so, the FCC or the Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice feels compelled to block such a move.36 The amount of activity on the part of the FCC and the various media industries has been massive and intense. In 1996, the year President Clinton signed the new Telecom Act into law, more than 125 significant merger or acquisition initiatives took place in the United States. That pace of activity has continued unabated to the present. One of the most sensational trends that caught the attention of all the electronic media industries and the world of information processing was the highly publicized and aggressive activity of Michael Armstrong, chairman of the board of AT&T, in the late 1990s. With a vision in his mind of where the firm had to go, he acquired firms (wireless and otherwise) that would position AT&T as a national provider of a broad range of communications offerings, not just long-distance phone service. The

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national press paid attention to Armstrong’s activities because AT&T is a well-known brand and communications is now a very big part of the information landscape of the United States. By the early 1990s, approximately one-sixth of the entire economy consisted of communications and related industries. Again, as we saw with paper-based activities, and earlier in Chapter 5 with the role of information in work, the evidence of a preponderance of information in the economy is significant and everywhere. Armstrong would not have received as much national press attention for his business leadership if he had been operating in the 1920s or 1930s. But today, like Louis V. Gerstner at IBM or Bill Gates at Microsoft, his actions affect too many lives not to be noticed. In the United States, providers of information and its technologies are both celebrities and powerbrokers. The selection of chairmen of the FCC was, for many decades, a nonevent except for the industry. Today, FCC chairmen are interviewed by the news media, they are the fodder of C-SPAN programming, and are known in many circles that in earlier times would have excluded them.

UNCLE SAM, THE ULTIMATE VENTURE CAPITALIST OF DIGITAL TECHNOLOGIES It should be obvious by now that the story of policy practices in the flow of information through the American economy is a complicated tale of mutually reinforcing sets of activities and dependencies among government agencies, between federal and state agencies, and among various industries that produce and deliver information. Nowhere is this so much the case as in transportation infrastructures, computers, and in telecommunications. Particularly in both transportation and communications, government participation occurred in two ways. First, the one discussed in this chapter is regulatory in setting prices, promoting access and competition, and ensuring construction of infrastructure across the nation. The second, which I have not discussed extensively, involves investments in infrastructure. That type of investment dates back to the days when the government funded construction of roads and


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canals to facilitate movement of mail, people, and goods. When railroads came along, the federal government invested in them by giving them rights of way in the territories in order to make it economically affordable for railroads to lay track, put up telegraph lines, and stimulate development of communities near rail lines. The telegraph, telephone, radio, and television were for the most part developed with private capital. As the 20th century moved along, however, the cost of developing new technologies rose to such levels that in the early stages of an emerging technology the economic costs and risks were often too great for any one firm to assume. The federal government frequently stepped in either with funding of projects (R&D) or with contracts to build something. More than just for the betterment of the American public’s access to information, these publicly funded initiatives were deemed essential to the national welfare, most specifically to its defense during both World War II and throughout the Cold War. Military origins of federal policy clearly dominated the early stages in the life of all digital information technologies. Later, once implemented in practical forms, a technology surfaced in civilian applications. For instance, GPS tools were built for the military to locate precisely enemy targets; today one can buy hand-held units for guidance on hikes through national parks. Every major project to build computers in the United States in the 1940s and early 1950s was funded by the U.S. Government.37 The U.S. Government also paid for every satellite built in this country until the late 1980s. Almost every significant telecommunications project of the past half century was mostly or significantly funded by government agencies until the 1990s, when private initiatives became significant in scope. The leading student of the government’s role in the development of the computer, Kenneth Flamm, was blunt: “The early successes of many technology-intensive sectors of the U.S. economy—electronics, computers, radio communications, aerospace—largely were the result of applications funded by and developed for military users.”38 Why was the United States at the end of the 20th century so much further along on the road to the Information Age in its current digital form than so many other nations? The answer lies largely in this

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enormous investment made by the nation in what later emerged as practical uses of information technologies. That the government would turn to technological innovation, of course, grew out of the nation’s two-century-long fascination and success with technology and by exploiting an environment in which information, economic incentives, and a high level of technical capability already existed. The ability of the government to have sufficient funds and credit to invest the required billions of dollars came directly out of the enormous vitality of the American economy built up since its industrial takeoff in the 1840s, and stimulated by emerging from World War II as the least damaged yet wealthiest nation on Earth. I have argued elsewhere that this national economic strength made the computer industry, for example, possible in the first place. Without that economic power, taxes would not have been sufficient to allow the government to make massive investments. The inability of West European nations to come up with similar amounts of funding made it impossible for them to make the investments in technology in the early postwar years that they too knew should be made.39 By the late 1950s, nearly 85 percent of all research and development expenses in the United States were being paid for by the American government. Unlike on the media regulatory side, where most regulatory functions were finally consolidated for purposes of administrative efficiencies into the one agency (the FCC), funding for computer and communications projects came from all over the government. Key investors in the second half of the 20th century were the Department of Defense (DoD), the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), national laboratories (such as Los Alamos) and the National Science Foundation (NSF).40 Over time, as technologies moved into commercial applications, funding shifted to newer projects. The government supported development of computers in the 1940s and early 1950s, such as those I discussed in Chapter 3. Then it began investing in satellites in the 1950s and 1960s. It also focused extensively on other related communications projects, such as development of the Internet between the late 1960s and the mid-1980s. The Department of Defense


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led all agencies in funding R&D of those telecommunications and digital projects that became the basis of the modern Information Age. As one student of that department’s role, Paul N. Edwards, summarized the strategy, “The primary weapons of the Cold War were ideologies, alliances, advisors, foreign aid, and national prestige—and above and behind them all, the juggernaut of high technology.”41 High-tech weapons were crucial in such a strategy, and they worked only if they had computers and communications. Edwards placed enormous emphasis on the computer: Of all the technologies built to fight the Cold War, digital computers have become its most ubiquitous, and perhaps its most important legacy. Yet few have realized the degree to which computers created the technological possibility of Cold War and shaped its political atmosphere, and virtually no one has recognized how profoundly the Cold War shaped computer technology.42

He has demonstrated effectively that the one influenced the other. Military reasoning always influenced information policy in the United States. Roads, canals, railroads, and the telegraph all had military significance and thus came under various forms of regulation, attention, and, in the 20th century, financial support. In the years following World War II, government policymakers increasingly recognized the importance of the federal role in stimulating development of technologies of many kinds, not just computers and satellites. By the end of the 1950s, the question was not whether it was a good idea to invest, but rather in what. More officials than regulators, however, wanted to ensure that ownership of the evolution of a technology eventually moved back into the private sector where such market forces as competition and economic rewards could be relied upon to push technological innovations in directions that made sense for the nation. As technological innovations occurred, so too did the debate about the nature of the federal role. The debate crested during the 1992 national elections when it was a topic of discussion; every candidate for president commented on the topic. During its first year, the Clinton administration published a comprehensive

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national strategy for investment in technologies. The net was that this administration would accelerate federal investments in all kinds of technology, not just in the Internet or in smart bombs. The emphasis of investments in the 1990s reflected a shift caused by the end of the Cold War away from purely military projects to more civilian-oriented ones. A second emphasis called for a turn away from pure technology development to the construction of information infrastructure and services to exploit existing technologies, such as the Internet. A third tenet called for moving government investments away from federal agencies to either state governments or private firms. A side-bar tactical approach also included government agencies encouraging partnerships and alliances among firms to work on developing technologies, an approach that in earlier years would have raised suspicions of collusion in the Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice. Government officials had concluded that collaborative approaches had given Japanese companies distinct competitive advantages over their American rivals and, therefore, that the U.S. should apply the same strategy. A distinguished participant in the development of recent technology strategy, with many years of corporate and academic experience, is Lewis M. Branscomb, who has been watching the evolution of government strategy for decades. Although not known for flamboyant language, he called this new strategy “a quiet revolution,” one in which “the business community is becoming more comfortable” as they keep a nervous eye cast in the direction of the Justice Department.43 During the last two years of the Clinton administration, various government agencies and task forces revisited the issue of what kinds of investments should be made in technology. To a large extent, these centered around some common themes: information infrastructure to increase digital access for all Americans, new technologies to help the handicapped access digital-based information, technologies for defense, and to stimulate further such industries as software, satellite communications, and a wide range of biotechnology projects. While the emphasis continues to be linked to what regulators


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do—opening markets and increasing private sector competition—today’s agendas are very much in step with how government officials have long dealt with information technologies. As we shall see with the case of the Internet, it is the past experience with other forms of information technology that has given public officials from one administration to another a base of experience from which to craft policies and practices at the dawn of the new century.44

THE SPECIAL CASE OF THE INTERNET The existence of the Internet poses a number of complex issues for the American government that go beyond simply making available such things as bandwidth and PCs in schools. Security and privacy issues45 regarding information about individuals, national defense, and the integrity of commercial transactions are obvious examples. How to use this technology to stimulate American economic development within the context of a more integrated global economy is another. One student of these issues, Brian Kahin of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, sounded a very positive note about the ability of national leaders to deal with these issues. Commenting on the Clinton administration, that included public officials who were working on policy issues in the next administration, he concluded that This is the first administration to understand the root interconnectedness of information, technology, and infrastructure. It has implicitly scoped out a policy development agenda that may take years to fully develop, but it has made a strong start in bringing the issues together. It has also drawn appropriate links between information infrastructure and other major components of its technology policy: education and training; advanced manufacturing technology; and making government more efficient.46

The FCC clearly demonstrated its appreciation as well for the role that it had to play. Its key message concerning its role vis-à-vis the Internet centered on access to information infrastructure. That focus was an important initiative of other government agencies as well. But clearly, the first agency one

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would want to look to for leadership on government policy is the FCC. Daniel J. Weitzner, the deputy director at the FCC most responsible for making technology accessible, observed in early 1997 that “the growth of the Internet gives the Federal Communications Commission a unique opportunity to advance one of its core communications policy goals: providing Americans with ready access to a diversity of information sources and communication opportunities.” He recognized that the Internet is “a rich forum for democratic discourse.”47 Weitzner’s comments are a clear indication of the importance with which the FCC, and for that matter other regulatory bodies, view the Internet. Put bluntly, it ranks right up there in priority with the creation of the postal network two hundred years earlier and the national highway system in the midtwentieth century. While the analogy between the Internet and the post office can be carried too far, it is an interconnected one. Both move information across the entire geographic footprint of the nation and beyond. Each stimulates a variety of economic activities. Commercial transactions could be conducted using either one. Both stimulated other forms of transportation; in the case of the post office, it was the construction of roads, canals, use of steam ships and railroads, and later adoption of the telegraph and telephone. In the case of the Internet, we are seeing new information-handling tools, software aids, and innovative ways of connecting businesses. We will definitely see more wireless traffic, indeed orders of magnitude increase as we ship increasing amounts of video and sound attached to text, bouncing them off satellites, for example. Yet, the Internet has just started. Who knows what other forms of transmitting information will develop as a result? Michael Dertouzos, in his fascinating look at the future of information, What Will Be, sees changes occurring across the spectrum of human activity, from work to private lives, from new forms of business to different application of democratic principles. Essentially a positive view, he concludes that The Information Marketplace will transform our society over the next century as significantly as the two industrial revolutions, establishing itself solidly and rightfully as the Third


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Revolution in modern human history. It is big, exciting, and awesome.48

A great deal of his—and my—positive outlook is tied to the further evolution of the Internet and its capabilities. His upbeat, yet sober, enthusiasm grows out of his deep knowledge of the capabilities of information technology and what he has seen of its use in recent decades. My enthusiasm also grows out of the historical experience of the American people in finding ways to exploit every major information technology to come along in the past several hundred years. Policymakers understand the problems posed by the Internet (such as threats to privacy of data and making pornography available to children). Nonetheless, they seem as clear in their appreciation of the importance of the Internet to the welfare of the nation as did the founding fathers on the value of the early infrastructure of the postal system when they too had to define fundamental policies. In fact, our comparison to the postal system continues. A fundamental mission of the American government is to promote economic development of the nation. Policy leaders are exploring how the government should use the Internet to that end and, quite candidly, they don’t yet have all the answers because they are just starting down this path. But they believe the postal system can provide insights and, more immediately, can play an important role. Look at the annual reports of the USPS published in the late 1990s, and you will sense that behind the polished language of these documents is a debate on the future role of this organization. The USPS remains, as it has for so many years, the single largest private employer in the nation. What makes this fact very pertinent to our discussion is that the USPS is solely an information-handling business. It does not manufacture goods (except stamps, postage envelopes), run a chain of restaurants, or repair machines for profit; its mission is different. Its job is overwhelmingly to move information. The USPS has not limited its mission to moving only paper-based forms of information. Like other institutions in our society, it is electronically moving information.49 Policymakers will have to decide how extensively the post office

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should be a part of the digital world. The USPS has a distinguished history of applying information technologies. Will it be the instrument of choice for possible e-democratic activities? Will it go beyond e-stamps (introduced in 1999) to being a future e-mail service that evolves beyond the private e-mail systems that we have today? Remember that in societies where there did not exist a national postal system, there first were privately run ones, just like our e-mail systems are private today. Will the USPS be the vehicle by which the national government delivers its messages and communicates with residents of the United States? I for one would be surprised if this very large information business that we call the post office did not play a central role both as a leader and player in the Internet world of the next generation. It remains a far larger, more complex infrastructure than its rivals, such as the package and overnight delivery services. And, although a quasi-private organization, and not without its operational problems, the USPS is a part of the nation’s investment in public institutions. Therefore, it remains available to play an important role in digital information-based activities, such as a primary infrastructure for governmental communications with citizens. The option is there for national leaders. The twin issues of regulation and economic development are part of the much larger concern about the role of the Internet in the basic work of government. In the case of the United States, government activities are tied ever so closely to its form, namely, representative democracy. We have seen the effects of the Internet run like a wave across dozens of industries, changing the nature of how they do things, and have witnessed the start of that same process in such private areas of our lives as vacations and religious activities. Simultaneously, the Internet is beginning to stimulate changes in the fundamentals of American democracy.

CONCLUSIONS What is most remarkable about governmental policies is the relative consistency of values demonstrated by public officials over the past two centuries. To be sure, how they reflected


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these values varied over time in degree, implementation, and effectiveness. But on the whole, from one generation to the next, policymakers focused on building infrastructures that made possible the flow of information, free expression, and access for the greatest number of residents. Rooted in the values and protections spelled out in the U.S. Constitution, policymakers enjoyed the benefit of having a set of legally mandated expectations that could help them over time. While there were tensions over such issues as privacy, access to information relevant to national security, and to material considered offensive or indecent, on the whole federal and state agencies proved reluctant to constrain the free flow of information. Can we fill a book with exceptions to this statement? Absolutely! We have only to remember our postmaster in Charleston in the 1830s, who tried to block the delivery of antislavery literature, but he was an exception. A second feature of policymaking is how technology influenced the specific regulations and actions taken by officials. While they generally took a hands-off approach to paper-based expressions, they could not with electronically-based information technologies because these did not have unlimited carrier capacity, especially in regard to wireless transmissions (e.g., radio, TV, satellites). So the question was always, how can we best parcel out the capacity so that the maximum number of people could share these and the greatest variety of opinions and information? The answers varied by technology. In the case of the telegraph, the issue was having lines laid between communities and facilitating through economic incentives to get the cost of transmission down. In the cases of radio, television, and satellites, policies emerged out of the realities of limited bandwidths and the compelling need for standards so that one device could communicate with another. Physics and technology dictated that policymakers would have to play a far more proactive role in the digital age than they had in the paper age. The limitations of technology continued to influence policymakers with regard to the Internet. A third feature of policymaking, and one that proved extraordinarily effective, particularly in the 20th century, has been the commitment of government officials to the develop-

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ment of information infrastructures. From roads, canals, and the postal systems of the 19th century to the massive investments in the development of computers, microelectronics, satellites, and the Internet, we have generations of policymakers who were willing to formulate policies that led to the creation of information highways and byways. The nation was blessed by a relatively healthy, usually vibrant economy that generated the demand for information, its prerequisite information highways, and the taxes needed to fund critical research and development initiatives, most specifically since the 1930s. Looking at the breadth of the role of federal, state, and local governments in the creation and distribution of information and infrastructures, I have to conclude that we have only just touched the surface in this chapter. What about military uses, role of information in the work of government, in education at all levels, and in science? Government policymakers are active in each of these areas. The current generation of government leaders grew up in a world filled with computers, telephones, TVs, and so forth, making them the best prepared of any to deal with the policy issues they face. This is intended to be a very positive statement. If a policymaker today constrains the flow of information, he or she does it knowing perfectly well how to do it, but also knows such constraint flies in the face of what the nation would normally allow. On the other hand, if policymakers work to expand usage of information and its technological infrastructure, they also know more so than earlier generations what is called for and how the public will generally react to such initiatives. The Clinton administration, for example, received few complaints about its desire to make the Internet available to larger percentages of the American public. Critics were focused less on the intent than on the effectiveness of the steps taken to get the job done. Since we are being told by scientists and engineers that over the course of the next ten years we will see as many innovations in the variety and capacity of information handling technologies as we did in the previous thirty years, the level of work of policymakers will remain high as they sort through


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what regulations and incentives they will want to implement. This process is a continuation of what occurred in the last four decades of the 20th century. New technologies, and their convergence with existing ones, complicate the situation. But if we are to believe the “lessons of history,” their motives will be all too familiar. Access, availability of cheap information, and existence of multiple types of information highways should remain pillars of American policies and programs. With no sign of the departure of the U.S. Constitution, we can also expect that policies will continue to reflect the legal heritage of the nation, along with its handed-down values concerning the importance of information to the national well-being. The story of government policy, particularly at the national level, is but half the story about information in the public arena. The other half of the tale is about the role of citizenship in a democracy that is being influenced profoundly by information technology. This is more the case today than at any time in the history of the nation. In addition to being an important topic by itself, because the nature of American democracy has always had a profound influence on the informational practices of the nation, the topic takes on a greater sense of urgency any time something affects it. The debacle of ballot counting in Florida in the aftermath of the elections of 2000 reminded Americans of this fact. In our time, the great influences are not civil wars or even the Great Depression. It is information technology and its effects on democracy. It is to that new reality that we must now turn our attention.

ENDNOTES 1. All the quotes on the First Amendment are taken from John Bartlett, Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, Fifteenth and 125th Anniversary Edition (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1980). 2. Andrew L. Shapiro, The Control Revolution: How the Internet Is Putting Individuals in Charge and Changing the World We Know (New York: Public Affairs Press, 1999): 169–170. 3. Many examples can be cited, but for an anthology of views, see Robert W. McChesney, Ellen Meiksins Wood, and John Bellamy Foster (eds.), Capitalism and the Information Age: The

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Political Economy of the Global Communication Revolution (New York: Monthly Press, 1998), and even Shapiro, The Control Revolution. 4. Of course, as Americans pioneered in the suburbs, the government funded construction of highways and more post offices for them. By the late 20th century, the largest employer in the United States was the USPS—an information organization— which, like so many private firms, was also relying on information technology to improve operations. Jeremy Rifkin, The End of Work: The Decline of the Global Labor Force and the Dawn of the Post-Market Era (New York: G.P. Putnam, 1995):142–143. 5. On some U.S. space missions, cached stamped envelopes and other paper documents were taken into space and even to the moon. Computers made space travel possible, and made even normal aviation the modern marvel that it is. These are the key points made by the historian who has studied this issue, Paul E. Ceruzzi, Beyond the Limits: Flight Enters the Computer Age (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989). 6. Nixon’s actions are described by Stanley Karnow, Vietnam: A History (New York: Viking Press, 1983): 633–634. 7. Evelyn Geller, Forbidden Books in American Public Libraries, 1876–1939 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1984): xv, 166–176. 8. William Noble, Bookbanning in America: Who Bans Books?— And Why (Middlebury, VT: Paul S. Ericksson, 1990): 83–95. 9. Ibid., 94–95. 10. Tyler Cowen, In Praise of Commercial Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998): 192–194. The author, an economist, makes a compelling case that the market place dictates what is good and bad art, music, and literature. 11. Nicholas J. Karolides, Banned Books: Literature Suppressed on Political Grounds (New York: Facts on Files, 1998): xv–xxi. 12. This survey is summarized in Lee Burress, Battle of the Books: Literary Censorship in the Public Schools, 1950–1985 (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1989): 29–69. 13. Thomas Cooper, Political Essays (Philadelphia: Printed for R. Campbell, 2nd edition, 1800): 71–88. There is an extensive bibliography on press themes in Harold L. Nelson (ed.), Freedom


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of the Press from Hamilton to the Warren Court (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1967): lv–lxv. 14. Beauharnais v. Illinois, 343 United States Reports 250. 15. Clement Eaton looked at the issue the most: “Censorship of the Southern Mails,” American Historical Review 48, no. 2 (January 1943): 266–280, but see also his Freedom of Thought in the Old South (Durham: Duke University Press, 1940). 16. American Civil Liberties Union, “Freedom in Wartime,” Annual Report (New York: ACLU, 1943): 3–11. 17. We have only to recall the controversy over the Pentagon Papers and other Vietnam War-related debates. 18. The quote works best in the context of a discussion about the role of citizens. For that discussion, and the source of the quote, see Lawrence K. Grossman, The Electronic Republic: Reshaping Democracy in the Information Age (New York: Penguin Books, 1995): 1–7, quote p. 7. 19. For an excellent summary of the Federal legislation and how to use it, see Your Right to Federal Records: Questions and Answers on the Freedom of Information Act and the Privacy Act, published by the U.S. General Services Administration and the U.S. Department of Justice, November 1996, and available on the Web at http://usdoj.gov/oip/foia_rights.htm. Other government Web sites have related material, but the best source is the U.S. Department of Justice. For quotes see, U.S. National Commission on Libraries and Information Science, A Comprehensive Assessment of Public Information Dissemination (Washington, D.C.: NCLIS, January 26, 2001): 2. 20. John C. Dwyer to Al Gore, July 1, 1997, reprinted as cover letter in FOIA 1996 Annual Report, http://www.usdoj.gov/oip/ annual_report/1996/96-vp.htm. 21. Convergence of various information technologies is in full swing and is a profoundly important activity. For details, see David B. Yoffie (ed.), Competing in the Age of Digital Convergence (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1997), especially pp. 159–200, 227–264. 22. For details on how busy, see the memoirs of the chairman of the FCC during the years 1993–1997, Reed E. Hundt, You Say You Want a Revolution: A Story of Information Age Politics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000).

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23. Data are drawn from Federal Trade Commission, Federal Communications Commission 1997 63rd Annual Report (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1998). One can also pull the report off the FCC’s Web page at http://www.fcc.gov. 24. The FCC homepage has various summaries of the two laws; see http://www.fcc.gov. 25. “A New Federal Communications Commission for the 21st Century,” (undated, circa 1998), http://www.fcc.gov/Reports/ fcc21.html. 26. Jill Hills, “The U.S. Rules, OK? Telecommunications Since the 1940s,” in McChesney, Wood, and Foster, Capitalism and the Information Age, 99–121. 27. FCC Press Release, May 10, 1999, “FCC Chairman William E. Kennard Establishes Task Force to Monitor and Assist in the Roll-Out of the V-Chip,” http://www.fcc.gov/Bureaus/Miscellaneous/News_Releases/1999. For a description of the V-chip issue, see the FCC’s V-chip homepage, http://www.facc.gov/ vchip. 28. The formal letter proposing the standard was signed by all three executives and addressed to William F. Caton, secretary of the FCC, January 17, 1997, http://www.fcc.gov. 29. Shapiro, The Control Revolution, 73–74. 30. Alan Stone, How America Got On-line: Politics, Markets, and the Revolution in Telecommunications (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1997): 4, 200, 209. 31. The law is described well by Peter W. Huber, Michael K. Kellogg, and John Thorne, The Telecommunications Act of 1996 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1996). 32. Steve Coll, The Deal of the Century: The Breakup of AT&T (New York: Atheneum, 1986): 347–380; Kevin Maney, Megamedia Shakeout: The Inside Story of the Leaders and the Losers in the Exploding Communications Industry (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1995): 59–104. 33. Stone, How America Got On-line, 61–155. 34. Maney, Megamedia Shakeout, 105–184. 35. Quote reproduced in ibid., 183. 36. Ibid.


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37. James W. Cortada, The Computer in the United States: From Laboratory to Market, 1930 to 1960 (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1993): 30–63. 38. Kenneth Flamm, Targeting the Computer: Government Support and International Competition (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1987): 14. 39. James W. Cortada, “Economic Preconditions That Made Possible Application of Commercial Computing in the United States,” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 19, no. 3 (1997): 27–40. 40. Ibid. for a short history of Federal investment practices, 42–124. 41. Paul N. Edwards, The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996): ix. 42. Ibid. 43. Lewis M. Branscomb (ed.), Empowering Technology: Implementing a U.S. Strategy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993): 22. He has an excellent discussion of modern U.S. Government technology strategy, 1–35. 44. For a listing of many of the key government reports on technology, go to http://www.Fedworld.gov, to get to the National Technical Information Service lists of available documents. 45. Privacy issues are drawing high levels of discussion and generating enormous passion. For an introduction to this key issue—and one which the Americans are seen as having a poor record on by other industrialized nations—see Schement and Curtis, Tendencies and Tensions, 135–139. 46. Brian Kahin, “Information Technology and Information Infrastructure,” in Branscomb, Empowering Technology, p. 160. 47. Remarks made on January 23, 1997, “Federal Communications Commission Bandwidth Forum,” http://www.fcc.gov/bandwidth/cdt, page 1. 48. Michael Dertouzos, What Will Be: How the New World of Information Will Change Our Lives (New York: HarperEdge, 1997): 306. 49. Available online at http://www.usps.gov/history/anrpt98.

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A DIGITAL DEMOCRACY

America is turning into an electronic republic, a democratic system that is vastly increasing the people’s day-to-day influence on the decisions of state.

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—LAWRENCE K. GROSSMAN

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merican citizens are, once again, facing a fundamental decision about how to exercise their civil responsibility to vote in a representative democracy. The way voting is done has long been the subject of debate; however, the arrival of the Internet has already reenergized interest in this issue. And the events following the national election in the U.S. in 2000 made it a white hot topic of concern to millions of Americans. Technological innovations in security, user identification, convenience, and so forth are the most recent long-term stimuli for the debate, although as these words are being written (July 2001) not a day goes by without national newspapers and magazines discussing this topic. However, it was the growing access and use of vast supplies of various types of informa340

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tion over the last half century that conditioned the American public for a more intense discussion of the relationship between information and technology on the one hand, and the dual influence of these on political practices. Ultimately, public officials at the local, state, and national level will have to pave the way for a resolution of the debate because democratic practices are already changing. The quote at the beginning of this chapter, from Lawrence K. Grossman, the former president of the Public Broadcasting Service and of NBC News, does not come from a public official; rather, these are the words of someone who is deeply immersed in the supply of electronic information to the American public. He symbolizes the other major participants in the formulation of any changes that are occurring in American democratic institutions, information suppliers like the press. Why should we care? Why have a whole chapter in what is already a long book? Simply put, the themes discussed here are the most important in the book because the ability of Americans to have access to all manner of information, and to have the right and opportunity to use it for personal advantage and pleasure, is a direct result of their having a form of government that makes it possible to be info-junkies. Put another way, governments can restrict and influence the flow of information, and, consequently, how it is used. Have a political system that constrains the easy flow of information and its use, as we see with authoritarian regimes, and you find less information and very different economic and social practices. European and East Asian political leaders recognize this reality. Thus, today they are wrestling with such issues as how to deal with the Internet and with what information to allow to flow through paper and other electronic media. Their initiatives are undertaken in an attempt to make their economies competitive on a global basis while satisfying the demands of a growing middle class that is literate, educated, and sufficiently affluent to do many of the things described in the earlier chapters in this book. We should care because the fundamental political premises of a society, as reflected in its national myths, constitutions, and laws, affect the activities of government. Federal and state

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regulators, for example, derive their authority and marching orders directly from laws passed by legislatures and approved by presidents and governors. Over the course of the past two hundred years, government officials have normally proven very reluctant to establish public policy without some basis in law. Even the court systems, which have a history of creating new law through their interpretation of existing laws, also root their decisions and opinions in the ideology and legal expressions of the past. That is why, for example, the U.S. Constitution is so terribly relevant to almost any discussion about American society, culture, economy, and politics. It is why my discussion about the role of information in American society has repeatedly included comments about the Constitution. The relevance of the topic at hand became profoundly intense and current when, in the days following the national election in the U.S. in November 2000, it was unclear who won the vote for the presidency in the state of Florida. However, whoever won in that state would, because of the closeness of the national election, garner enough electoral votes to be declared the national winner. What complicated the problem of accurate counting of votes was the fact that the punched card systems used in Florida did not always record clearly the intentions of the voter, leaving open the possibility of inaccurate interpretation of results. The consequence was evident to the entire world, which followed the story over the next two months. We do not need to go over what has now become very familiar ground to all Americans and to hundreds of millions of people around the world. What is relevant here, however, are the issues on which corrections to the mistakes and problems faced in Florida and in other parts of the nation are made because they demonstrate how Americans respond to the use of technology. Essentially, there were three issues. First, Florida and many other states allow local election officials to interpret the results of voting, using local criteria rather than some set of state or national standards. Americans in general found that practice problematic and potentially susceptible to corrupt practices, as some civil rights groups charged after this election. Second, Americans wanted to know the results of the election quickly—that is to say, on the evening of the elec-


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tions or soon after. Counting paper ballots by hand for days proved unacceptable to the American public and became a source of national embarrassment as stories of more efficient counting practices in other countries (such as Brazil) were publicized. Third, the thought of using such old technology as punched cards seemed so backward to a nation that in its business operations and government agencies had discarded such data input methods decades earlier. Public officials all over the United States reacted in two ways. First, they defended the use of older technologies because of the high cost of using newer approaches such as online voting using screens or even the Internet. Second, dozens of governors immediately launched commissions to establish statewide standards for counting votes. A great deal of the debate outside of government corridors, however, centered on why Florida or any other state would still use such an ancient technology, given the fact that other states used optical scanning methods (such as children use in taking standardized tests) and touch-screen technologies (as some communities in California were beginning to use and some other countries were already using). While the history of this election will be the subject of books for decades to come, what the historians will not be able to avoid is the extent of the discussion about using information technology to provide a quick fix to the problem of slow and inaccurate vote counting. Almost every recommendation made after the election on how to reform included the use of IT. In the months following the election, hundreds of bills were submitted to the Congress and state legislatures calling for reforms that included the use of more modern technologies. By early March, 2001, some 400 proposals had been submitted. Hundreds of counties had contacted IT companies and vendors of voting software to request information or proposals. This response is such a typical American story. We need to understand exactly the extent of use of technology for voting prior to the election fiasco because the nature of its use and the extent of its deployment says a great deal about how public officials use information technology. The current added attention to the topic of electronic voting caused by the events of the national election of 2000 masks

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the broader patterns of adoption driven by considerations of function, ease of use, cost, and reliability—the same kinds of issues that go into decisions on how to use information technology in such other areas of life as work, leisure, and religious practices. Approximately 32 percent of all polling places across the nation still used punch-card ballots. Another 27 percent used optical scanners, while 18 percent relied on lever machines. Only 9 percent had already deployed electronic touch screens. Other methods (for example, paper ballots) accounted for the remaining percentages while use of the Internet was the subject of discussion but not yet of implementation. So we can conclude from this evidence that local communities still maintained authority over the decisions of what methods to use, and that there was a broad array of approaches, even within states. The problem for many communities, since along with authority comes the burden of funding elections, was cost. To modernize all the polls across the nation, at a cost of about $3000 per workstation, posed a potential expense of somewhere between $3.5 and $9 billion.1 In addition, only 22 states have any guidelines dealing with the use of electronics in voting practices. So, in addition to technical and cost issues, there are policy considerations, which is why the topics discussed in this chapter so suddenly took on a greater urgency. Americans do not routinely get up in the morning and begin thinking about their constitution or the special role played by their local, state, or national governments in the use of information by citizens. There are, however, moments when the nation’s attention is brought to bear on the topic of democracy. Typically, it is at election time, when political campaigns draw the interest of Americans to issues of national concern, by way of media coverage of these issues, and finally through voting, the ultimate act of citizenship in a democracy. On occasion, the fundamental role of democracy intrudes into the lives of Americans in other ways, for example, when arguing with officials about some business or tax ruling, or when attempting to resolve a community zoning issue. Political scientists and economists, along with many other information workers, of course, deal continuously with the role of govern-


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ment as part of their work and often comment about democracy in print or over the airwaves. In short, the nature of government affects how a nation responds to information. This chapter is, therefore, devoted to the subject of democracy and the implications of information technology. For two centuries, paper-based information sources worked their influences on government, and many of these I discussed in earlier chapters. Beginning in the 1920s and continuing to the present, electronic forms of information handling began to change the role and influence of information on political activities. We need to understand those changes. The availability of the Internet itself with its huge volume of information, and the convergence of voice (e.g., the old radio) and image (e.g., the old TV) with the Internet, are the next turn of the screw. These various technologies are beginning to have substantial yet differing effects on how we practice democracy. This is a new intensification of the role of information, one that is beginning to be felt, and that will grow in importance in the years to come.

HOW WILL E-DEMOCRACY EVOLVE? The issue boils down to two ways to exercise decision making in government: representative and direct democracy. With representative democracy voters elect representatives who make decisions on their behalf. The thinking is that such individuals would, as part of carrying out their responsibilities, become more intimately familiar with the issues surrounding a decision than the average citizen and supposedly would have more time to devote to becoming familiar with those questions. The argument goes, “who has time to read a proposed 1,000 page tax code, let alone understand its ramifications?” Certainly not the average voter. In practice, elected public officials are more familiar with the subtleties of an issue. A second advantage of representative government, often argued, is that lawmakers will not always immediately and directly be swayed by public opinion, by the “passions of the moment,” but would, instead, take a calmer, more informed approach to the resolution of an issue. A third argument for such an approach is that people considered highly qualified (those

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knowledgeable and smart, who demonstrate good judgment and understand the aspirations of their constituencies) are normally the best to have sort through options and make decisions. This type of democracy is what the Founding Fathers chose for the United States. They were familiar with direct forms of government, had consciously thought about the pros and cons, and deliberately chose representative democracy. The alternative approach is for some form of direct democracy, the type we seem to be slowly evolving toward today. In this scenario, key national decisions are decided directly by the voter, not by representatives, and the tool of choice is the referendum, which binds legislators and other public officials to implement wishes of the electorate. All those referendums that citizens in California vote on are examples of direct democracy. The advantages touted for this approach are equally as compelling as those for representative democracy. This form of government is said to be pure democracy, in which people directly express their wishes and command the government to execute them, unpolluted by such intermediaries as an electoral college or legislators who are subject to the influences of special interest groups and personal gain. It is argued that with this approach you cut out bribes or the financial influence of lobbyists, special interest groups, or wealthy contributors to reelection funds. Another argument goes that such a form of government forces citizens to play a more active role in the affairs of the nation than they might otherwise. In the 17th century, when the number of colonists was small and lived mostly in tiny urban centers, residents in North America had a small taste of direct democracy, before a class of political elites and strong colonial administration emerged. All heads of households could fit into one room, such as in a meeting house, discuss an issue, and make a decision. Buy-in for results was high, and things got done. But by the mid-18th century, it had also become obvious that one could make decisions that were, to put it bluntly, stupid. To be more formal, decisions could be made and actions taken that at some future date would be seen to have been ill advised or simply uninformed. Sound judgment, it was feared, would give way to the


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passions of the moment. Salem witch trials, the experience of political and social upheavals in Europe, and other events in North America led those members of the political elite crafting the new American government to conclude that indirect decision making by the citizenry was a better approach. Throughout the history of the United States, however, Americans have exercised both forms of democracy. State and federal legislators, governors, and presidents were elected to represent the interests of the electorate. On the other hand, communities have often opted for use of referendums to resolve questions of local concern, ranging from bond issues to fund construction of new schools to such policy decisions as caps on taxes, the role of English in schools, green spaces around towns, annexations, and so forth. On the whole, the mixture of the two has worked well. Over the past half century, another form of direct participation emerged, use of polls by politicians. As the science of taking polls improved to the point where it was both cost-efficient and results collected scientifically believable, politicians came to rely on these to inform their opinions about what actions to take. Polls, because so many are published, make Americans aware of what others are thinking too, making it possible to hold an official accountable should that politician deviate from the “will of the people” and conversely to affect public opinion. Polls are not officially binding on a government official, but we have reached the point where taking an action contrary to what polls suggest is considered politically risky. At the national level, presidents have increasingly relied on this source of input. While we could debate whether one president or another relied too much or not enough on these, what is clear is that by the end of the century, they all were profoundly influenced by polls. The general increase in the availability of information that we have seen in such other aspects of American life as work, leisure, and religious practices, is no less true in public affairs. Beginning in the 1920s with radio, politicians could talk directly to voters, and reporters could bring the results of political actions to the public in an immediate fashion. With the arrival of television, and particularly highly centralized TV

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coverage through the three national networks in the 1950s and 1960s, new influences came into play. These ranged from how the news was presented to real-time coverage of political conventions, elections, and debates among candidates and other knowledgeable parties, and call-in talk shows both on radio and TV. In addition to these electronic sources of information and influence, there were traditional paper-based ones that never went away: newspapers, pamphlets, flyers, books, articles, and posters. As new information infrastructures were implemented, interest groups could leverage them in a coordinated manner to get their points of view in front of both the electorate and public officials. Both the American Medical Association (AMA) and the National Rifle Association (NRA) are examples of this process at work. Both are very effective information handlers. Both have published articles, advertisements, and books defending their interests and perspectives. Both have simultaneously leveraged radio and television with publications and local meetings during periods when the nation discussed specific issues of concern to them, as, for example, gun control at the end of the 1990s after a series of shootings in schools. They can create events that the electronic media will cover. They can also take polls to demonstrate the public’s approval of their perspectives, and they can lobby legislators and contribute vast sums of money to their reelection campaigns. Today they also have Web sites, which make it possible to deliver to the American public ever larger quantities of information quickly and cheaply. But, the public can communicate too. E-mail to congress has sky-rocketed. In 2000, members of Congress received 880 million electronic messages. These came in waves every time a major issue was before the Congress. For example, during debates on the nomination of John Ashcroft for attorney general, Congress received hundreds of thousands of e-mails. In 1998, the House of Representatives received 20 million e-mails, 48 million in 2000. The use of electronic technology has also created new circumstances in the 20th century, most notably the decline of geography. Put in economic terms such as I might have used


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in discussing the changing nature of work in Chapter 5, niche information markets were created. Instead of people identifying primarily with a particular state or locale, as was the case in the 19th century, one could begin to align with others who thought the same across the nation. Liberals, the religious right, pro-life and pro-choice, gays, conservatives, libertarians, senior citizens, boomers, and so forth, could form national constituencies that communicated effectively and frequently, and thus could quickly come together for effective political actions. The rapid formation of an American opposition group to the work of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 1999 illustrated the power of information and the ability of the information infrastructure to bring so many people together so quickly in Seattle, Washington. They essentially broke up the meeting of the WTO, despite the wishes of the American government. Ironically, at the same time as information increased in quantity and Americans were using ever more of it, the national government was downsizing many of its programs, shifting responsibilities for many domestic initiatives back to state governments. Beginning with the Reagan administration and continuing to the present, across both Republican and Democratic administrations, the national government has been shrinking. Why and how are issues outside the scope of this book; it is more important just to recognize the fundamental pattern. Innovations in public policies toward such issues as welfare reform, public/private education, changes in the use of taxes for economic development, and so forth, emerged increasingly out of the states and some local governments during the 1990s. These governments became more informed on issues, and reached out to their citizens through the use of a variety of information infrastructures: local TV and radio talk shows with mayors, for example, creation of Web sites, and electronic processing of tax and license fees. Ironically, this process of localization is exactly what the Founding Fathers hoped for at the same time that they were constructing a national representative democracy. The swing back to localism was profoundly aided by both the availability of information (some would argue propaganda, but with many perspectives)

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and an information infrastructure to support its effective flow through society. The Internet has demonstrated in a very short period of time that the trends just discussed are intensifying. As the American public gains increasing amounts of access to the Internet and uses it more frequently to inform and conduct their civic responsibilities, the influence of information technology and its content will inevitably rise. It is why we must start thinking about the role of the Internet as a new and special influence on American democracy. What we see is much that is familiar and historically consistent with the past, and yet, as with other aspects of American life, many things that are new.

THE SPECIAL ROLE OF THE INTERNET The reason for going through a brief course on civics and the role of information is because the Internet could very well tip the scales in favor of more, rather than less, direct participation in government decision making. The logic runs something like this. Now that nearly 98 percent of all households are equipped with telephone lines and television sets, we can expect that the Internet will become just as prevalent in the very near future. In the first half dozen years of its wide public availability, nearly 40 percent of American homes obtained access to the Internet, and within another half dozen years, that number would climb to more than two-thirds. At the same time, the percentage of Americans with access to the Internet at work, in public libraries, and in other government buildings essentially makes this technology as universally available as today’s polling centers.2 With that high degree of access, we could then increase voter participation simply by making it easier for Americans to vote. Rather than take time off from work, or get up earlier on election day, or fill out absentee ballots and look around for a stamp in order to mail it in after, of course, either writing away for the form or stopping by an office to pick it up, well, you see what is coming. One could turn his or her chair around to a terminal or WebTV-enabled television set, go to a voting Web site, type in a password, have one’s identity verified electroni-


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cally by the browser, and then vote by selecting options. Technology is sufficiently effective to verify if a voter is indeed who she says she is. During the summer of 2000, President Clinton signed into law a bill conferring legal validity of electronic signatures, yet additional legal recognition that technology is available to provide the level of security we had with Paper Age voter registration processes. Voter registration and voting could take a mere few minutes in an electronic world. As people became more comfortable with e-voting, the argument goes, Americans could vote more frequently, and all during the course of the year, on a variety of issues and elections for public office. Many commentators have argued that voters could even be asked to vote for or against legislation, directly bypassing legislatures for proposed laws on which a legislature would prefer the public to vote. James Madison would jump out of his grave in Orange, Virginia, if that happened, but the scenario is not sci-fi, it is plausible. Because votes are data, and exist in electronic form, results could be tabulated in real time. When e-polls close, results could be announced almost immediately. To a large extent that is done now with elections, thanks to the wide use of computerized voting tabulation systems (not the actual voting devices themselves) across the United States. In fact, nearinstant electronic tabulations would be so easy that one could expect two consequences. First, a higher percentage of Americans might be inclined to vote, erasing today’s concern that during the last two decades of the 20th century the percent of voters declined. Second, because of the ease of use of this technology, politicians could put the monkey on the backs of voters to make an increasing number of decisions, particularly highly controversial ones, through e-referendums. The argument goes that such an approach would take a great deal of political risk out of the lives of policymakers. So far, elected and appointed officials have been reluctant to pay the price that such direct citizen involvement calls for, relinquishing personal authority and influence. Infrastructure options exist from Netscape-like providers all the way to an e-post office, which is rapidly embracing Internet technology as a continuation of its historic mission of being in the information infrastructure business.

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The implications are enormous. Those who do not favor direct voter involvement can point to the success of the American political system over the past two centuries, a very strong argument in favor of indirect decision making. They can also cite decisions made by Americans that turned out to be of questionable wisdom, such as California’s Proposition 13 which, while it reduced taxes, nearly crippled what had been one of the nation’s best public education systems. Experienced state government officials objected to it at the time of its passage. Even public opinion has been suspect as, for example, in the case of the Spanish-American War during which President William McKinley and Congress were led to believe, against the better judgment of many experienced officials, that the nation wanted to go to war with Spain.3 The Internet can also affect the pool of voters and their degree of representation in Congress and state legislatures. The national census could eventually be done electronically, using, for example, the USPS or commercial Internet service providers to count every nose as Congress wants. That approach would eliminate the need for alternative strategies, such as the statistical sampling approach proposed by the Clinton administration for the 2000 census, which legislators and jurists soundly rejected for both constitutional and political reasons. Voter registration could become a simple matter of matching names to zip codes to create voter lists, which in turn could be used to verify the legitimacy of a vote. Will that happen? The technology to do the job is already here today and we are very close to having access to the Internet for every American adult. The decision to use this technology is ours to make. If historical experience is any indicator of things to come, Americans will vote electronically. It may not happen on a massive scale in the immediate future because political leaders have to sort out the implications of such an approach to their careers and prospects for their parties, not to mention legal issues and affordability. But it will happen; it is so easy that it must. Yet, it will probably also happen slowly because such a transformation poses a risk to existing political factions.


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The risk to existing political parties is that their natural constituencies could change. For example, financially well off senior citizens comprise a group with one of the highest voting rates in the nation. They are the natural constituency of the Republican party. They are conservative and well organized and, so far, are only just beginning to use the Internet. The least likely to vote today are young adults, but they are the ones most comfortable with the Internet. If e-voting becomes the norm, will they become the largest voter segment? If so, does that mean national priorities and policies will move away from the more traditional and toward the new voting groups? What does that do for the major political parties? Some politicians would go out of business; others would enhance their careers and power. If we moved to more frequent balloting (because of the convenience of the Internet) will policies and practices shift quickly and frequently as the winds of opinion blow back and forth? We know that with polling people do not hesitate to express opinions regardless of whether or not they have any factual basis for their positions. Would that also become the case in an e-democracy?4 Regardless of what decision is made about voting, watch groups are already on the Net, getting people involved in writing to their legislators, and in quickly distributing information on controversial issues. All politicians have their Web sites and are linking them to others sites so that an increasing number of Americans are being exposed to various political perspectives. Critics of direct democracy range from one of America’s greatest journalists, Walter Lippmann, to the founding fathers of the Republic. Decades ago, Lippmann stated his position in blunt language: “A mass cannot govern.”5 The political leaders who created the U.S. Constitution, and later its first set of amendments, opted for a balance between direct involvement and representation on behalf of the public. They created a structure in which political leaders and government authorities had to maintain a balance between what the public wanted and what their own judgment suggested was the right course. Over time, individual decisions by public officials swayed back and forth on various issues influenced more or less by public opin-

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ion than by private judgment. Yet, at other times, the reverse occurred. McKinley bowed to public opinion while Clinton defended the rights of gay citizens to serve in the armed services. Franklin D. Roosevelt got ready to participate in what clearly would be a second world war while the nation overwhelmingly objected to involvement in any international crisis. Governors in California turned over to the voters almost every major policy decision in the 1980s and 1990s. Given the penchant of Americans to exploit technology, and what we have already seen in the political arena using the Internet, one can safely conclude that at the moment the advocates of direct democracy are in ascendancy.6 In fact, as constituents increased their use of e-mail to Congress, voters were, in effect influencing voting decisions by their Congressmen. How the issue will be resolved is still an open one, and it is quite possible that it will never be definitively closed because American voters have always been very reluctant to tinker with the basic building blocks of their democracy. There is a profound, almost universal reverence and awe for what the Founding Fathers accomplished when they created the government. That awe has existed pretty much intact over the past two centuries, and was reinforced in November–December 2000, as the national election problems were resolved as stipulated by our 18th century constitution. Minor changes here and there have taken place as a consequence of circumstances or prior experiences. Memories of failed changes were influential—for example, the 19th Amendment (1919). This amendment outlawed alcoholic beverages, but turned out to be an unmitigated disaster. Positive experiences were effective influences too, such as the 25th Amendment (1967) which modified the chain of succession in the event a president vacates his or her office for whatever reason. By and large, however, all experiences have made this nation’s voters and public officials wary of changing the constitution and its fundamental political underpinnings. Political scientists and historians who have looked at the process by which governments transform understand that change occurs only if a nation’s leaders want it. They are the individuals in a society with the most power to launch a trans-


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formation. The masses do not; however, people must be ready for proposed changes.7 Widely shared handed-down values profoundly affect decisions made by politicians in a democracy and the levels of preparation for change that voters receive. American handeddown values involve a combination of thoughts and beliefs that influence their thinking. These include preservation of individual rights, access to information, reluctance to alter the fundamentals of the political system, yet a penchant to want a greater voice in deciding the course of the nation. Americans simultaneously prefer smaller government (read this to mean less governmental interference in their lives), and also one that handles many of the details of administering the nation, from road building and public education, to fighting the “war” on crime and drugs, to handling foreign policy, defense matters, welfare, administration of parks, and cleaning up the environment.8 Throughout this book I have generalized about American attitudes toward information, and the role of information technology. It is my contention that how they apply the Internet to their political behavior will be profoundly influenced by collective handed-down values. American scholars have been reluctant to speak about national characteristics as a result of the world’s experience with Adolph Hitler and Nazi policies, which were based on many assumptions about national characteristics. However, evidence is mounting that one can look to handed-down values for insight on what a nation might be expected to do. A distinguished political scientist, Alex Inkeles, posed the issue as a question: Are the societies which have a long history of democracy peopled by a majority of individuals who possess a personality conducive to democracy? Alternatively, are societies which have experienced recurrent or prolonged authoritarian, dictatorial, or totalitarian government inhabited by a proportionately large number of individuals with the personality traits we have seen to be associated with extremism? In other words, can we move from the individual and group level, to generalize about the relations of personality and political system at the societal level?9

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He answered his own question: “Almost all the modern students of national character are convinced that the answer to this question is in the affirmative.”10 Others have reached similar conclusions.11 The continued relevance of some of de Tocqueville’s comments from the 1830s about Americans is evidence that these can be made, and that they do influence the policies and practices of citizens and their officials. It will be to those traditions that Americans will consciously or subconsciously turn when defining the role of the digital in their democracy. What is most remarkable about governmental policies is the relative consistency of values demonstrated by public officials over the past two centuries. To be sure, how they reflected these values varied over time in degree, implementation, and effectiveness. But on the whole, from one generation to the next, policymakers focused on building infrastructures that made possible the flow of information, free expression, and access for the greatest number of residents. Rooted in the values and protections spelled out in the U.S. Constitution, policymakers enjoyed the benefit of having a set of legally mandated expectations that could guide them over time. While there were tensions over such issues as privacy, access to information relevant to national security, and to material considered offensive or indecent, on the whole federal and state agencies proved reluctant to constrain their free flow. Can we fill a book with exceptions to this statement? Absolutely; we have only to remember our postmaster in Charleston in the 1830s. A second feature of policymaking is how technology influenced the specific regulations and actions taken by officials. While they generally took a hands-off approach to paper-based expressions, they could not do so with electronically-based information technologies because these did not have unlimited capacity. So the question was always How can we best parcel out the capacity so that the maximum number of people could share these and the greatest variety of opinions and information? The answers varied by technology. In the case of the telegraph, the issue was laying lines between communities and facilitating affordability through economic incentives. In the cases of radio, television, and satellites, policies emerged in


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response to the realities of limited bandwidths and the compelling need for standards so that one device could communicate with another. Physics and technology dictated that policymakers would have to play a far more proactive role in the Digital Age than they had in the Paper Age. The nature of technology continued to influence policymakers with regard to the Internet as well. A third feature of policymaking, and one that proved extraordinarily effective, particularly in the 20th century, has been the commitment of government officials to the development of information infrastructures. From roads, canals, and the postal systems of the 19th century to the massive investments in the creation of computers, microelectronics, satellites, and the Internet, we have generations of policymakers willing to formulate policies that led to the creation of information highways and byways. The nation was blessed by a relatively healthy, usually vibrant economy that generated the demand for information, its prerequisite information highways, and the taxes needed to fund critical research and development initiatives, most specifically after the 1930s. Looking at the breadth of the role of federal, state, and local governments in the creation and distribution of information and infrastructures, one has to conclude that I have only just touched the surface in this chapter. What about military uses, the role of information in the work of government, in education at all levels, and in science? Government policymakers are active in each of these areas. The current generation of government leaders grew up in a world filled with computers, telephones, TVs, and so forth, making them the best prepared of any to deal with the policy issues they face. I intended this to be a very positive statement. If a policymaker today constrains the flow of information, he or she does it knowing perfectly well how to do it, but knows also it flies in the face of what the public would normally tolerate. On the other hand, if policymakers work to expand usage of information and its technological infrastructure, they also know more than earlier generations what is called for, and how the public will generally react to such initiatives. The Clinton administration received few complaints about its desire to make the Internet available to larger percentages of the American public. Critics

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were focused less on the intent than on the effectiveness of the steps taken to get the job done. Since we are being told by scientists and engineers that over the course of the next ten years we will see as many innovations in the variety and capacity of information handling technologies as emerged in the 1980s and 1990s, the level of work of policymakers will remain high. They will be sorting through what regulations and incentives they will want to implement or modify in response to new circumstances. This process is a continuation of what occurred in the last four decades of the 20th century. New technologies, and the convergence of those with existing ones, complicate the situation. But if we are to believe the lessons of history, the motives will be all too familiar. Access, availability of cheap information, and existence of multiple types of information highways should remain pillars of American policies and programs. With no sign of the departure of the U.S. Constitution, we can also expect that policies will continue to reflect the legal heritage of the nation, along with its handed-down values concerning the importance of information to the national well-being. Traditional methods of delivering information to the public will also continue to be used. The U.S. Government Printing Office (GPO) is still the world’s largest publisher of printed material. Even politicians are increasing their use of older information technologies. For example, politicians who aspired to election as president of the United States in 2000 kept ghostwriters busy writing books under their names explaining their proposed programs.12 They did this even though they all also had Web sites, some of which were significant in their ability to raise campaign funds (e.g., for John McCain).

SO WHAT ARE WE TO DO? Given all those realities, are Americans immune from any innovations in national information policies? Will the relentless march of technological innovations simply go on without being influenced, or disturbed, by policymakers or the will of


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the electorate? In other words, do we have choices? Are there issues to be resolved that would make it possible for Americans to leverage information technology even more than they do today or, at a minimum, more effectively? The answer to these questions is generally yes, there is more to do and we do have choices. There are significant issues of national importance to resolve, and they go far beyond merely responding to the appearance of the Internet. Since I have argued that the basic building rock, the facilitator of America’s use of information, has been the combination of its national political beliefs and the form of government that exists to implement these, from a practical perspective we must turn to those political instruments of society needed to implement changes to address many fundamental issues related to information. Experts in the supply and use of information have been thinking about this issue for some time, commenting both on patterns of use and what should be done next. Lawrence K. Grossman, for example, wrote a whole book on the subject, The Electronic Republic. He too recognizes that citizens will play a greater, more direct, role in the activities of the American democracy than in the past, caused by two long-term trends. The inclusion of more people eligible to vote (e.g., women and African Americans in the 20th century) and, of course, the emergence of information technologies that have informed and involved people represent the pervasive influences at work. He sees many recent trends that are byproducts of these developments: the extension of ballot initiatives, opening of the courts, rise of public discontent, expanding force of public opinion, and the extended influence of the media with all its biases and mixed, often contradictory messages. People become more involved, television gives many political activities an entertaining quality, and traditional parties give way to single issue alliances formed across the nation rather than representing some geographic space. Grossman worries about several developments. First, the concentration of the media in the hands of a few large corporations makes him uncomfortable because of the potential for bias in presentation of information. He is also nervous about the professionalization of politicians, which may make them

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less responsive to the public will. He is concerned with the “dumbing down” of the quality of information made available to the American public, because there are certain levels of quality that must be maintained if a citizen is to be sufficiently informed before making a political decision. Public polls show Americans find television, in particular, guilty of sensationalizing crime, for instance, or of turning a dangerous crisis, such as the Gulf War, into entertainment.13 His solution is the same proposed by Thomas Jefferson, “that urgent steps be taken to improve the quality of citizen deliberation in the public sphere.”14 Grossman calls on Americans to safeguard free speech by applying the First Amendment to all media equally, and to put no constraint on any of it no matter what, or on who can publish. The government should continue to encourage the greatest diversity of media ownership and control possible. He subscribes to the notion that there ought to be universal access to all electronic forms of information, even arguing that it should be free if necessary.15 To ensure accurate reporting, he recommends that libel laws be reformed to permit public officials to sue the media for inaccurate coverage. Reduce the diet of sound bites and increase the volume of substantive reporting to improve the quality of information presented to Americans, such as is done by CNN and C-SPAN. Have more presidential debates, discourage negative advertising, and restore civics education to all grades in school. Grossman accepts as almost inevitable that voters will have more opportunities in the future to vote on referendums. They like the idea, and politicians have increasingly accepted the inevitable. However, he urges that ground rules and practices be developed to improve the quality of such voting. A team of professors of communications has also advocated reforms of the political system and how information about national matters flows through society. W. Russell Neuman, Lee McKnight, and Richard Jay Solomon echo many of the same concerns expressed by Grossman. However, they see the creation and use of a national network available to all as the central issue. “We recommend a proactive national policy to make the provision of communications and information ser-


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vices competitive,” which they believe then means that “content and ownership regulations in broadcasting and commoncarriage rate regulations in telecommunications will no longer be necessary.”16 They call for a technical open architecture, which means anybody’s form of technology can plug into a network, open, universal, and with flexible access for all. In short, they advocate that government officials play their historic role of fostering creation of information infrastructures that all Americans can tap into. “Our belief is that public policy will play a role in the evolution of the social and economic electronic infrastructure for the next century.”17 So go beyond the roles defined for the FCC in 1934, and as redefined in the 1996 Communications Act. This suggestion of having an open architecture, while it is consistent with national values and practice, and does address the problem of federal regulators regulating each type of telecommunications technology almost independently of each other at a time when digital technological developments are causing all forms of communications to converge, makes sense, but is too narrow. Grossman’s ideas address a much larger set of issues, those related to the overall role of all media and politicians in society. But his approach pays perhaps too little attention to the plumbing of the information infrastructure. Both sets of suggestions, however, begin to lead us to a set of goals and actions that can be taken to solve what I see as the central issue of today’s public policy toward information: the effective integration of digital technologies into the fabric of America’s political life in ways that are consistent with the desires of the nation. The nation’s history and political beliefs suggest open architectures, universal access, an aspiration for detailed and accurate information when they want it, but also “lite” versions of the same data (e.g., as provided by sound bites and headlines). Carl Shapiro and Hal Varian, two highly influential economists who are experts on the Internet, have quietly made a number of recommendations to federal policymakers about how to respond to the larger issue of U.S. government information policy. They recognize that the American government has always had information policies. We saw that reality

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demonstrated with the creation of the constitution, postal system, the way the government regulated the telephone, later radio and TV, and how it faces the Internet and its various converging technologies, from telephone to wireless, from TV to voice. Shapiro and Varian have argued that there are three basic roles government has and should play: as creators and disseminators of information, as regulators and users of information, and as creators and implementors of institutional and legal infrastructures (e.g., creating privacy rules and enforcing antitrust policies). Relying on economic analysis, they have demonstrated that government creation of knowledge is best when it funds basic research, as it did with the creation of the computer and later the Internet. So they want more of that. They think it is just fine for government to recover costs for information it creates through user fees, but also only “provide information for which it is the most cost-effective producer.” Regarding universal access they argue the case for matching grants to various institutions in society to develop information infrastructures, so that the private sector has “skin in the game” and values what is being built and used. They cite the view of Andrew Carnegie, who funded the construction of many public libraries in the United States in the late 19th century. He funded construction, not operation, of libraries, arguing that if users did not value the services provided by a library they did not deserve them. In short, resist temptations to fund universal services. Shapiro and Varian do see a major role for government in protecting copyrights, patents, and trademarks, although they are not always happy with the quality of work performed by public authorities in these areas. Maintaining flexible property rights for intellectual property and privacy is an economically worthwhile role for the federal government to play. In the area of competition, they strongly endorse federal initiatives to foster competition because that forces the private sector to deliver new, more effective, and cost-efficient goods and services. This means they are nervous about the government’s ability to regulate information industries. They see the problems that have affected the FCC, for example, in the areas of telephone and cable regulation. They propose that “government regulation should focus on controlling genuine


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monopoly power where it exists.”18 On another economic matter, the question of promoting trade, they recommend that the government promote international trade in information technologies, especially since the United States has so many to sell. Here again, however, they focus on the issue of competitiveness. Just as they get nervous about the concentration of market power, which is why they recommend continuance of antitrust policies, they also want an open international market where the United States can compete with its information products and services. I have gone through the thoughts of six experts on the role of the Internet and government policy to suggest where some of the thinking is today. What they all have in common is a concern about the role of national government in promoting the flow of information through the nation. This is a common theme echoed throughout the history of the United States. It is also an issue that has had many detractors arguing for constraints and controls, as we are seeing today over the issue of access to pornography over the Internet. But all these experts have come down on the side of historical practice, access in one form or another. When combined, these reasons suggest that no one perspective dominates, but rather two: political beliefs about the nature of democracy and concern for economic success, which we can translate into the effective functioning of capitalism. With respect to the Internet, the convergence of technologies does pose some immediate problems from the point of view of national politics and policies. The reality is that digital technology is making it possible to converge various forms of digitally-based information platforms that cannot be stopped by any one government because this trend is occurring around the world. Unlike in earlier decades, where the majority of innovation may have occurred in one country, today technological developments are coming from various countries, for example, Europe with wireless or information appliances from East Asia. Yet politicians and regulators essentially still work with technologies in slices—telephone, cable television, Internet, satellites, and so forth—at a time when they must move rapidly to a more comprehensive view

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of these technologies, treating them as variations of one major set of innovations: digital communications. This is really the point made by Neuman, McKnight, and Solomon. A careful reading of the Communications Act of 1996 reveals that, while it did much good, it also has the look and feel of a stewpot of regulations. Certainly a visit to the FCC Web site will make that patently clear, since its content is cataloged into chunks by type of technology. Get the policy right and access increases where it makes sense. Technological innovations continue in ways that make American companies selling such technologies competitive in the world. Invest public funds on those things that are essential to the economic and military welfare of the nation. Investing in as yet unknown or economically risky technologies is good for the nation’s future, as we saw with the early funding of the computer and related applications. Underlying the use of information in any era has been education and literacy, particularly the latter. Literacy makes it possible to read, and although we have much data in the United States that is in the form of sound and images, most of what we use in informing our work, play, and religion is textual. While new technologies are coming online that allow one, for example, to dictate text to a PC, you still have to read the text, even though someday soon the PC may talk back. Therefore, American government at all levels will have to continue to focus on maintaining very high levels of literacy. Closely linked to literacy and the role of information is education. Many people have commented on the value and need for education, and clearly this is a nation that has made profound investments in schools, colleges, and universities and shows little signs of deviating from this pattern. Students, professors, and educated Americans are vast consumers of information, so we can expect that their reliance on information and their supporting information technologies will remain at a very high level for the foreseeable future. Understanding how to apply information technologies, such as the Internet, will continue as a tactical, immediate requirement facing most Americans. Making the connection between an information technology, such as the Internet, and practical uses has never been a major problem; in fact, Americans have a history of normally figuring that out more quickly than people in many other countries.


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But as the literacy rate of the world rises, and the dissemination of information and information technologies does too, any competitive advantage Americans might have had through the use of information gets compromised. Innovative information appliances, such as a variety of hand-held devices, are coming out of East Asia, while the West Europeans now lead the world in the development and use of wireless communications. In short, without a relentless push forward in the development and use of innovative information technologies, the patterns of use of information that have been distinctive in the United States will be no different than what will exist around the world in one fashion or another. As evidence of the use of the Internet is beginning to call out, access and availability of information is becoming so ubiquitous that very shortly we will not be able to make as many national distinctions about use as we do today. The implications for public policy and politics in the United States are enormous. Questions public officials are beginning to face are broad and detailed: What should be the U.S. policy toward China, which occasionally allowed its music and film industry to reproduce and sell U.S.-copyrighted material without permission of the author?19 ■ Is it worth a trade war? What about a military war? ■ In which technologies should the U.S. government invest R&D funds? ■ Does President George W. Bush’s renewal of interest in the Star Wars missile defense system spin off enough new technologies of use in the civilian sector that the initiative should be invested in further, beyond military reasons? ■ As the American government continues its historic mission of promoting adoption of democratic forms of government around the world, does it promote representative or direct democracies? ■ At a time when U.S. democratic practices are slowly becoming a blending of both, does that emerging experience influence the specific foreign policy initiatives of the nation? What effect would one form of democracy have over the other in one nation versus another?

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■ If nations are increasingly aligning by culture and religion in the post Cold War era, what effect does information technology have on both trade relations with the U.S. and on their foreign policies? Public officials are already facing these questions; none of these issues will be ignored during the first two decades of the 21st century. If we go beyond the obvious issue of national self-interests in such areas as physical security and world trade, I believe we come back to the values that made Info-America what it became. The United States can draw on its fundamental values of freedom of expression, relative freedom to exploit information for economic value, a facilitative role for government in encouraging and promoting the creation of information infrastructure, not its content, and rely on our faith in the value of education. Skeptics aside, Americans have always had a fundamental faith in the value of technology. Despite the many cases where technology has created problems, such as pollution or attacks on privacy, the reality is, Americans remain unshaken in their faith in technology. They will reach out to it in all its forms, including informational, to enhance all aspects of their lives. The benefits have outweighed the limitations of their predilection to use technology. For that reason, we can expect that there will be new innovations in both information technology and how it is used in the years to come. Technology remains a central feature of America, affecting private and public life. It is more than homes and offices cluttered with information tools; it is a state of mind, an attitude in favor of information. Because of the central feature of technology’s role in American society, any appreciation of how Americans might use it in the future is conditioned by what is happening with information tools. Technological evolution is happening today even more rapidly than in many other periods in American history. The history of information technology is full of examples of rapid surges forward in a nation’s adoption of a technology, and we are going through such a phase right now. Many of the basics of the science undergirding information technologies are new, so we are living in a period where this


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knowledge is being applied—exploited if you will. By looking at some basic trends in the evolution of information technology underway at the moment, and placing them into the broader context of the nation’s activities, it becomes easier to anticipate and understand how this nation will continue to function. For that reason, I discuss trends in the evolution of some of today’s most important information technologies in the next chapter before concluding with a chapter on the role of individual Americans.

ENDNOTES 1. Most of the data in this paragraph is drawn from Lara Jakes, “No More Dimpled Chads, Bipartisan Lawmakers Propose,” Hearst Newspapers, January 31, 2001, published in Wisconsin State Journal, January 31, 2001, p. A3. 2. Alfred D. Chandler, Jr. and James W. Cortada (eds.), A Nation Transformed by Information: How Information Has Shaped the United States from Colonial Times to the Present (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000): 257–280. 3. Not having the facts is a problem. One of the flashpoints that finally tipped the nation into war with Spain was the sinking of the U.S.S. Maine in Havana harbor. The widely held belief, not verified by a calm investigation of the facts, was that the Spanish blew up the ship. A naval investigation some threequarters of a century later demonstrated clearly that Spaniards had not blown up the ship, coal dust had ignited. For the report of this study, see Admiral H.G. Rickover, How the Battleship Maine Was Destroyed (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1976). 4. For background and implications, see Lawrence K. Grossman, The Electronic Republic: Reshaping Democracy in the Information Age (New York: Penguin, 1995): 9–142. 5. Walter Lippmann, The Public Philosophy (New York: New American Library, 1955): 19. 6. Andrew L. Shapiro, The Control Revolution: How the Internet Is Putting Individuals in Charge and Changing the World We Know (New York: Public Affairs Press, 1999): 150–157.

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7. The major study by Juan Linz on the subject is Democratic Transition and Consolidation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996). 8. The literature on this point is massive. However, for an initial, yet detailed, discussion, see Giovanni Sartori, The Theory of Democracy Revisited (Chatham, NJ: Chatham House, 1987). 9. Alex Inkeles, “National Character and Modern Political Systems,” in Francis L.K. Hsu, Psychological Anthropology: Approaches to Culture and Personality (Homewood, Ill: Dorsey, 1961): 172; but see also 172–207. 10. Ibid., 173. 11. The role of handed-down values was the central issue I studied for an earlier book, which contains summaries of the relevant students on the topic. James N. Cortada and James W. Cortada, Can Democracy Survive in Western Europe? (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996): 1–22, 157–166. 12. For example, George W. Bush, A Charge to Keep (New York: William Morrow & Co., 1999); John McCain, Faith of My Fathers (New York: Random House, 1999); Steve Forbes, A New Birth of Freedom (New York: Regnery, 1999); Bill Bradley, Values of the Game (New York: Bantam Doubleday, 1998, 2000); Al Gore, Earth in the Balance (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000 edition). 13. Grossman, The Electronic Republic, 188–189. 14. Ibid., 189. 15. Ibid., 190–217. 16. W. Russell Neuman, Lee McKnight, and Richard Jay Solomon, Political Gridlock on the Information Highway (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997): 251. 17. Ibid., 263. 18. Carl Shapiro and Hal R. Varian, “U.S. Government Information Policy,” paper presented at Highlands Forum, Department of Defense, June 8, 1997, draft cited is dated July 30, 1997. The copy I used came from Varian’s Web site, http://www.haas. berkeley.edu/-shapiro. Quote is from p. 36. 19. In 1999 and 2000, Chinese officials appeared to have reversed prior policy and began to adhere to international copyright and patent treaties.

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An extrapolation of the trends of the 1880s would show today’s cities buried under horse manure.

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10 —NORMAN MACRAE

I n the late 19th century the problem of horse manure had become the subject of discussion among officials in many large American cities. Of course all that changed quickly with the adoption of the internal combustion engine as the replacement for horsepower. Urban manure passed into history, replaced with the equally distinctive scent of gasoline-driven progress. The lesson in hindsight is simple: Give Americans a new technology that works as well, cheaper, or faster than what they have today and they will adopt it quickly. In the case of the poor horses, within a generation they were all but gone from major cities, relegated to pulling a few remaining ice trucks and providing tourists with rides in the park. Macrae’s comment from 1903 also points out the fundamental 369

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problem with forecasting: It is not always accurate. In 1974 the American economist Paul A. Samuelson explained the problem a little better: “I think the greatest error in forecasting is not realizing how important are the probabilities of events other than those everyone is agreeing upon.”1 It is this failure to include factors that wind up affecting subsequent events that is the problem. However, not to forecast or take action on some belief leaves us in the position proposed by Francis Bacon in 1597, “predictions ought to serve but for winter talk by the fireside.” No self-respecting business manager or government leader will buy that. They will opt instead for some judgments on probabilities and take action to optimize opportunities. The good news is that we have two realities to help us peek at the future. First, since the future always arrives unevenly, faster in some places, slower in others, we can argue that it is already here and is playing itself out. This is the situation in the United States, for example, with the Internet and PCs in the 1990s and early 2000s. That same phenomenon of using the Internet and PCs is spreading around the world, so we see the future arriving a tad later in Europe and Asia, for instance. But the American experience suggests what those societies may expect to undergo as they adopt these tools. Second, there are some assumptions we can make about the near-term future based on existing conditions. For example, everyone who is going to be 20 years old in ten years is alive today, and we know who they are by name. Thus, demographic data exists. It is a useful guide to the future because the number of people and the resources they use is what always drove growth, decline, and change in civilizations.2 This is just like cell phone usage arriving sooner in Europe, from which Americans are learning.3 We have yet a third consideration, which we can either call historical precedent or handed-down values. Whatever we call it, I am talking about patterns of behavior and shared beliefs that carry over from one time to another, often from earlier generations to the present. It is this approach to understanding the role of information in America that has

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most influenced how I viewed topics covered in this book. Changes speed along at uneven rates, taking differing forms along the way. While we may replace our PCs every two years, we do not replace our habits so fast. In fact, our beliefs and patterns of behavior remain relatively intact until some catastrophic or life-changing experience comes along. We do not usually change our diets until either a doctor demands it or our social life motivates us. So there is much that is stable enough that we can assume will exist for some time into the future even in the midst of many other changes. Americans are fundamentally an optimistic people. In 1903, Ludwig Max Goldberger, commentator on the American scene, summarized their attitude: “America, the land of unlimited possibilities.” In a speech on September 8, 1919, President Woodrow Wilson commented on his fellow countrymen in a related way: “Sometimes people call me an idealist. Well, that is the way I know I am an American. America is the only idealistic nation in the world.” But my favorite observation comes from that very reliable observer of the American scene, Alexis de Tocqueville: They [the Americans] have all a lively faith in the perfectibility of man, they judge that the diffusion of knowledge must necessarily be advantageous, and the consequences of ignorance fatal; they all consider society as a body in a state of improvement, humanity as a changing scene, in which nothing is, or ought to be, permanent; and they admit that what appears to them today to be good, may be superseded by something better tomorrow.4

This is a society that is young in spirit, still building its nation and its culture. While traditions exist, they are at most only a century or two old. America measures the age of some traditions in practice by decades, Europe measures in centuries, and Asia occasionally by the millennium. The American New Canaan is still being built on the hill. American optimism is as legendary and pervasive a feature of society in North America as is its near childlike positive attitude about the future and the march of progress. It overlooks problems, emphasizing the possible over the improbable. Gallup and other pollsters constantly regale us with data indi-

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cating how Americans feel about their economic prospects, whether or not children will have a better or worse quality of life than parents had, and so forth. In 1998, the editor-in-chief of U.S. News and World Report reaffirmed the positivism of the American public as a critical reason for his expectation that the future of the United States was bright: There are many explanations for this buoyant, confident mood. One is the get-up-and-go spirit that has always typified America. If anything, American business should widen its lead over the rest of the world. France had the seventeenth century, Britain the 19th, and America the 20th. It will also have the 21st.5

This optimism is built on two implicit assumptions: that those circumstances contributing to our well-being will be there in the future, and that Americans will continue to find new ways to enhance economic and private life. Part of how they do that is to turn routinely to technology. It is part of their faith in technology in general, despite their periodic concern about its threat to employment or to the environment, in which information technology fits.6 Certainly history would suggest that, so far, those two implicit assumptions are two safe assumptions to make about their attitudes. If there is one safe bet we can make, therefore, it is that Americans will continue to rely to a very great extent on information in all aspects of their lives. They will use all manner of information, and the artifacts of information, to sustain and enhance what they do. A good side bet is that they will also find new forms of information technology that will, in turn, be used in parallel with existing technologies and gizmos to provide yet more information and tools with which to support their activities. A peek at the already arriving immediate future suggests what is happening. The expectation that Americans will continue to be voracious info-users is the central message of this chapter. That there is no letup in their appetite for information and their imagination about how to apply it remains remarkable to observe in action. I use the word will a great deal in this chapter to simplify the discussion about what I or others anticipate will occur, especially regarding the evolution of information technology.


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However, my underlying assumption is that Americans do have choices about how specific technologies will evolve, how they will use technology and information, and how these will affect them, because their history is one of options taken, and opportunities exploited, but by choice. In other words, the going-in assumptions described two paragraphs ago makes the use of the word will important. At the same time, reality turns out not to be what we expect, so we can anticipate some unintended surprises and consequences, some positive, others negative. Nevertheless, people take actions based on beliefs and expectations. So this chapter is as much a lesson about how to look at the future of information as it is a forecast. I focus on general, fundamental trends, concentrating primarily on digital matters rather than paper-based media, because it is the former that is stimulating the exciting developments currently underway.

DOES TECHNOLOGY HAVE A WILL OF ITS OWN? We know that weather behaves in certain ways, and an understanding of weather patterns helps forecasters do a better job. For example, when a mass of humid cold air collides with a mass of humid warm air, we can expect storms. Observation and analysis then suggests to what extent such storms are violent, and where and when they will probably occur. Students of technology have long debated and studied the question of whether or not technology also has an internal dynamic of its own, in which patterns of behavior can be identified, and thus lead to a body of knowledge about how it evolves. If we could forecast the behavior of technology, the benefits would be enormous. One could predict when new capabilities would exist, when to adopt or drop the use of a device or technology, when to invest, and so forth. The issue is so important that students of technology have emerged in many disciplines: history, economics, philosophy, literature, political science, engineering, science, and even in cultural anthropology and sociology. As American society became increasingly aware of the importance of technology during the Cold War, experts

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joined with those from Western Europe and later East Asia, to study the nature of technology. Historians have conducted some of the best studies on the issue. The term often used to capture the essence of the debate is technological determinism. As one student of how historians study the issue defined it, “determinism asserts, in the first place, that technological change occurs within a purely internal frame of reference, that norms of internal and functional efficiency are the only ones governing it.” Put another way, “determinism asserts that modern technological change follows a fixed and necessary sequence.”7 The essence of the debate is whether or not technology evolves based on its own internal set of laws, regardless of what people might choose to do. The debate is also intensified and broadened by concerns about whether or not technology did something. For example, the statement that the car created suburbia, or that the Internet globalized the economy almost gives a specific technology an enormous power. Other examples come from various walks of life: atomic bombs took away the ability of the United States to declare war, computers made IBM the largest IT supplier in the late 20th century, hand calculators have ruined children’s ability to do math, automation has destroyed millions of jobs. Does an invention take on a life of its own? Two students of the subject, Leo Marx and Merritt Roe Smith, have made a very important point, namely that the mass media (and I would add also those writing for business managers and public officials) have been the most vociferous in assuming or arguing in favor of technology taking on a life of its own.8 On the other hand, the majority of historians, including these two have argued a different case. Most historians see a variety of issues affecting the nature of technology and how it evolves. These include the values people hold, attitudes of the developers of technologies, existing technical and economic realities, market conditions, and other political and social priorities. Historians who have looked at hundreds of instances of technological evolution have found many influences at work, thereby providing a great deal of evidence that technology does not necessarily have a life of its own. These influences have ranged from social attitudes to political and legal choices,


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to the circumstance of events and economics, to available materials and knowledge. One simple example illustrates their perspective. In the 1940s, military airplanes experienced a high number of catastrophes as wings fell off in flight, due to bad mathematical calculations during their design. In the early 1950s, the U.S. Air Force mandated that all aircraft designed for its use had to have the wings designed using software created for that purpose because the calculations and engineering would be more accurate. The software, called Computer Aided Design, or CAD, was expensive at the time, not easy to use, and the computers used were not really as efficient as engineers would have liked. Many would have preferred just to design using blue prints and slide rules. But the military made the choice. One consequence was that wings stopped falling off airplanes. Another was that during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, enormous advances where made first in CAD software and then in a by-product called Computer Aided Manufacturing (CAM). Once you had digital data on a design it was not a great leap in logic to use that data to instruct machines to make parts that were exactly what the blueprints called for, with little or no human intervention. CAD would not have developed as early as it did if it were not for the U.S. Air Force, and who knows how much later CAM would have arrived. The engineering and mathematical possibilities of using software were always there, but other influences determined how the technology would evolve. It is why, for example, that the earliest and most extensive users of CAD/CAM here in the U.S. aerospace industry. In time, this technology diffused into all manufacturing industries and around the world.9 The issue of determinism spills over into discussions about technology and society. It is not uncommon to see comments like “Americans have a tendency to invest in technology when they have a problem to solve.” I have made comments like that all through this book. But is there a tail wagging a dog here? True, Americans have a tendency to rely heavily on technology, a behavior that has been reinforced over time by numerous successes with technological innovations. Does that mean that Americans will always reach for technology? Does that mean that they never have or never will rely on alterna-

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tives? Are Americans prisoners of a pattern of behavior in which technology takes on a life of its own? In other words, is it so deterministic that people become prisoners of some process by which technology changes or seizes control over patterns of behavior? Some scholars have argued that in fact this has been the case.10 At the risk of making an outrageous gross generalization, a solid look at the debate has to lead one to the conclusion that the majority of students of technological evolution do not buy the strict argument of the determinists. The more they study the issue, the more they see various influences at work in shaping the course of technological evolution. Sometimes a breakthrough in science is at work, such as the sudden appearance of the transistor. In other circumstances, political and military realities drive a development, such as the creation of the atomic bomb. In other situations, economic opportunities provide the incentive, as in the case of how PCs have evolved. The reverse too can occur, as in the slow evolution of television technology or commercial aircraft flying at essentially the same speeds as 25 years ago because in neither case were there economic incentives to change. U.S. automotive companies were guilty of the same behavior during the 1960s and 1970s when it came to designing vehicles that consumed less fuel, resisting change until Japanese competition forced their hands. The form that a particular technology takes is also influenced to a great extent by cultural and social attitudes. For example, the Japanese do not have a lot of space in their offices and homes. Therefore, much of the consumer electronics they built is small in order to fit into these spaces. Consumer electronics in the United States tended to be much larger because space was not such a critical factor. It was only after the Japanese came to dominate the American consumer electronics industry that such products as stereos and TVs available in the U.S. shrank in size. Americans love big vehicles and, therefore, it is no surprise that over the course of nearly a century, the largest number of models of big cars and trucks came out of the United States. European 18-wheelers are often 12 to 14 wheelers. Their cabs are smaller than American truck cabs.


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The smallest automobiles in the world are regularly made outside the U.S. For reasons we need not go into here, European publishers of books have more often than Americans published paperback products. American publishers like to publish hardback versions of books first, then later paperback editions. Both have access to the same printing and binding technology, and both publish the same kinds of material. At the end of the 20th century, many large European book publishing conglomerates moved into the American market, buying up well-established U.S. firms, such as Pearson acquiring Prentice Hall. They then imposed European styles on their American counterparts. That is one reason why, for example, you are now beginning to see business books published in the U.S. appearing first as paperbacks. Yet the technology to produce another format was always there. Although one can argue that U.S. publishers were very late to play the digital game, they now get it and are producing digital products such as taped books, chapters on the Internet, CDs, and are doing direct publishing of first editions on the Web before going to paper. Is this another example of the American tendency to apply technology when it is not needed? The answer, I believe, is simply no. This society does reach out to technology for answers because so many times in the past technology has helped solve problems and improve performance or enhance profit and pleasure. But Americans have also been just as alert to the problems posed by technology and have not been cautious about backing away from it. The closure of so many nuclear power plants in the U.S. in the 1990s, the demand that automobile engines burn fuel cleaner, and the political strategy of avoiding the use of atomic weapons during the Cold War are simply some illustrations of the ability of this society to sometimes constrain its use of technology. In short, nationally and at the personal level, technologies are picked or rejected based on a variety of reasons out of the control of technology itself. The same has always applied to information and its tools. It is why, for example, new information handling tools have to earn their acceptance. While Americans are quick to see the benefits of a new tool that does not mean they

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blindly adopt it. It is the understanding of information technologies that gives this society the expertise to judge when it is a good time to embrace new things. The reason for going through this discussion about technological determinism is to point out that in theory, and sometimes in practice, one does not have to adopt a technology, or give up something that works, or tolerate a specific form of a device. These are choices to be made. America’s love of information and its technological forms is not inevitable. Historical reality is that it could change, and in all probability will, in ways that are both predictable and unpredictable. But because we have choices, and since options are normally based on some assumptions and perceptions of possibilities, any forecast of the future of information and its technologies should begin with some assumptions.

SOME BASIC ASSUMPTIONS ABOUT THE FUTURE Options are chosen not because of any considerations about historical determinism. We choose because of immediate realities confronting us. Just as the weather forecaster has to make a prediction grounded in data about existing weather conditions, and the business manager forecasts sales based on current buying habits and market demands, so, too, we can begin with some basic assumptions about our reality. Also, like the weather forecaster, we know that the further out one goes in time, the greater the probability that Samuelson’s concern about unaccounted-for facts influencing events will occur. Therefore, I propose that we think about what should happen during the first ten to fifteen years of the new century. Leave it to the foolhardy and the fortunetellers to comment about what will happen for the rest of the new century. All good projections begin with underlying assumptions, which some people might choose to call predictions. Seven stand out: 1. That a global war or multicontinent natural catastrophe will not occur. If one does, I assume that we recover


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from it and get back to building productive economies with both the newfound knowledge gleaned from the event and a determination to reapply what we had learned up to its occurrence. Americans historically have generated vast quantities of information and important new technologies during periods of war, especially in the 20th century. For example, World War II led to the development of computers, radar, atomic bombs, and important advances in medications and surgical practices. The experience of the Vietnam War enhanced our knowledge of medical care. One can expect that sustained military activity in the future will lead to new technologies and information; even the Gulf War, as brief as it was, did that, affecting military strategic thinking for the rest of the decade. So we can assume that at least in the case of military conflict, Americans can be expected to leverage and acquire more information. 2. That the American population in aggregate will be slightly older during the first two decades of the 21st century, and that residents of the nation will have near ubiquitous access to the Internet. The percentage of U.S. population over the age of 65 has been rising, from less than 10 percent of the total in 1970 to a projected 15 percent by 2020. Yet the American population remains relatively young in comparison to other industrialized states, largely due to immigration. Inflows of new residents in the 1980s and 1990s were some of the most extensive in American history. With the nation conditioned by many generations of going to school, we can also reasonably expect literacy levels to remain at above the 90 percent level for the foreseeable future.11 3. That the economy goes through at least one additional decade (or two) of profound transitions as the full effects of computers and the Internet are realized. Economist Richard K. Lester helps us understand why the assumption about a positive economic future is realistic. He observes that “there may indeed be something extraordinary about the present situation, about the fact that three such powerful economic driving forces have come together at more or less the same historical

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moment. Globalization, rapid advances in information technology, and the deregulation of many industries at home and entire economies abroad would each on their own have had far reaching effects on the U.S. economy. In combination, their effect has been to leave almost no corner of the economy untouched.”12 Our initial experiences with the Internet also demonstrate how this wave of information-handling technology is moving through the economy, generating opportunities, growth, and change as it moves along.13 4. That the educational level of Americans continues a slow but steady rise in quality and deployment across the population. National and local governments demonstrated in the late 1990s a renewed commitment to education at the kindergarten through community college level, with additional funding, state and national performance rankings, and innovative uses of distance learning, computers, and new teaching methods. Corporate America continues to invest billions of dollars in training programs in response to the enormous process of transformation that companies have undergone over the past decade. There is virtual agreement across most sectors of the economy and public life that a key component of America’s economic success in the next decade or more will depend on effective education. There are no signs of that commitment wavering, particularly since most states are awash in surplus tax dollars that means there is extra money to invest in education. The constraint in budget allocations is tied less to any basic belief about the value of education than to other potential spending options, such as tax cuts or spending on prisons, transportation, and medical services. 5. That government policies and commitment toward education and the free flow of information remain essentially unchanged. All through the late 1990s and during the political campaign of 2000, candidates for the presidency of the United States all positioned themselves as the “education candidate.” We saw in Chapter 8 what the FCC has been ordered to accomplish. In short, the


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federal government has become an extraordinarily enthusiastic supporter of the Internet, the free flow of information, and increasingly is providing additional investments in information technology R&D. While the national government has done a poor job in comparison to European states in managing the issue of privacy of people’s personal financial records, the fact that the U.S. is the Wild West in how information flows in the American economy suggests there are no hints of any constraints on the horizon. 6. That government investments in research and development of information technologies and in communications will increase over levels experienced in the 1980s and 1990s. In the last three years of the Clinton Administration, public officials did a great deal of work in defining the logic and list of priorities for such investments. That thinking, in turn, made it possible for the Bush Administration to settle quickly on where to invest. Information technology, base technologies associated with national defense, and others related to communications and the Internet all made the short list. History teaches us that such financial commitments take years to play out, which is a fancy way of saying money will be invested for the foreseeable future in these areas. We can expect, for example, a faster Internet II (as it is called) to be online very soon, and additional military robotic devices as well, such as pilotless aircraft. 7. That the economy continues to expand the percent of those activities that have high information work content and are profitable. A related assumption is that the services sector will continue to grow, in large part because of all the new business opportunities presented by the Internet.14 Students of the economy are almost uniformly in agreement on this point, arguing only over language and extent of this ongoing transformation. Most are also in agreement that much of this information-centric work is being driven by innovations in information technology, such as the Internet.15 I would add that American society has long been preparing for this transformation, thanks to its historic pattern of

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using information in all its various forms for fun and profit.

HOW INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY IS AFFECTING OUR FUTURE The fundamental computer chip, is the most specific driver of the use of information today, and right behind it are various other information technologies that are built from this basic building block. Constitutional and legal protections, along with rates of literacy, education, and economic prosperity, are important factors too, but the key specific influencing one is what is happening to technology, and most precisely with the microprocessor (the chip). To understand how we are going to use information in the years to come, one should watch the computer chip, from which all near-intelligent devices will emerge over the next two or more decades. In a half century we have gone from the primitive transistor to micro-devices that make it possible to put an ENIAC-class computer on our wrists. The flexibility of digital data, sitting in a myriad of devices, is nothing less than phenomenal. Talk to the engineers and scientists and they will tell you four things. First, computer chips will continue to shrink in size and cost, while expanding their capacity to hold ever-growing amounts of data. Shrinkage translates into portability, which means you can have intelligent watches and smart coffeemaking machines. The experts already see in front of them a total remake of most household and work machines as they are refitted with intelligence, much like in the late 19th century when machinery was refitted with electricity. Welcome the arrival of what experts are calling the information appliances, devices that can regulate their own behavior, give us feedback on how and what they are doing, and even improve their own performance.16 They will be invented in the U.S., Western Europe, and East Asia. They will mostly likely be consumer products, with the majority made in Asia. More complex appliances will probably surface first in the United States, others later in Europe.


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Second, while engineers quibble about the rate at which computer chips acquire more capacity or shrink in size, what we know is that the rate of their transformation has actually been picking up speed. This means that the historic pattern of injecting digital technology into more corners of our lives actually increases. Gordon Bell and James N. Gray, two highly respected experts, not known for outrageous statements, put it this way: By 2047 almost all information will be in cyberspace—including a large percentage of knowledge and creative works. All information about physical objects, including humans, buildings, processes, and organizations, will be online. This trend is both desirable and inevitable. Cyberspace will provide the basis for wonderful new ways to inform, entertain, and educate people. The information and corresponding systems will streamline commerce but will also provide new levels of personal service, health care, and automation.17

Their vision is actually considered conservative in some circles. Their own projections of the speed with which information will be able to move in a computer chip suggests that between the early years of the 21st century and mid-century, speed will grow by 9 orders of magnitude, mostly based on existing technologies and known laws of physics.18 Why can we be so certain of such projections? More than simply a reflection of the realities of physics, these are a series of choices. Developers of this technology are motivated to improve performance (speed, reliability, capacity). People will buy products that run faster, cheaper, or perform more functions. Competition for market share or dominance is intense and increasingly a global phenomenon, not just a U.S. story. Governments around the world are encouraging their technical communities to come up with more innovations, and some are becoming effective at supporting their national champions. Simultaneously, increasing numbers of people are making their living on the outputs of such innovations. In the U.S. alone in 2000, more than 2 million Americans worked in the computer industry.19 Add several million more to cover the other digitally intense industries such as telecommunications, and you begin to sense the magnitude of the employment picture. No

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responsible business leader or public official wants to see these people standing in unemployment lines. Almost every state is trying to create its own Silicon Valley. New high-tech workers will probably not stand in unemployment lines any time soon. Even employees at failed dot.coms are quickly rehired by other companies. The demand for technical labor is so high that even the U.S. Congress is constantly petitioned by IT companies to allow ever larger numbers of skilled workers to emigrate to the United States. So while engineers may talk about chip speeds and greater densities (hence smaller intelligent machines), most observers recognize that a fertile environment for innovations is at least as decisive in the evolution of technology. The environment needed for such technological transformations exists in the United States, across all the critical forms needed: skilled technical workers, a strong and wealthy economy which can afford to invest in innovations and then in the outputs of R&D, and finally armed with a positive attitude toward new hightech products. The key is to understand that it is the combination of these elements that so profoundly influences the future of information and its components in the United States. Third, in the immediate future we will see important advances that will increase our use of computer-based information because of how humans will “talk” to computers. Today, we overwhelmingly interact with computational devices by typing on a keyboard and reading responses on a screen. As the amount of memory and the speed with which they work increases in computers, we will be able to converse with machines and have them respond verbally. This has already started, but this approach to “man–machine interfaces” will make it easier, more “natural,” and faster to rely on computers to work, to read, to capture information, to do some of our analysis (even thinking), and at costs that most people can afford. One expert at the IBM Watson Research Labs, William B. Tulskie, Jr., writing about research underway in the late 1990s, observed that “development of new input interfaces goes further to encompass the richness of communications via gestures, gazes, facial expressions, and voice inflection.”20 In a word: Amazing, made even more so because it is real.


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Fourth, collaboration and communication among people will continue to expand. Wireless phones and use of satellites for personal communications are in their infancy. These are technologies that extend patterns of behavior already developed by our use of telephones, televisions, and the Internet. So we know what to do; it is now a question of expanding our behavior by a greater reliance on the more portable wireless technologies emerging today. Collaborative software tools, PCs and electronic whiteboards, and a host of other office devices reinforce our ability to communicate across space. This is a process that has already transformed the way many corporations and governmental agencies work, reducing the amount of physical travel for meetings and getting conversations going sooner.21 For some time, economists have been measuring the role of knowledge and the social returns on investments in research and development. While their research and reports are often a challenge to read, their findings square very well with what Americans have understood for a long time. Since new forms of information technology first turn up at work, it would be interesting to know what effect they have on the nature of work. We know that as work becomes more technical, wages for unskilled labor drop, as does the need for their services, while conversely the requirement for labor skilled in the use of a new technology rises. I described that pattern in Chapter 5. However, what is emerging is a growing body of new evidence of a more significant development that has less to do with wages and unemployment and is more about the nature of work. Specifically, as skilled labor increases in an industry or job type, those workers provide economic incentives to speed up additional technological changes. This is one reason why we can expect to see even more information technologies in the future. Economic incentives for additional transformation exist. As Michael T. Kiley, of the U.S. Federal Reserve Board, put it, “a larger number of skilled workers raises the incentives to invest in technology that skilled labor uses,” something which he also reasons in turn creates new demand for skilled labor, often because the new skilled labor has been busy creating new technological innovations that help them in their work.22

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What happens to the value of American investment in research on information technology? It has obviously paid off in the past, and the federal government routinely sees this as an important activity worthy of its attention, regardless of which political party is in power. Often debates over investments are less about whether these should be made and more about how much by when and by whom. Three factors normally reinforce the case for investment. First, such investments create new jobs, either for those doing the R&D (engineers, scientists or graduate students) or for those who work with a new technology after it appears. The latter includes the million plus workers in the United States employed in the semiconductor industry and the equally impressive number of manufacturing personnel making computers, IT peripheral equipment and software, or cell phones. Furthermore, advanced technologies lead to new products and services that can be exported around the world, increasing employment at home, creating a higher standard of living, and generating more tax revenues. All three have occurred, in spades, during the last five decades of the 20th century. The ability of Americans to invent and market high-technology products has led the leading student of competitive advantages of nations, Michael E. Porter, to argue that “the rapid pace of change in technology promises to provide many opportunities for American inventiveness and entrepreneurship. These create the potential for the United States to enter a period of sustained prosperity.”23 The third is the positive feedback to investors. In the 1990s we saw the obvious positive economic feedback that owners of small startup Internet companies harvested as they moved from an idea, to implementation on the Internet, to nearinstant wealth when they went public with their offerings. In fact, there was so much of this going on in the late 1990s that high-tech stocks singlehandedly drove the NASDAQ average up hundreds of points. Many of the stories of these firms, however, indicate clearly that investing in technology-based products created the economic engine of growth they so enjoyed. Dell Computers, Netscape, Sun Microsystems, and others are the obvious examples, as are older firms created in the 1980s by the same process, such as Microsoft and Cisco.24


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Economists, however, also like to think in terms of social returns of technologies that the entire economy benefits from, not just some firm or venture capitalist. Increasingly, they are learning how to measure returns on investments in not only information technology, but from all kinds of technical advances from pharmaceuticals to biology, not simply from computers. Many economists are coming to the conclusion that the returns to society are often four times what an individual investor gets. For example, if a venture capitalist earns 7 percent return on his or her investment in a particular technology or company, society as a whole will enjoy a 30 percent return once that technology has worked itself into products and services. Even with that attractive return for society, some economists argue that the four-to-one ratio may be understating benefits. As far back as 1997, Stanford University economist Charles I. Jones and Federal Reserve Board economist John C. Williams, had reached that conclusion: “A conservative estimate indicates that optimal investment in research is more than four times actual investment.”25 Given what organizations these two were in at the time, one could see how such information would influence the opinions of both senior officials in the Federal Reserve Board and within the federal government as they plotted out their investment strategies for the early years of the 21st century. To summarize, the technological drivers continue to be linked to evolution of information technologies, both at the level of the computer chip and information appliances (such as personal computers), and to the continued economic rewards to individuals and the American economy as a whole. As I suggest in this book, no single factor accounts for the evolution of information technology. None operate in isolation of others. All feed on each other, with influences from their various comings and goings. The short answer to the question “What should I watch?” is the evolution of the computer chip. But also observe the effects it has on people, their tools, work, toys, and recreation, and you get a better appreciation of how technology will remain an important element of future American society. A very basic, important byproduct evident all through the 20th century that we can expect to continue is the spillover of

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one form of information technology to another. Books are an example. We think of them as paper-based information artifacts. Leave aside the obvious use of personal computers as word processors used by authors to write books in the first place and instead look at what is happening with textbooks. There is a quiet revolution underway. Teachers and professors would like nothing better than textbooks tailormade for their versions of a course. Increasingly, publishers of textbooks like McGraw-Hill and Prentice Hall, are taking chapters from various books and putting them together in new volumes that reflect the order in which teachers want the material presented to students. Making that material available over the Internet or on a CD-ROM is no longer sci-fi; it is an increasingly standard line of business for publishers. The ability to put together material this way is made possible by the fact that manuscripts today begin in digital form; it is how they are published as books. An author turns in a diskette copy of the book. After it has been copyedited and pages have been laid out, the end product is fed to a printing press from a digital copy. However, that digital copy can be published on the Internet, as a CDROM, or be mixed and matched with other chapters to create a new published product. The lowest unit of work, the molecule of the published book, is now the chapter in a digital format, not the paper book, thanks to information technology. In short, tailoring information is becoming far easier to accomplish today than ever before. We should expect more of that, just as we have already discovered in our use of the Internet. Another example illustrates the point. If you are a regular visitor to specific sites on the Internet, then you have discovered a wonderful feature: bookmarking. You can instruct a personal computer to remember the Internet address of a particular site, keeping it on a short list, often displayed at the top of your screen. Whenever you want to visit the site, you click on the icon or name of the site listed in your bookmarks and very quickly you are taken there. All other sites are bypassed for the moment as you go to where you want to be. Narrowscaping information this way allows one to get to data they want on a regular basis, shutting out other sources (which can be efficient but possibly too limiting, but that is a topic for discussion outside this book). It is efficient and easy to do.


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But back to the spillover effect of one technology to another. We can expect to see a greater combination and intermixing of forms of information over time. With the introduction of HDTV (high definition television) broadcasting, and, more significantly, digital TV, we can now mix text and multiple programs simultaneously on a television screen with a significant improvement in the quality of the image over earlier technologies. As computer memories get bigger, faster, and cheaper, we will see more mixing of video, text, and sound on our personal computers, televisions, and perhaps in the not too distant future, on wrist-based information appliances.26 Movies are routinely made with computers displacing actors. Pagers are communicating text instead of just telephone numbers, and everything is getting physically smaller, which means we can walk around with information appliances on our persons. Again, all of these kinds of spillovers are made possible by the basic information building block of our day, the chip. We should not, however, ignore a darker side to the increased use of information technology. The darker side can include the potential of ever greater loss of privacy—already a major concern during the last three decades of the 20th century and which American society has done a relatively poor job of managing by choice—although there is growing awareness that more has to be done with this issue. There is also the ongoing frustration with technologies that do not work as advertised: the PC that crashes, the software operating system that locks up, the slow transmission speed of the Internet. The good news is, however, that technologists know what has to be fixed and, because there are positive economic incentives to do so, many will be.27 Almost from the first day that the telephone became a widely-used device, to the present with the Internet, there have been critics quick to call out problems with information technologies. They have pointed to the corrupting influence of socially inappropriate information and entertainment made available to children (from the Internet back to the television of old), and to the erosion of American values or loss of community. But here we are, after decades of new technologies and mountains more of information, and the nation survives,

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even thrives. We can expect critics to challenge new uses of information but they are useful in calling out problems that need to be addressed, such as the privacy issue. They can lead to public policy and private practice that address some of the most obvious problems through development of such technical solutions as the V-chip to keep children from viewing programs parents consider too violent or otherwise offensive. It is the nature of the free flow of information in the United States that makes it possible for critics of technology to inform the public about their views as much as the same open process allows advocates of a new device or piece of information to hawk their wares.

EFFECTS OF FURTHER ECONOMIC GLOBALIZATION ON HOW AMERICANS USE INFORMATION Americans do not act alone in their use of information. American society is part of a larger whole that comes with many names, from the global village to the global economy. Nowhere is this reality of the United States as part of a larger whole more evident in American life than in the work of national governments and international corporations, since both deal with each other around the world. In these institutions, managers are literate, they routinely rely on every major form of information technology, and have major sources of information available to them with which to make decisions and to get things done. Managers in Hong Kong, New York, or Berlin are the same in their extensive reliance on large bodies of information; many speak excellent English and have even attended the same graduate schools. As one moves down the economic food chain to local businesses and to the private activities of people (e.g., leisure and religious practices), my generalizations need qualification. Yet Americans have not been alone in their use of information and information technologies. When they first came to North America in the early 1600s, AngloSaxon colonists were no different than their countrymen in what information and technologies they used. By the end of the 18th century, of course, they began to invent their own


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things and had created the information environment discussed in Chapter 1. But Europeans did not sit still. They too increased their literacy rates during the 19th and 20th centuries, read newspapers and books, and embraced such technologies as the telegraph, telephone, radio, and television. If there were differences, with Western Europe in particular, they involved the rate of adoption and lag time with electronic information-handling tools. The telegraph was first installed in the United States, then in Europe. The telephone was invented in the United States, then adopted in Europe. Radio and television were exceptions in that installations in Europe proceeded initially either at or slightly ahead of U.S. rates, although how many people ultimately had access to these technologies was most intense in the United States and achieved sooner. This was particularly the case with television, where more U.S. households even today have TVs than in Europe. All of Eastern Europe is still behind in its use of telephones, radio, and TV.28 One of the drivers causing information to be used is the change in economic well-being. In the case of Europe, an important period of extensive prosperity began after its recovery from World War II. By the 1960s, West Europeans had rebounded from the war and their economies were expanding, as did their adoption of telephones and TVs. Today, the per capita use of televisions and telephones are very close to American rates. West Europeans, however, use cell phones at a rate at least a third greater than Americans because they were able to establish universal technical standards for this technology, an achievement Americans have not yet fully realized.29 West Europeans lagged behind the United States in their use of computers in the 1960s and 1970s by about seven years.30 That began to change in the 1980s, yet we see a continuing lag in the use of personal computers. That situation is changing, thanks to the compelling attraction of the Internet which has stimulated a surge in the use of information technologies. But that only began in the late 1990s. From a business perspective, the implications are clear: the U.S. will begin to lose its differentiation—competitive advantage—created by

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its early reliance on PCs and the Internet as Europeans get online. The highly respected, usually very accurate market research firm, International Data Corporation (IDC), reported that by the end of 1999 some 60 percent of all Web sites around the world would exist outside the United States, with many in Europe. Nearly half of all Internet-based commerce would also take place outside the U.S. by 2003.31 Which leads us to a discussion about East Asia. Places like Japan, Singapore, Hong Kong, and the eastern cities of China are extensive users of information technology, from cell phones to Web sites. They are still low users of PCs for other applications because of the problems with local alphabets that make it difficult to use keyboards, particularly in Japan where the standard of living is high enough for people to afford information appliances. But with voice recognition systems now coming online, that problem is beginning to disappear at the same time that the number of individuals who can afford to acquire this technology increases. Already East Asia is a hotbed of e-commerce. Along with the West Europeans, in 1998 Asians collectively conducted about $5.6 billion in business over the Internet. IDC expects that number to jump to $430 billion by 2003.32 While that number seems very high, even if one were to cut it in half, or half again after that, what is happening remains obvious and dramatic. Simultaneously, of course, U.S. use will climb up from the 5 to 8 percent of the GNP that went through the Internet in 1999 to some higher figure. Meanwhile in the Asia-Pacific region there already were 21 million users of the Internet at the end of the 1990s, with an expectation that this number would quadruple in five years. The point of reviewing these statistics is to demonstrate that what was unique about American use of information technology in the 1990s will not be so in later years, a time now upon us unless U.S. society creates new information technologies and thereby new needs and uses. My bet is that Americans will do that. What about the printed page? In Chapter 7, I noted that per capita consumption of newspapers and books in Western Europe exceeded that of North America. That has been true for many decades. The publishing industry in Western Europe


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boomed in the 1980s and 1990s, with mergers and acquisitions of publishers, while per capita sales rose, simultaneously with levels of education. That process began to seep eastward into Eastern and Central Europe, which had always lagged sharply behind Western Europe in its use of all manner of information tools and technologies. That is still the case. But as the standard of living rises across all of Europe—from Ireland to the western provinces in the modern Russian state—one can expect people to rely on ever-increasing amounts of information, reducing the differences in usage between the United States and the continent of Europe. If we look at the entire world, however, a very different picture emerges. To begin with, over half the world can still be called “poor,”33 which translates into societies that can ill afford to buy books and PCs, but which have found it possible to buy cheap radios and, increasingly, television sets. Even after accounting for these purchases, literacy rates remain very low in some areas, such as in Africa and parts of Asia and the Indian subcontinent. Low literacy rates exist where local economies are less industrialized than in other parts of the world where information use is higher. The truth is that half the world has yet to make its first phone call. Between the Indian subcontinent and China alone, there are over 2 billion people (one-third of the world’s population), of which less than 25 percent could potentially afford to acquire such middleclass information tools as a telephone or PC. So the world as a whole has a long way to go to catch up with the United States in its reliance on electronic forms of information handling. To a lesser extent, the same holds true for books, and decreasingly to newspapers. With newspapers, however, literacy rates more than costs often determine the extent of demand for this cheap source of information. On balance, however, as each new wave of informationhandling tools appeared, they turned up all over the world. Literacy rates and standards of living were always the most significant factors that influenced how fast a nation embraced a technology. Regulatory behavior on the part of governments either facilitated the process (e.g., cell phones in Finland in the 1990s) or slowed it down (e.g., getting telephones in

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France, Italy, and Spain in the 1950s and 1960s). Once an economy reached a point where it could afford new tools and information, people acquired them. In turn, such sources of information affected the nature of local work so that over time circumstances became more similar rather than dissimilar to those in the United States. Because in the U.S. there existed an environment more nurturing of competition and entrepreneurship, one that also sustained a highly flexible, mobile circumstance for the free flow of information (e.g., constitutional and legal protections), Americans were always able to stay just a step ahead of everyone else in the development and use of most information and its tools. That situation should continue into the foreseeable future. Yet, competition caused by the use of information will also continue for similar reasons. If there is one technology that seems to have leveled the playing field the most it is television and nothing more specifically made this situation so than global transmission of programming. Leave aside reruns of American comedy programs and the accusations of American cultural imperialism that these cause, and look instead at the BBC and CNN. When the Gulf War erupted, both Saddam Hussein in Iraq and George Bush in the United States watched CNN’s coverage of the conflict. Europeans and Arabs tuned in to the same networks. Toward the end of the 1990s, even more people tuned in to the same programs. Viewers of soccer championship games or the funeral of British Princess Diana were measured in the billions, truly making the world a global village if only for a few hours. The implication is clear: as people around the world can increasingly afford television sets they will watch programs together, creating a more common sense of identity than they had before. To be sure, they will also watch their own local programs, but digital technology will give them at least as much ability to pick and choose what information to collect and use as did paper-based technologies. National differences will remain, but reliance on information will increase, and some of that will be common in form, from the shared experiences of watching a World Cup championship game to enjoying some of the same movies, music, literature, and nonfiction materials.


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The moral of this story is that the uniqueness created in American life by U.S. reliance on information to carry out its activities should erode over time. That reality, however, does not change my basic contention that, for some three centuries, Americans had a propensity to be extensive users of information, and that this pattern of behavior fundamentally became one of the critical elements defining the nature of the American experience. Nor does that mean that Americans will be denied the economic benefits of new technologies in the future. Their pattern of behavior suggests they will quickly develop new information tools and, just as important, rapidly exploit them.

AMERICAN VALUES, BELIEFS, AND HABITS Whether it was chasing the frontier to the Pacific Ocean, building the atomic bomb, or exploring space, Americans were always building, changing, and growing. They have always been a curious, optimistic lot, willing to try new things, confident that they would prevail. The question was never would they be able to fly to the moon, but rather it was when. President John F. Kennedy said to get the job done within a decade, and they did. With a combination of curiosity, practical bent of mind, and a focus on tangible goals, the flight to the moon was typically American. They could afford to fund the required R&D, they had the technical know-how to invent what needed inventing, and they had a wonderful pool of information and information infrastructures to help move the cause along. The pragmatic attitude and practical abilities of the nation meant it would focus on results rather than the journey, yet it is the trip that helps us understand the results. Part of the trip to today’s results, and to possible future successes, involve the very important creation and use of information infrastructures and the knowledge and data these information highways spewed out. Americans came to realize that they needed a variety of complex information tools and organizations, from printing presses in Boston in the 1600s to the complex network of the postal system of the 1800s. But, these only began

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the process. They were followed by Americans building schools and colleges, and inventing a variety of electronic communications appliances from the telegraph to the cell phone, the computer, satellites, vast amounts of software, the PC, and today’s new information appliances. It was the Internet following Ma Bell’s telephone network, it was the newspaper and book competing against journals first and magazines later. Over time, Americans had come by accident and design to recognize that their information needs—the basis of successes in other fields, such as the moon launch—rested on their use of myriad information tools. Once on the information treadmill it was, of course, difficult to get off. Reliance on information became a habit, a way of life, the way “we do things around here.” Information and technology became one and the same. Daniel J. Boorstin explained the situation: As American civilization became increasingly permeated by its technology, it lay increasingly at the mercy of the internal logic of advancing knowledge. Science and technology had a momentum of their own: each next step was commanded by its predecessor. To fail to take that next step was to waste all the earlier efforts.34

Americans had broken down the barriers between thinkers and doers, creating a uniquely American circumstance. That is why, for example, many a biology professor dreams of setting up a startup firm to sell some new biologically based wonder from his or her lab. Mortimer B. Zuckerman noted that this entrepreneurial instinct had played well in the general field of information processing too, both on the demand (user) and supply (vendor) sides: U.S. companies were the first to realize the importance of computers and information technologies and have invested massively in them, accountng for over 40 percent of the world’s investment in computing. They spend more than twice as much per capita on “infotech” as Western European firms and eight times the global average; there are more than five times as many computers per worker in the United States as in Europe and Japan. U.S. manufacturing has replaced large mass-produced consumer products with sophisticated goods derived from intel-


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lectual output in knowledge-based industries, the fastestgrowing segment of the world’s economy.35

As we traveled through time, from the years immediately following the end of the American Civil War to the present, the story of technology and science, of learning and knowledge, became increasingly a tale about information and its infrastructure. But why? Information, in and of itself, is useful and interesting but not compelling enough to answer the question. The American experience would suggest three drivers, which are motivating features of information, that help to explain why data, information, knowledge, technical information infrastructures, and so forth were always important aspects of American life and will continue to be so. First, information provided the know-how one needed to get a particular job done well. “Done well” usually meant either it was performed efficiently or resulted in some economic gain, usually at the expense of a competitor. Second, information provided a fast path to results, either because it showed us how to do something, like the ever-popular self-help books have always done, or Americans learned enough to come up with yet another novel approach to solving a problem or seizing an opportunity. Short cuts and speed were the name of the game. Which leads to a third, critical feature of information: flexibility coupled to freedom. Americans like to be able to do “their thing.” They talk about teaming and working together, and they do that when required, whether on a sports team or in a world war, but fundamentally the United States is a nation of individuals, a paradox. Freedom to go where they want made the automobile a success. The same is happening with the Internet. The flexibility that arises out of freedom of movement, of thought, and of pursued goals, goes far to explain the practical value of every form of information technology that has come along. On occasion, power shifts back and forth between the individual and society. In the case of Americans and their information at the start of the 21st century, we are seeing a profound shift away from institutional flexibility back to the individual. Information technology, particularly the Internet, is already working its influence on the power shift. In less than one

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decade, consumers have increased their influence over what products were sold, at what prices and terms and conditions, and how they were delivered and used. Suppliers of goods and services are almost unanimous in recognizing this shift currently underway and are equally in agreement that the single most important cause of that shift is the Internet.36 This change is so profound that even government officials are beginning to ask questions about the future of national governments, a topic I discuss briefly in Chapter 9. The shift in power began with business—so typically the American battlefield of choice—in which price, configuration, and convenience have always ruled the day. You can go onto the Internet and find a home mortgage anywhere in America, or the best deal on a five-year-old Honda Accord anywhere on the continent. Increasingly, so can consumers in Asia and Europe. Will a Frenchman someday buy a used Japanese Accord located in America off the Internet and have it shipped to Paris? Consumers all over the world are gaining enormous market, thanks to information technology. It is one reason why so many corporations are once again consolidating into ever-larger entities to expand their scale and scope in response to this surge in consumer power.37 Access to more information in ever more convenient forms raises as many questions as answers. For example, with more information on medical topics becoming available online just as a computer-savvy generation of Baby Boomers enters that phase of their lives when they most need medical attention, what does this say about patient/doctor relations? I for one no longer hesitate to challenge a doctor’s knowledge, or to suggest alternative treatments. Fifty years ago that would have been unheard of behavior by a patient. Will Americans need the interpretive services of a minister, priest, or rabbi to explain religious issues, serving as the go-between them and their God? If not, what happens to religious institutions, such as the large and complex Catholic Church in America? Will we bypass politicians and vote directly on national legislation? Do we arrive at a point where Americans become a unit of one, a new species of one? The answer, I believe, is no. Americans have displayed a tribal instinct in building their information infrastructures and their culture, but simultaneously


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have retained the personal ability to move around within their society. They have recognized the wisdom of community but also the need for individual flexibility. We see the community equipped with shared constitutional protections of freedom of speech, yet also a reluctance to constrain traffic on the Internet. That freedom of flexibility has led Americans to rely on a large variety of information and informationhandling tools. Their circumstance goes far to explain why their homes and offices are filled with so much information and the tools and formats needed to provide that variety. It is such a prevalent feature of how Americans use information that we can realistically expect new information appliances to be adopted, sitting alongside already existing ones, for a very long period of time. The biggest information event going on now is what is happening with the Internet. While there has been much hype and exaggeration about this recent arrival on the American landscape, it increasingly is becoming difficult to overstate the importance of what is occurring. Throughout this book, I offer evidence of both the increasing presence of the Internet and about its growing role in the flow of information. Rates of adoption are no longer measured in single-digit percentages. By as early as the spring of 1997, experts were reporting that one in four Americans had a working knowledge of the Internet, and that this number would clearly double by the end of 1998. In fact it did, and nearly doubled again by the early days of the new century.38 The process of inventing, adopting, and using information has not been as smooth and effective as this book would otherwise suggest. Americans have not done a good job, for example, in creating the kind of universal technical standards that made the cell phone so ubiquitous in Europe. The Internet is spinning out of control for some people as pornography and hate messages become too readily available to their children. Europeans have a point when they argue that American society is clueless when it comes to protecting information about individuals. We let people burn the American flag out of fear that if we blocked that expression we might constrain other forms of free speech. In short, the price for flexibility, access to information, and its

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accrued benefits, is there and, of course, has many critics. On balance, however, Americans have tolerated the problems because benefits have normally exceeded the burden.

THE NATURE OF AMERICAN INFORMATION The nature of published or written-down information in America has changed dramatically over the past two centuries. It has moved from primarily religious and public data to a vast array of materials on all subjects, from the Bible to hard rock music, from newspapers and business almanacs to Internet news sources to hate groups on the Web, from the printed word to movies, videos, and music. As Americans entered the 21st century, one could identify some aspects of their information. Whether these stick for long or are momentary phenomena remains to be seen. For one thing, we are living in an era where lists and awards are very popular, reflecting a statistical and practical strain in this society. David Letterman on the Late Show with David Letterman has his Top Ten, but it seems everyone is ranking things from Best City to Live In (Money Magazine), to the Best Car, Most Dangerous Cities, and even Murder Capital of the United States as tracked by the FBI. And, of course, we see the rankings of every professional athlete and team. Polls, ever so popular, especially those ranking candidates and issues by popularity or degree of support, are continuously published. A second feature in the deployment of information usage concerns how numerically intensive we have become. In the 18th and 19th centuries, information was highly qualitative, that is to say, narrative and descriptive. Today a fact that is a number is considered “hard,” hence believable, while narrative is considered “soft,” not always as believable. Part of the source of this shift in the nature of information can be traced to the development of statistics as a subfield of mathematics between the late 1800s and the early decades of the 20th century. Use of statistics spread to the hard sciences by the 1950s, to the social sciences a decade later, and finally to process management practices in business and government by the end of the 1980s.39 As I was writing the initial draft of this chapter (August 1999) in Madison, Wisconsin, I noticed that


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the local newspaper on one day demonstrated both our fixation with lists and with numeric-intensive information that is now so prevalent in the United States. Perhaps a fluke of circumstance, but page one had a number of stories rooted in numbers: “Fed raises interest rates: quarter point increase intended to cool economy,” “Death toll in Turkey reaches 18,000,” “HIV cases straining the system” which is an article on the number of new cases in Wisconsin, “Madison is ranked No. 2 for children,” and “UW No. 10 for women’s athletics.”40 I could probably just as easily cite another day’s paper where there are no numbers, but there it is, a combination of news (e.g., death toll in Turkey, interest rate hike because both are events), rankings (the city with children, women’s sports at the University of Wisconsin), and information exchange of questionable news worthiness (about HIV, which is not so much a “hard” news event as it is a commentary about an existing circumstance). The love of numbers transcends science and technology. They are in so many aspects of life that it has become imperative that children in school and adults at work acquire everincreasing amounts of mathematical skills. This trend is expanding in scope despite the fact that we have tools to help perform mathematical calculations. Our future appears to be one where numbers will be even more pervasive. They displace text as an important subset of language and way of thinking. Mathematical literacy is almost as much a required skill today as is the ability to navigate around the Internet. Americans also like their data in small amounts. To be sure, they still read fat books, but that is the exception. Living in impatient times calls for more than fast food, fast travel, fast service, or short lines. It also calls for quick information. Love of speed has long been as American as Thanksgiving and baseball. That feature of American society spills over into information and even language. “Give it to me straight,” “cut out the crap,” “net it out,” “cut to the chase,” and “give me the punch line” are familiar phrases.41 Leaving aside whether that makes the use of information superficial or trivial, the “bumper sticker” or the “elevator” answer requires short bursts of information, opinions, or conclusions without the full blossom of discussion.

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In recent decades the move to shorter sound bites of information has come from three sources with which we are all familiar. First came radio, followed soon after by television. These mediums lent themselves to short sound bites and constant changes in subject, tone, and volume. That was our first conditioning. Then came computers and their green screens that could hold only so much information at a time. Scrolling was a nuisance and reading text on a monitor not as comfortable as reading text on paper. That was one reason why books and magazines remained popular but also a cause for why we began to condense information. The third is the Internet. A screen on the Internet is so loaded with advertisements, icons, lines, and pictures that the amount of text that can be displayed is quite small. Have you noticed how paragraphs are often one or two sentences in length, or how almost all sentences are now simple and short? In a book, by contrast, we can use compound sentences, others with dependent clauses (very popular with me as you have seen in this book), and greater use of adjectives, adverbs, and other qualifiers. Book paragraphs are often three and four times longer than those on the Internet. As people increasingly began receiving information from the Internet they were forced to get the short version of everything, even though the amount of information on the Internet was gargantuan. Starting about the time television came on stream, print media began publishing shorter stories and smaller paragraphs with less data. Academic journals remain the exception to my broad generalization, although it is now routine for these to publish a one- or two-sentence summary of an article’s key points, usually at the beginning of the essay. They continued to provide their more detailed coverage as Americans simultaneously found their electronic sources of data leading the way to shorter expressions. In fact, the number of printed academic journals and newsletters grew steadily in number all through the 20th century, even though often appealing to very narrow audiences. Yet it seems that the public at large has less time to probe deeply into a subject. It is no accident that we are so familiar with Cliff Notes, Readers Digest, and the myriad of executive summaries of popular books. They are always popular; they are so American.


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So is the rich diversity of information. Americans enjoy their information in a variety of formats. If there is a clear pattern of behavior it is that from their earliest years in North America, colonists and later citizens acquired and used information in every conceivable format, from books and newspapers to radio, TV, computers, and now the Internet. When they look at a subject, they usually wind up using multiple forms. When planning a vacation, for example, an American might go down to his or her neighborhood Barnes & Noble and buy a travel guide in book form. That same American might next log on to Travelocity.com on the Internet to start the hunt for cheap airfares to the vacation spot. On the way home from work, that same person might stop off at a local video rental store and check out a tape about the vacation site. And so it goes on, a variety of formats. How many people listen to music at home on the radio, diskettes, maybe even still on records, CDs of course, and now through their PCs while cruising the Internet? How many use almost all these formats during the course of one week? The love of variety cuts across all ages, social classes, industries, professions, and private activities. Coming back to the earlier theme of speed, Americans also like their information just-in-time. In fact, we have made speed almost a body of knowledge, an American handed-down value. We discuss the wisdom of just-in-time manufacturing, training, information for business management, and value in creating cognitive efficiency (a fancy way of saying you were ready to learn something now).42 Does an American renting a Hertz car want driving directions from the airport to the hotel when he or she makes a reservation? No, of course not. They want directions at the moment they rent the car; turning to the little TV screen in the rental office to print these out. They less frequently use the maps rental agents try to offer; these take too long to study. They want their information fast and predigested, hence the directions off the terminal that just say, “turn right on Rt. 495, take Exit 9, and go 8.1 miles, hotel on right.” Cycle time reduction—an American term—applies to the way we want to get information. Coupled to the Ameri-

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can penchant for wanting information predigested in short bursts, speed makes a natural complement to how data are presented and used today.

CONCLUSIONS What is most remarkable about the story of information in the United States is its popularity. By popularity I mean availability across all sectors of American society. It is not an overt popularity with people cheering in the streets; rather it is a quiet, almost unnoticed element of society. The use of information is so much a part of American society and it is so widespread and diverse, that it is almost invisible until one starts looking for it. This is very much like the phenomenon of buying a car and suddenly noticing every other copy of the same model on the highway. So the challenge has been to see the obvious, and in this case it is the extensive use of information. As illustrated in this book, in most phases of American life information and its technologies play vital roles. Respect for information and knowledge belies this society’s self-image of being antiintellectual, propractical, with a bias toward decision making, action, and respect for absolute results. However, peel back that veneer of values and proclivities and one sees that American reliance on information is no accident; the tendency to rely on information is a long-standing one. It bears repeating a central theme: that a combination of infrastructures created over time made this possible. The religious requirement for people to be able to read provided the initial impetus for literacy, and eventually this was institutionalized with public education and a vast network of colleges and universities over a period of three centuries. Side by side, the physical movement of information through a complex, comprehensive postal network blanketed the nation. With the arrival of electrical information, the nation went about adding to its information infrastructure with the telegraph, telephone, network of radio and TV stations, and finally the Internet. As you read these words, Americans are at it again, this time building a network of wireless communications. Creating a legal infrastructure that was information friendly—such as the


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First Amendment, copyright laws, Freedom of Information laws—provided a powerful and essential set of protections that facilitated the flow of information through the lives of the residents in the United States. These were periodically updated to reflect new realities and technologies. As the nation collectively became wealthy, its national government could afford to invest in research and development that facilitated development of new information technologies. The two most spectacular, of course, involved computers and satellites. The immediate incentive was often defense, first during World War II and then in the Cold War, nonetheless, the nation’s propensity to turn to technology for assistance was so typical of itself. Why has the role of information in America not been so obvious before? If information is such an important aspect of the story of the United States, why don’t we have libraries full of books on the subject? The fact is, Americans have recognized the significance of information but in piecemeal fashion, not through the eyes of American users. Americans have always looked at information as a series of independent, noninterrelated subjects. Thus there are histories of newspapers or television, others about computers, and about each major information technology, from the telegraph to the cell phone. Journalism professors don’t study the history of the computer, nor do historians expert on the post office necessarily look at the history of the Internet. But the true impact of information does not become obvious until we view the subject through the eyes of individual Americans. When done, we find that they have mixed and matched different types of information all day long, whether in 1801 or 2001. The contents of their mixes and matches varied over the centuries, as did the tools they used, but not the practice. That is why any student of the subject of information in America has to do what Americans have always done: Look at multiple types and sources of information simultaneously. It is why, for instance, within the covers of this book I discuss public schools and newspapers, PCs and postal systems, adding machines and telegraphs, telephones and typewriters, satellites and Bibles, vacations and work, PDAs and digital watches. When viewed holistically, one quickly sees that the landscape is cluttered with information

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and the tools and mediums needed by Americans to access all this data. Information and its supporting technologies and infrastructures are so central to American life that one can hardly imagine a day when this would not be the case. Any appreciation of American life, and how it will evolve over time, must take into account this singularly important feature (that of information, supporting technologies, and infrastructure). There are absolutely no signs of a waning American appetite for information. In fact, it is growing, because Americans continue to add to their infrastructure its technologies, while the nation collectively and quietly has been shifting its economic activity increasingly to ever-higher levels of information content. Today we recognize that process by calling it the service sector, the information economy, or even the knowledge economy. As economists are more frequently pointing out, information is forming an increasing amount of the activities of nonservice sector work, from agriculture to manufacturing. In the final analysis, we are left with the obvious conclusion that Americans are info-junkies, busy at work in an info-America. Ultimately, Americans want to apply whatever knowledge they acquire. What lessons can an individual take away from the findings presented in this book? Clearly, there are serious issues that public officials and private citizens have to deal with during their working careers. In Chapters 8 and 9 I suggested actions for public officials. Now we must turn our attention to the role of individual Americans, and in particular to those working in the private sector, because they ultimately shape the culture, economy, and activities of the United States. For that reason, the last chapter is devoted to them.

ENDNOTES 1. Michael Jackson, Business and Economic Quotations (New York: Macmillan, 1984): 84. 2. Jared Diamond has carefully looked at the problem of resources and demographics and has observed that “A large area or population means more potential inventors, more competing


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societies, more innovations available to adopt—and more pressure to adopt and retain innovations, because societies failing to do so will tend to be eliminated by competing societies.” (p. 407). As societies grew in number, those that failed, such as those that grew up in the Fertile Crescent “committed ecological suicide by destroying their own resource base, through over consumption and waste.” (p. 411). Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (New York: W.W. Norton, 1997). 3. A case in point: IBM, an American corporation, has turned to its European operations for guidance, technology, and management of the wireless opportunity. Normally, major new technologies would have been managed within the USA, often by American managers and engineers. 4. John Bartlett, Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations (Boston: Little, Brown, 1980): 506. The other quotes in the paragraph preceding this quote are taken from this same source. This book lists over 100 positive quotes about America. 5. Mortimer B. Zuckerman, “The 21st Century Will Be the Second American Century,” Foreign Affairs 77, no. 3 (May/June 1998): 31. 6. Carroll Pursell, The Machine in America: A Social History of Technology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995): 319. 7. John M. Staudenmaier, Technology’s Storytellers: Reweaving the Human Fabric (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1985): 171. 8. Merritt Roe Smith and Leo Marx (eds.), Does Technology Drive History? The Dilemma of Technological Determinism (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1994): x–xii. 9. David F. Noble, Forces of Production: A Social History of Industrial Automation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986): 5–7, 84–85, 96–105. 10. Merritt Roe Smith, “Technological Determinism in American Culture,” in Smith and Marx, Does Technology Drive History?, 1–35. 11. W.W. Rostow, The Great Population Spike and After: Reflections on the 21st Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998): 36–38.

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12. Richard K. Lester, The Productive Edge: How U.S. Industries Are Pointing the Way to a New Era of Economic Growth (New York: W.W. Norton, 1998): 266. 13. I have discussed these issues more thoroughly in 21st Century Business: Managing and Working in the New Digital Economy (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall/Financial Times, 2001). 14. Ibid. But see also what may be the very best book on management practices and the Internet by two economists, Carl Shapiro and Hal R. Varian, Information Rules: A Strategic Guide to the Network Economy (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1998). 15. Lester, The Productive Edge; Don Tapscott, The Digital Economy: Promise and Peril in the Age of Networked Intelligence (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1996), especially pp. 325–328 that provides statistical evidence; Dale Neef, A Little Knowledge Is a Dangerous Thing: Understanding Our Global Knowledge Economy (Boston: Butterworth-Heinemann, 1999): 27–44; Jorge Reina Schement and Terry Curtis, Tendencies and Tensions of the Information Age: The Production and Distribution of Information in the United States (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1995): 21–46. 16. Donald A. Norman, The Invisible Computer: Why Good Products Can Fail, the Personal Computer Is So Complex, and Information Appliances Are the Solution (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998): 51–68. 17. Gordon Bell and James N. Gray, “The Revolution Yet to Happen,” in Peter J. Denning and Robert M. Metcalfe (eds.), Beyond Calculation: The Next Fifty Years of Computing (New York: Copernicus/Springer-Verlag, 1997): 5. 18. Ibid., 13. 19. Peter Freeman and William Aspray, The Supply of Information Technology Workers in the United States (Washington, D.C.: Computing Research Association, 1999): 60–61. 20. William A. Tulskie, Jr., ”Technologies for Today and Tomorrow,” in James W. Cortada and Thomas S. Hargraves (eds.), Into the Networked Age: How IBM and Other Firms Are Getting There Now (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999): 182. 21. Ibid., 184–186.


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22. Michael T. Kiley, “The Supply of Skilled Labor and SkillBased Technological Progress,” White Paper, September 1997, Federal Reserve Board, available through the Federal Reserve Board Web Site, http://www.frb.gov. 23. He penned these words in the late 1980s. The events of the 1990s strongly confirmed his long-term prognosis for the United States. Michael E. Porter, The Competitive Advantage of Nations (New York: Free Press, 1990): 724. 24. Their stories are beginning to be told. See, for example, on Dell, its CEO’s account, Michael Dell with Catherine Fredman, Direct from Dell: Strategies That Revolutionized an Industry (New York: HarperBusiness, 1999); on Netscape by its chairman, Jim Clark with Owen Edwards, Netscape Time: The Making of the Billion-Dollar Start-Up That Took on Microsoft (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999); on AOL by reporter Kara Swisher, AOL.com: How Steve Case Beat Bill Gates, Nailed the Netheads, and Made Millions in the War for the Web (New York: Times Books, 1998); and about Sun, there is Karen Southwick, High Noon: The Inside Story of Scott McNealy and the Rise of Sun Microsystems (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1999). 25. Charles I. Jones and John C. Williams, “Measuring the Social Return to R&D,” White Paper, February 1997, available at http://www.frb.gov; quote on p. 16. 26. IBM unveiled a watch-sized device in July 2000 as an experiment to see if it could put a stripped down PC operating system in a machine that small. It worked. Instead of praising IBM, the technical press almost universally expressed frustration that IBM had not chosen to bring it out as a product! 27. One of the best recent discussions about what is wrong with computers was penned by Thomas K. Landauer, The Trouble with Computers: Usefulness, Usability, and Productivity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995). 28. Ian Mackintosh, Sunrise Europe: The Dynamics of Information Technology (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986): 5. 29. The OECD is constantly tracking this information and it remains the best source. 30. Paul Gannon, Trojan Horses and National Champions: The Crisis in Europe’s Computing and Telecommunications Industry (London: Apt-Amatic Books, 1997): 107–120.

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31. “Report: E-Commerce Develops Beyond U.S.,” Reuters at CNET News.com, August 25, 1999, http://www.news.com/News/ Item 0,4,0-40948.00.html. 32. Ibid. 33. Kenichi Ohmae, The End of the Nation State: The Rise of Regional Economies (New York: Free Press, 1995): 71–100; W.W. Rostow, The Great Population Spike and After: Reflections on the 21st Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998): see chart on p. 4; Massimo Livi-Bacci, A Concise History of World Population (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1992): 146–196. 34. Daniel J. Boorstin, The Americas: The Democratic Experience (New York: Vintage Books, 1974): 597. 35. Zuckerman, “A Second American Century,” 21. 36. Shapiro and Varian, Information Rules is a monument to that point. American corporations, in particular, are reacting fast with new strategies. See Stephen H. Haeckell, Adaptive Enterprise: Creating and Leading Sense-and-Respond Organizations (Boston: HBS Press, 1999): 1–22. As this book went to press in the summer of 2001, the U.S. government reported that online commerce was up 33.5 percent in the first quarter of 2001 over first quarter of 2000, and up by 1 percent over the fourth quarter of 2000. Historically, the fourth quarter is the biggest for retail industries because of the holiday season, so any increase in the first quarter over the fourth is significant, U.S. Department of Commerce, “Estimated Quarterly U.S. Retail E-Commerce Sales,” press release, May 16, 2001, http://www. census.gov/mnts/www/current.html. 37. This has been occurring in high-information content industries in particular, such as in insurance and banking. The most publicized examples, however, are coming out of entertainment and communications; Kevin Maney, Megamedia Shakeout: The Inside Story of the Leaders and Losers in the Exploding Communications Industry (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1995): 1–32. 38. One popular source for this kind of information has been the Nielsen Media Research project that from time to time reported survey results. 39. Stephen M. Stigler, The History of Statistics: The Measurement of Uncertainty before 1900 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Uni-


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versity Press, 1986): 358–362; H. Thomas Johnson and Robert S. Kaplan, Relevance Lost: The Rise and Fall of Management Accounting (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1987): 183–207; Robert E. Cole, Managing Quality Fads: How American Business Learned to Play the Quality Game (New York: Oxford University Press and Milwaukee: ASQ Press, 1999): 99–101. 40. Wisconsin State Journal, August 25, 1999, p. 1A. 41. In a complimentary biography of Lou Gerstner, IBM’s CEO in the 1990s, one of his strengths cited by the author was his demand for speedy answers, treating it as a virtue, Robert Slater, Saving Big Blue: Leadership Lessons and Turnaround Tactics of IBM’s Lou Gerstner (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1999): “people who spend time talking and talking are the kind who can kill a business,” said Slater about Gerstner’s attitude, p. 125. For how he ran meetings, see pp. 126–127. 42. In American business circles, the most influential statement on the value of speed was written by George Stalk, Jr. and Thomas M. Hout, Competing Against Time: How Time-Based Competition Is Reshaping Global Markets (New York: Free Press, 1990). The case for modern training techniques was sponsored most effectively by the American Society for Training and Development (ASTD), which has a membership of some 70,000.

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The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn and relearn.

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—ALVIN TOFFLER

E conomic success is often a function of leveraging circumstances to one’s advantage. Happiness for individuals exists frequently when they are in harmony with their environment. Self-worth springs from achievements consistent with one’s values, aligned with the noble aspirations of an individual’s society. Americans have long desired economic prosperity, enjoyed success in work, created a unique lifestyle for themselves, and engaged in healthy spiritual events. Positive idealism is central to the American ethos. Growing out of English thinking of the 17th century, and later of the Great Awakening of the 1700s, that positivism flowed into American life. The concept of technology being a force of positive action seemed almost American. The word itself—technology—was 412

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popularized in modern times thanks to an American professor at Harvard, Jacob Bigelow. Writing in the 1820s, Bigelow argued that technology would “extend the dominion of mankind over nature.”1 Edward Bellamy, the highly popular late 19th century American socialist writer on utopian ideals, and best known as the author of Looking Backward (1888), frequently made similar points, even though on occasion he was criticized for his exuberance: “This craze for more and more and ever greater and wider inventions for economic purposes,” was for him a common feature of American society.2 Personal achievement, results, and the freedom to accomplish these are quintessential American values. Underlying these have been relatively clear attitudes toward work and responsibility, and personal initiative. While the United States has changed a great deal over the past two centuries, and North America over the past four, these basic values have been relatively evident and constant since the 18th century. They have changed in form and expression, in how they have been described, criticized, and implemented, but they remain nonetheless. With each new turn of the social or technological crank, Americans have adopted new sources of information, embraced new knowledge (even creating a great deal of it), and preferred technological and scientific tools for work, leisure, education, and religion. They have long linked use of information (and its tools) to economic success. It had to have practical use. Public administrations have also been users of information and champions of access to data and knowledge. Governments at local, state, and federal levels, while normally held in high regard (especially constitutionally guaranteed rights) have also been viewed with considerable suspicion. Because of limitations put on governments, public institutions acquired roles consistent with their mission. Thus it was no accident that they built information infrastructures, supported R&D of new ones, and eliminated barriers to information, education, and applied information technology. We have in the American case a situation where, over time, the central source of most activities has been the individual

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and, to put it in more formal economic terms, in the private sector. Work is done in a relatively free market environment, within a capitalist economic system. Religious beliefs are squarely in the domain of the individual and the private sector. Leisure is defined by the choices of people, and group behavior is dictated by shared interests and modes of behavior. Individuals do not partition their lives, but rather apply their values across all their various activities. The information gained in school or work are applied all week long. The values learned in church, school, work, or in the military inform their daily affairs across the same week. Permeating everything is the use of information and its artifacts. The central message of this book is that the use of information in America has been and continues to be extensive. Its uses give us insights into the functioning of U.S. society, and possibly, at patterns in other nations. They also suggest in part how Americans achieve economic success, a positive sense of self-worth, and enjoy life. They have bent the institutions of society to their will when it came to creating and disseminating of information. Their governments have always built infrastructures for the flow of information. It is no accident, for example, that the U.S. government is perhaps the largest manufacturer of information in the world; it certainly is its largest publisher. Religious organizations in the U.S. (churches, schools, and colleges) are also information factories teaching values, religious beliefs, and life-long skills. Work today is infused with skills development, knowledge management, information technology, data mining, R&D, scientific research, and quality management practices. As the economy became increasingly service-sector oriented, and based more on scientific and engineering principles, companies, and their employees, also became information producers and users. Continued innovations in information technologies are also often propelled by the hunt for new forms of entertainment, from hand-held digital toys with more computing power and the earliest digital computers, to movies made using software rather than actors. So what? That is such an American question. It calls attention to another feature evident in the personal use of all


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kinds of information in America: the requirement that it be useful and practical, even when just intended to entertain. Michael Dertouzos, in his thoughtful book about the future of information technology, could not end his tome without a chapter advising people how to apply the insights of his forecast. He was told by readers of his first edition, “Tell us what to do.”3 In the call for the practical, he is not alone. Hundreds of books have appeared on information, computers, books, and other information media, each year for nearly a century. Almost all of them have had to answer the questions, “So what?” “What do I do?” Some have been philosophical; most have been prescriptive. Even Dertouzos has his lists, six in fact.4 For Americans and their nation as a whole, to continue profitably using information, a few lessons from history clearly suggest a path to take. It begins with the basic appreciation of the fact that information has value in all facets of their lives and, therefore, to be successful in a profession, spiritual life, politics, or to have a good time, reaching out to information and its artifacts is a good thing to do. Plain and simple, information in many forms does improve quality of life. The fact that it can cause pollution, be used for prejudicial purposes and other negative behaviors, is outweighed by its positive qualities. Second, Americans find value in simultaneously using multiple forms of information. In other words, the Internet alone is not the end-all of information sources. Books, movies, conversations, lectures, posters, TV, radio, telephone, magazines, letters and notes, and other artifacts of information will survive because it is the combination of all of these that allows one to use and enjoy information in effective ways. There has been, however, a profound historically important shift in the basic building blocks of information artifacts that cannot be overlooked. Since the middle of the 20th century, there has been an ever-increasing migration of information to digital forms, for the reasons described in previous chapters. If interested in knowing where the new information form or tool will come from, watch the evolution of the computer chip. Every time IBM or Intel puts out a press release announcing the development of a cheaper, faster, or smaller

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chip, pay attention, because with every innovation of this type, new ways to deliver and use information become possible. As this book hopefully demonstrates, it does not take Americans long to figure out how to apply new capabilities. It is the constant rush of new applications that contributes significantly to making Americans feel there is so much change in their lives. Changes, of course, are more often the consequences of new uses of information or information technology. Nonetheless, watch the chip because it is the molecular structure of the Age of Information. One could also say the same thing about software, but the developments here are more complicated to watch since they come in so many forms. Anyway, without the chip, software would not work the way its does, and in all probability, it would not exist.

CONSEQUENCES AND POSSIBILITIES FOR WORKERS AND MANAGERS Every major commentator on the impact of the computer on modern society has spoken about the computer chip changing everything. What I point out in this book, however, is that reality is more complex, because it involves more than computers. To begin with, values and roles have remained quite resilient to the introduction of new technologies, although the way things are done changes almost instantly with every new turn of the technological screw. The use of multiple types of information and information tools has and continues to be an important feature of work. User manuals and PCs, telephones and faxes, beepers and cell phones, videoconferencing and TV, and intelligent manufacturing equipment all are used in tandem. Industries, and companies within them, are frequently transformed by the effective or ineffective use of a combination of information technologies. It is why savvy executives know that the ultimate questions they can ask of any technology (computer or otherwise) are “When do I adopt it?” and “When do I dump it?” However, for anyone working today, digital technology does present an extraordinary opportunity to innovate by improving efficiencies of operation in novel ways and by de-


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veloping and selling new products and services relying on the digital. The historic opportunity is to inject the digital into machines, processes, and offerings. It is comparable to the historic opportunity that arose in the late 19th century to inject electricity first into machines, and later into goods and services that fundamentally destroyed some industries, created new ones, and changed how people worked and lived. The digital will do the same. We know that because, after a half century, it has already done a great deal. We understand that the extent of deployment of digital technology into such basic elements of life as lighting for our homes, household appliances, machinery and tools at work, kindergarten to university teaching and learning, transportation, and even roads is infinitesimal so far. Despite the enormous increase in the use of computer chips in various medical applications, doctors still perform physicals by hand and surgeons still manually slice us open. But even here all that is beginning to change, thanks to microelectronics and scanning technologies. The digital is about more than automation of machinery and work. It is becoming quite clear that it is changing many features of work and business strategy.5 How companies and industries are going to evolve is still unknown. But for the individual wanting the answer to the question “So what?” it suggests they should apply the digital, and experiment with organized change. They may not know the consequences of their actions until long after the events, but results will be positive, not necessarily negative. At companies, agencies, and schools, info-driven changes lead to the basic insight that investing in information, information tools, and developing skills, more often than not create new, often unanticipated economic payoffs. The same applies to individuals; information leads to more successful work lives and standards of living. In short, the often subconscious appreciation Americans have had for information of all types and quality, have, in aggregate, paid off. So we should continue the process, pushing the boundaries of information technologies, and make access to information current, easy, and innovative. However, we have also learned during the middle

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and late decades of the 20th century that adoption is not enough. Doing things faster than competitors has profound economic implications. On the one hand, the sooner to do something runs the risk of failure or cost overruns. On the other hand, those who succeed gain real economic advantages over rivals at the firm and country levels. Economists and historians have clearly demonstrated that speed generates economic value. But once again let me emphasize that these insights apply to all forms of information and information handling. This is not just about using the Internet before some competitor. Nor is it just about automating manufacturing processes. It is the combination of multiple types of information, and their technologies and formats, applied in a timely fashion, that provides the kinds of positive and negative results the United States has experienced since as far back as the 1840s. Confidence should be high about the value of information because the base of knowledge for this insight is not the Internet, or even the whole experience with computers. Rather, it rests on multiple types and forms of information across several centuries. Historic and current experiences suggest that the Internet, as exciting and innovative as it is, has yet to kick in with historical consequences. The majority of Americans and people around the world have yet to use it and, therefore, to cause the full effects of this innovation to occur. Most businesses have yet to exploit fully this technology, and those that have, use it primarily to enhance existing business practices. In time, of course, that will all change, but incrementally, quickly, often unexpectedly, and with many surprises both positive and negative. It will not be until many decades from now that we will know the final consequences of the Internet. But we have the historical precedence of so many other forms of information handling to draw on for insights and confidence in what we do now. So what we should do is use it, because we know with a high degree of certainty that the application of information and its base technologies does create its own opportunities and benefits.


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CONSEQUENCES AND POSSIBILITIES FOR PLAYERS In Chapter 6, I used several examples of nonwork activities to illustrate the role information and information technology plays in the private time of Americans. What is very apparent is that even in a wide range of activities, from family vacations to night classes, from games children play to serious book collecting, information is present. Americans have also long been enamored of statistical data and enjoy lists and rankings in fields, from sports to best movies, from the Fortune 500 companies to the ten worst dressed people. Information provides an invisible, and sometimes visible, infrastructure that makes the activity either possible or justifiable. One needs vast quantities of information to be a baseball junkie, but information is also the justification for some types of family vacations, such as the obligatory trip to the nation’s capital, to Gettysburg, or to Colonial Williamsburg. The presence of information cuts across classes, races, genders, and geography. The type of information varies from the serious and scholarly to the pseudoentertainment of some amusement park. But in one fashion or another it was always there. As the nation’s overall standard of living grew over the past two centuries, the volume of information consumed increased as well. Americans have steadily expanded the variety of leisure information in their lives. They vacation, play video games, see movies, watch television, use telephones, listen to CDs, watch DVDs, or travel. Vacationing, the preserve of the wealthy in the 18th century, became part and parcel of the middle class by the late 19th century, and the near birthright of the working class by mid-20th century. Blue collar workers, in particular, have vacations spelled out in their union-negotiated contracts, while even the poor are sponsored for holidays, such as trips to the country for inner-city kids. There is no evidence to suggest that the number of people using information in their private lives will decline, nor is there even a hint that the variety of data and information tools used will stabilize or decline. All the evidence suggests the contrary.

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The implications are extraordinary. In marketing, for example, this trend means vendors can reach audiences quickly and thoroughly by using information tools already in the hands of potential customers. We see that process at work with advertisements on television, and also on the headers of Internet Web pages. This suggests Americans should not see a decline in advertisements; rather, the opposite. In state and national parks, and in community public centers and parks, we will see more museums, more historical markers, and probably additional lectures. That some of American history presented in parks and historical sites is trite, sometimes even inaccurate, does not mean that Americans are not interested. Interest in historical matters is nearly a growth industry in the United States. It is an example of economic discontinuities that economists often speak of because, rather than professional historians heading the charge in this growing interest, companies (e.g., Disney) and people who are not professional historians are leading the way. Historians are being squeezed out of this growing interest in history, largely because they and their institutions are failing to recognize the trend, let alone taking charge of it. Sadly, the majority are being marginalized to classrooms and narrowly focused academic conferences.6 However, books on history written by nonhistorians (e.g., journalists and professional writers), and TV programs on the History Channel and the Discovery Channel are now read and seen by millions. It’s a shame, because historians have so much that they could share with all of us. It is not uncommon for people in any country, as they get older, to become more interested in historical matters. Americans are no exception to this pattern. With the American population in aggregate becoming older, and especially with a large number of Baby Boomers just entering their senior years, we can expect historical leisure activities to become a growth industry, from books to visits to Civil War battlefield parks. Simultaneously, more Americans can afford the vacations and other leisure-time activities. The press tends to emphasize how many Americans do not have pensions or medical coverage. To be sure, there are and will always be poor in America, living on the margins of mainstream society. But flip the issue over and you also see a different story, one not al-


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ways emphasized. By the end of the 20th century, half of American workers had some sort of pension coverage. About two-thirds of those could participate in 401(k) savings plans to augment their pensions and did, investing more than a trillion dollars in them in the last two decades of the century. In short, 30 million Americans had 401(k) accounts. Fifty million Americans could count on Social Security and were eligible to use Medicare and ever-expanding types of coverage provided by this program. Regardless of whether or not these pensions are adequate, the trend remains. We have tens of millions of Americans who can afford to do more than just pay for food and shelter. When one can do more than just cover physical necessities, by coupling additional leisure time brought about by retirement, it becomes even more possible for information to play increasing roles.7 Therefore, we can easily anticipate that the amount of energy diverted to recreational uses of information will expand rapidly. Personal business opportunities exist for satisfying that demand, much like the provision of information and information technologies is doing today for business. This is more than a prediction that funeral parlors will have more business because more old people will die. This is about some fundamental increase in types of information traditionally used in leisure activities, and perhaps a shift away from the creation and dissemination of information in business and conventional education. For those who think that the Discovery Channel is trite info-pabulum, there will be more of it. For those who think retired, well-educated professors and other professionals will devote their energies to the creation and use of information, the future looks bright. In short, both good and bad information will proliferate.

CONSEQUENCES AND POSSIBILITIES FOR THE RELIGIOUS For many in the United States, religious activities play an important role in their lives. These can range from thought and prayer as daily, if brief, routine, to living in communities dominated by religious practices. As with all major classes of activ-

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ities in American society, there are not-so-obvious infrastructured in place to serve people. Those infrastructures have extensive information content. Three in particular are most prevalent. The first is the infrastructure needed to run religious organizations. Active churches are like businesses. They have offices, and in those offices are books and magazines, calculators, fax machines, PCs, telephones, and pagers for ministers. A small library has always been an important feature of a minister’s home or of a midsized to large church. Today, many of these collections look like tiny public libraries, equipped with books, magazines, PCs, and access to the Internet. Because ministers, priests, mullahs, and rabbis have considerable contact with their communities through associations and visitations to sick and aging members of their churches, cell phones are popular tools of their trade. Their offices are responsible for communicating with members of the congregation, taking in cash contributions, billing for tithes, paying bills, publishing weekly church bulletins, and maintaining a physical plant or campus of buildings. These facilities range from a small church that needs its lawn cut to complexes of structures that include housing for clergy, schools, community centers, and churches, temples, or mosques. In short, many of the tasks performed by a modern church are similar to, if not the same, as those carried out by a government agency or private business. A minister today can be said to be a combination cleric, business manager, head of marketing, and, of course, spiritual or psychological advisor. It has long been this way. So too has the use of information technology. The Reverend Gardner Spring, writing in 1856 in reaction to the role of the telegraph, captured the essence of what was possible: “We are on the border of a spiritual harvest because thought now travels by steam and magnetic wires.”8 The promise of new technologies today remains the same. To carry out their responsibilities, clerics and their staffs have not hesitated to reach out and use information and information technology. And, as I demonstrate in Chapter 7, many keep up with the latest technologies. The Internet is a popular tool, used to find information and to reach out to members of


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a congregation. It is effective, and joins other information tools in assisting members and clerics to create and run congregations. There is little evidence to suggest that this pattern of behavior among Americans regarding the management of their religious activities is different than what we see in the work environment. What this similarity suggests is that part of being effective in the religious sphere of one’s life involves information and its tools. Ministers rely on the digital to reach out for information and to communicate. Church members can do the same through books, magazines, radio, television, and the Internet. Since residents of North America have often used a combination of media in the past, one could expect that this will continue in the future. This behavior raises several questions. Are there new ways for churches to reach out to the religious? Should religious services be delivered on demand, instead of at fixed times on the weekend? Can we offer parishioners religious counseling in a “just-in-time” fashion as we do training in a business environment? Just as businesses and government agencies have repeatedly had to rethink how to conduct their work and what services to offer, churches will do the same. The process has been in evidence now for a good half century, although it is very clear that clerics have been far slower to exploit the possibilities of new technologies in the past quarter century than their business counterparts. This behavior stands in sharp contrast to their role in exploiting book publishing, radio, and television in earlier times. In the parlance of modern business, their use of the printing press represented “best practices.” If a business manager in the 1840s wanted to know how to exploit book publishing to deliver a message, he had to look no further than to religious organizations, such as Bible societies. If a political party wanted to leverage the radio in the 1920s, it had merely to examine how radio evangelists used this medium. The second effect on religious activities involves the Internet. Although I have discussed this topic in this chapter and more extensively in Chapter 7, there are several additional implications we should recognize. Since the Internet is rich in text and visual images and operates around the clock, anyone can use it to become involved in small or major religious activ-

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ities at any time, any day of the week. The electronic doors to the church are always open. Theoretically, the electronic minister is always available. Geography is rapidly becoming irrelevant. If physical contact with other members of a congregation at a church service on Sunday morning is a standard way of conducting religious activities, will it be so in the future? We know already that popular television ministers in California are the mainstay of many listeners across the United States. Will that also happen with the Internet? My expectation is that digital congregations will emerge, much like political action groups, centered on individual popular ministers or likeminded people. In earlier times we would have referred to such people as members of a sect, or a subset of a mainstream religion. Will we see, therefore, mass customization of religious beliefs? While the thought of everyone having a religion unique to one’s self seems far-fetched, the notion of greater shades of variation within an established religion is not. Information, from the Internet to the old-fashioned book (e.g., the Bible) makes this possible.9 The third area to affect religion concerns the emerging role of artificial intelligence on religious views. The physics of the digital, and the philosophical considerations of computer science are opening new vistas for religious thinking. Nothing is bringing this about more so than artificial intelligence (AI). For a half century, engineers, scientists, and philosophers have been studying and building intelligent machines. The day may come soon when such machines, artificially intelligent, will be as smart or smarter than people. Current projections suggest that this might be possible by the mid-21st century, although the AI scientific community has missed many of its projections for success in the past. However, this new century will not end without highly intelligent machines. Those who think about religion and AI have already started to contemplate the implications. One scientist put it clearly: “I believe that science’s greatest task in the late 20th century is to build living machines.” Are these the worlds and universe discussed in both halves of the Bible? Do these machines then have souls? If all living things have a soul, why shouldn’t a living machine have one also? And now, with our ability to create biologically-based life thanks to the manipula-


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tion of DNA, will intelligent robotic life of the future look, feel, and act like living creatures? Already our notion of a robot as a metal machine with computer chips may be outdated, out of pace with biologically based information handling devices of the future. As one commentator on the prospect of the artificial has already concluded, “I’d say you can have a soul in an artificial universe . . . it would be a real soul.”10 Does the existence of digital forms of information and its tools (such as robots) take us to a new dimension of religious thought? Thomas Aquinas and Peter Abelard, two great theologians of the Middle Ages who wrote extensively on Christianity, and Mohammed who collected Arab religious thinking in written form to create the Koran, would probably argue the case against the digital changing theology. If they were here, they might argue that the “intelligent” machine is a tool, just as pen and paper were tools that they used. While their views would probably be the most widely accepted ones for several decades in the 21st century, they may not be by the early years of the 22nd, when highly intelligent machines will be commonplace. AI life may cause as much of a change in theological thinking in the United States as did the arrival of Christianity and Islam in the Middle East and Europe. What that earlier experience teaches us is that changes in thinking happen relatively quickly in historic time. Christianity established itself in less than 250 years, Islam in 50. At the dawn of the 21st century, it is enough just to recognize the potential influence of digital forms of information and tools on the spread of religious movements.

CONSEQUENCES AND POSSIBILITIES FOR PUBLIC OFFICIALS AND CITIZENS Historical and contemporary experiences are very clear on the matter of politics and national policy. American officials and the electorate should continue to invest national assets through the federal government in the development of new technologies. Today that would include more advanced forms of telecommunications and the Internet, research on biologically based replacements for the computer chip and on intelligent devices.

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Second, creation of national information infrastructures should continue to be done every time a viable new information tool emerges. This is so strategically important to the nation that it transcends political parties, and is fundamental to American political practices and rights and successful capitalism. This second imperative is so strong that resistance to it is fraught with problems. The experience of the U.S. Postal System in recent years is the prime tactical example. Once, it was the only carrier of mail, publications, and packages. At one time it was the largest employer of civilians in the American economy.11 Today, it is under siege as first class mail (its highest profit revenue generator) rapidly moves to the very inexpensive e-mail, leading many to question if the USPS has a future. Did it respond to the capabilities of the Internet too slowly, and is it now paying the price? Is it perhaps even in danger of disappearing? Public officials and citizens have already started to interact using the digital. This process is more than having kiosks in shopping centers to renew drivers’ licenses, or to use a credit card to pay a fee. More than voting over the Internet, this all about closer interactions among governments and citizens. It is also about more efficient delivery of services, and the protection of personal rights. The temptation to impose controls over private activity and beliefs always lurks in the background, as it will, no doubt, in the decades to come. But Americans, including the majority of their public officials, have, in general, resisted the temptation, honoring the practices and beliefs laid down by the Founding Fathers. We should recognize that the activities of the KKK, or locking up Japanese Americans in World War II, or arresting antiwar protestors during the Vietnam War, are exceptions to an otherwise broadly held belief in freedom of use of information for the purposes of going about our lives. Related to access and infrastructures, there is yet another role for government to play. This involves the imposition of technical standards so that various information technologies can “talk to each other” and thus facilitate the flow of information through American society. What we have learned in the 20th century is that once data is in digital form, it can be moved around and delivered in a wide variety of formats, from


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text to video to sound—all the same data. Telecommunications from the telegraph to the Internet, and what we have learned about software, all point to the continued need for standards. Standardization of information tools has occurred over the centuries, to be sure, so the requirement for standards in the digital age is not inconsistent with past experience. However, as with the development of the book and newspaper, and later with the telephone, radio, and TV, during the early stages of new technologies, standards are either limited or nonexistent. These technologies are not fully or effectively exploited until standards emerge. Either some dominant force imposes a standard, as did Microsoft by selling more copies of its operating system for PCs than anyone else, or governments facilitate the process as was done in Western Europe with the imposition of standards for cell phone communications. Government officials can speed up the process of creating standards. Faster creation of standards leads to earlier exploitation of information technologies. Faster exploitation of technologies holds out the promise of economic, spiritual, intellectual, and political benefits. That is the logic behind why the U.S. government continues to play an aggressive role in the creation of standards and works with other governments around the world to do the same. Information technologies do not recognize political boundaries. In short, standards for digital information tools normally have to be global to be fully optimized. The one other activity for citizens is a very immediate tactical one—what to do about digital elections. This nation has yet to make up its collective mind about how to use electronic tools to vote. Americans have already decided to use electronics to inform their political points of view. They learn more about politics from television than from books, newspapers, or through individual conversations with local, state, or national leaders. Now they have the issue before them of how to perform their obligations as citizens, by voting. Will they vote online? So far, only political scientists and some public officials have weighed in on this issue. The national elections held in November 2000 broadened and intensified the debate. The dialogue will be held, although it is not clear at this time

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what the outcome will be. There are two reasons for this. First, there is a profound hesitation to change any of the mechanical processes of citizenship, although in recent decades tabulating votes have been moving from paper ballots to more automated means. Second, we do not know what effect making voting easier will have on political parties and interest groups. Yet even here, we know that over the past two centuries, the vote has been continuously extended to more groups, moving from just white male property owners in the late 1700s, to all adult citizens by the 1960s. The next turn of the screw may be to increase the convenience of voting, and that is what would trigger the next round of changes in American voting practices.

SOME FINAL THOUGHTS This book has been about the role of information in modern American life. The assumption behind it is that if we had a better idea about how information is being used in the workplace, in leisure and play, and in our religious and political affairs, we would have enough of an understanding of the topic to set national agendas or develop personal strategies for our careers and our life styles. These four major areas of our lives—work, leisure, religion, and politics—consume the majority of the waking day of most Americans. There are many other subcategories or slices of life that could also have been looked at, such as education for minors, role of information in the military, science, and medicine, but the findings would have been essentially the same. Information would have been seen as an extraordinarily important feature of these areas, along with the development of additional bodies of data and knowledge. We also would have seen that infrastructures for the delivery of information would have existed; indeed, many are the same ones used by people at work, at play, church, or politicking—the U.S. Postal Service, the Internet, and the telephone. Because Americans live parts of their lives in these various sectors, one could reasonably assume that lessons learned in one sector of life would be carried over and applied in another. In fact, this happens all the time. The telephone first used at


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work in the 1880s became a communications tool in the home in the early 1900s. Personal computers used in the office in the early 1980s became the hot new information tool for the home by the early 1990s. So cross-utilization of information and its tools and infrastructure is a common pattern. Indeed, we should look for this as a way of determining how best to use a body of information and tools in the future. The future, therefore, arrives at different speeds across the various sectors of our lives. This concept can be extended further to say that the future arrives at different speeds within a sector of our lives, such as the use of computers in manufacturing companies in the 1950s before they were widely adopted in retail operations or by churches. This pattern teaches us three lessons. First, always look over your shoulder to see how others are using information and tools because they probably are not always doing things the same as you. This is the concept called “best practices” so widely applied in business today. The assumption is that someone has already figured out a useful way to use information that you have yet to try. Second, infrastructure and standards are important because they allow one to share information and to reach for and apply information and insights from other sectors of the nation’s life. This also applies to global developments, especially today with cell phones and the Internet because speed counts just as much in commerce as in war. Third, information enhances, endangers, improves, compromises, and changes lives of residents in all kinds of economies and cultures. Information is used in positive and negative ways, as are other tools and practices of a society. Information and information tools and artifacts are never themselves the problem. The problem lies with their users. It is an important point to make because there are always critics of the Internet, television, DVD-based movies, cell phones, books, and so forth. These critics are often articulate and they get press exposure. But in reality, Americans have found that more often than not information has been a positive element in their lives. Their experiences created consequences, and simultaneously, new possibilities.

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ENDNOTES 1. Jacob Bigelow, Elements of Technology (Boston: Boston Press, 1829): 4. This is believed to be the first publication in America to use the word technology. 2. Edward Bellamy, Equality (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1897): 236. 3. Michael Dertouzos, What Will Be: How the New World of Information Will Change Our Lives (New York: HarperEdge, 1997): 317. 4. Ibid., 317–347. 5. These are described in Philip Evans and Thomas S. Wurster, Blown to Bits: How the New Economics of Information Transforms Strategy (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2000); Carl Shapiro and Hal R. Varian, Information Rules: A Strategic Guide to the Network Economy (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1999); and James W. Cortada, 21st Century Business: Managing and Working in the New Digital Economy (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall/Financial Times, 2001). 6. If the reader is an historian, let me recognize the exceptions. The work done in particular by public historians runs contrary to the trend described in this paragraph. But the population of public historians runs into the high hundreds, while there are more than 20,000 historians in the U.S. 7. Robert Sobel, The Great Boom, 1950–2000: How a Generation of Americans Created the World’s Most Prosperous Society (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000): 358–359. 8. Quoted in James W. Carey, Communication as Culture (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989): 206–207. 9. The opportunity to interpret scriptures variously in the early 1800s led to the rapid development of many Protestant denominations, a form of mass customization made possible by an earlier information technology, the printing press. 10. All quotes taken from David F. Noble, The Religion of Technology: The Divinity of Man and the Spirit of Invention (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997): 170–171. 11. The crisis and implications are discussed by Edward L. Hudgins (ed.), Mail @ the Millennium: Will the Postal Service Go Private? (Washington, D.C.: Cato Institute, 2000): 125–148.

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Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it.

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12 —SAMUEL JOHNSON, 1775

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he bibliography on the role of information in the United States is immense yet fragmented. It is immense because of the number of aspects one has to look at, aspects ranging from histories of IBM to vacationing practices, from religious themes to public policy. It is fragmented because the study of information as a feature of any society is not yet a recognized field, although much has been done on the subject. This is particularly the case with regard to the use of digital data, the role of books, newspapers, radio, and television, and now a growing body of literature about the Internet, which was invented and first implemented in the United States. There is also a near-massive body of material on social and economic issues that have led people to start using such phrases as Information Age and Post431

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Industrial Society to describe the United States. The good news is that for most topics there are excellent additional sources of information that can expand our appreciation of the role of information in the United States and in societies in general. What these sources make quite clear is that the book you are reading is only the tip of the iceberg. The publications that follow are intended to be starting points for those who want to learn more. I selected materials for inclusion that are either easy to find or are relatively new. In each instance I picked publications that reflected current research and thinking about the subject. The endnotes for each chapter also include many additional references to articles, books, and Web sites. Many of my sources were drawn from Internet sites. Since materials on the Web come and go, I have printed out every source I cited in an endnote so that if a citation is dropped from its Web home, I will have it in my files. If you run into a problem retrieving something off the Net I cited in an endnote, let me know and I will send you a copy. I can be reached either through the publisher or at [email protected].

HISTORICAL BACKGROUND A group of experts on the role of information in American society recently made the first attempt to write an integrated history of information in America: Alfred D. Chandler, Jr. and James W. Cortada (eds.), A Nation Transformed by Information: How Information Has Shaped the United States from Colonial Times to the Present (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000). The book covers the subject from approximately 1700 to the present, and includes a substantial bibliographic essay. Since information and technology always were related to each other, understanding the general flow of technological developments in the United States is important. The best onevolume introduction to the subject is by Carroll Pursell, The Machine in America: A Social History of Technology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995); it is also available in an inexpensive paperback edition. Since science played a strong role in the growth of knowledge and informa-

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tion in the 20th century, understanding its earlier years gives us insights on the attitudes of Americans toward information as they began their historic economic takeoff in the mid1800s. Robert V. Bruce wrote The Launching of Modern American Science, 1846–1876 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987), which won the Pulitzer Prize the following year. It, too, is conveniently available in a paperback edition. For a beautifully written and illustrated book on the American experience, you can hardly go wrong with Steven Lubar, InfoCulture: The Smithsonian Book of Information Age Inventions (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1993). On the early years, when public policy and attitudes regarding the role of information were formed, you cannot do any better than to begin with two highly readable books by Richard D. Brown, Knowledge Is Power: The Diffusion of Information in Early America, 1700–1865 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), and The Strength of a People: The Idea of an Informed Citizenry in America, 1650–1870 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996). The latter is also available in paperback. On late 19th and early 20th century use of information by American corporations, there are two books. The first is by JoAnne Yates, Control Through Communication: The Rise of System in American Management (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), in which she offers case studies to demonstrate the use of information and such info-artifacts as the 3 5 card, file cabinets, and three ring binders. James R. Beniger, The Control Revolution: Technological and Economic Origins of the Information Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), argues that it was the attempt to control the flow of events in large organizations that led to a variety of new ways of moving information around in the United States between the end of the Civil War and the present. On the arrival of mechanical aids to information processing, such as typewriters and adding machines, see James W. Cortada, Before the Computer: IBM, NCR, Burroughs, and Remington Rand and the Industry They Created, 1865–1956 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), reprinted in a paperback edition in 2000. For an introduction to how the

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American public met the computer after a half century of using other office equipment, see James W. Cortada, The Computer in the United States: From Laboratory to Market, 1930–1960 (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1993). On the business management aspects of the subject, see James W. Cortada, Information Technology as Business History: Issues in the History and Management of Computers (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996), especially pp. 189–246.

THE TELEPHONE When anyone thinks of information tools, after the newspaper and book, there are several electronic ones that quickly come to mind: television, computers, the Internet, and the one that taught this nation so much about telecommunications, regulatory practices, and led to so many technical innovations: the telephone. After television, it is the most widely used information tool in modern society, and it was invented in the United States. I did not discuss the telephone in this book for a number of reasons, not the least of which is space constraints, but also because most Americans are so familiar with this information transmitting technology. The definitive biography of Alexander Graham Bell is by Robert V. Bruce, Bell: Alexander Graham Bell and the Conquest of Solitude (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1973). For the best analysis of how Ma Bell became a national telephone network, see Robert W. Garnet, The Telephone Enterprise: The Evolution of the Bell System’s Horizontal Structure, 1876–1909 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), one of a series of telephone histories published by this university press. For a general history of the telephone there is John Brooks, Telephone: The First Hundred Years (New York: Harper & Row, 1976). On the breakup of AT&T in the early 1980s, see Peter Temin and Louis Galambos, The Fall of the Bell System (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). For a collection of essays on the effects of the telephone on society, a good source to begin with is Ithiel de Sola Pool (ed.), The Social Impact of the Telephone (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1977). The best account of the social effects


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of the telephone, however, is now by Claude S. Fischer, America Calling: A Social History of the Telephone to 1940 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), and available in a paperback edition. It includes a magnificent bibliography on the history of the telephone in America.

THE COMPUTER When we think of information processing in the United States, the immediate image that comes to mind is, of course, the computer. Recently, two very good histories were published that also include citations to a great deal of the literature on the subject of its technology and prior history. The first, by Martin Campbell-Kelly and William Aspray, is a history intended for general audiences and is highly readable: Computer: A History of the Information Machine (New York: Basic Books, 1996). The second, written by Smithsonian historian Paul E. Ceruzzi, emphasizes the technological evolution more than the first, and is particularly excellent for the period 1940 to 1980, A History of Modern Computing (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998). There are many histories of important machines and companies, such as IBM and Microsoft, which are cited in the two books by Campbell-Kelly and Aspray, and Ceruzzi. However, on the period of the Cold War, the key study is Paul N. Edwards, The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), one of the most important new books to appear on the history of computing. Because video games and high-tech entertainment are now such an important aspect of American leisure activities, they are subjects worth looking at. A useful introduction to the subject is by J.C. Herz, Joystick Nation: How Video Games Ate Our Quarters: Won Our Hearts, and Rewired Our Minds (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1997). Since children are most associated with video games, it makes sense to also look at Don Tapscott, Growing Up Digital: The Rise of the Net Generation (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1998), now also available in a paperback edition. For a study of how video games and entertainment have linked together, with developments

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up through the late 1990s, see Steven Poole, Trigger Happy: Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution (New York: Arcade Publishing, 2000). Publications on the history of personal computers are almost a growth industry today. One of the first and still very useful accounts of the early history of PCs is by Stan Augarten, Bit by Bit: An Illustrated History of Computers (New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1984). For the story of the Apple computer, there are a number of histories; however, if you had to pick one to begin with, it probably should be a book by Michael S. Malone, Infinite Loop: How Apple, the World’s Most Insanely Great Computer Company, Went Insane (New York: Doubleday, 1999). Do not be misled by its silly title, the book has a great deal of information on the firm and its products, and is a good read. On the IBM PC, see James Chposky and Ted Leonsis, Blue Magic: The People, Power and Politics Behind the IBM Personal Computer (New York: Facts on File, 1988). For an account of the effect of PCs on the American computer industry, see Charles H. Ferguson and Charles R. Morris, Computer Wars: How the West Can Win in a Post-IBM World (New York: Times Book, 1993). For a massive amount of historical trivia on all aspects of computing, including PCs and their software, complete with photographs, chronologies, and descriptions, there is no more complete source today than a CD-ROM compiled and published by Mark Greenia, History of Computing: An Encyclopedia of the People and Machines That Made Computer History (n.c.: Lexicon Services, 1998). The easiest way to get this is via the Internet, through such book vendors as Amazon.com or Barnesandnoble.com. However, after all is said and done, the best overall account of PCs is by Paul Freiberger and Michael Swaine, Fire in the Valley: The Making of the Personal Computer (New York: McGrawHill, 2000). Microsoft has been the subject of over a dozen books, but the most informative is by Michael A. Cusumano and Richard W. Selby, Microsoft Secrets: How the World’s Most Powerful Software Company Creates Technology, Shapes Markets, and Manages People (New York: Free Press, 1995).


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ECONOMICS OF THE INFORMATION AGE The literature on the economics of computing and other information practices in the United States is detailed, and some of it quite readable. One recent short study that fits this description is by Daniel E. Sichel, The Computer Revolution: An Economic Perspective (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 1997). More global in approach, and also very readable, is Dale Neef, A Little Knowledge Is a Dangerous Thing: Understanding Our Global Knowledge Economy (Boston: Butterworth-Heinemann, 1999). For an economic debate with fellow economists and government policymakers that, in the process, provides a useful introduction to the role of all kinds of technology, not just informational, see Frederic M. Scherer, New Perspectives on Economic Growth and Technological Innovation (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 1999). For a collection of articles on all aspects of digital economics, see Erik Brynjolfsson and Brain Kahin (eds.), Understanding the Digital Economy: Data, Tools, and Research (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000). Because telecommunications is a part of the story, the subject fits here. Two excellent introductions now exist. A short, historical account on the experience of the United States is by Alan Stone, How America Got On-Line (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1997). But for a more focused analysis emphasizing the more modern period, see the collection of contributed essays in Robert W. McChesney, Ellen Meiksins Wood, and John Bellamy Foster (eds.), Capitalism and the Information Age: The Political Economy of the Global Communication Revolution (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1998). For a selection of writings by economists and sociologists, see James W. Cortada (ed.), Rise of the Knowledge Worker (Boston: Butterworth-Heinemman, 1998); it also contains an introduction to the general theme of information workers in America. The endnotes for Chapters 1 through 6 have references to publications on such industries as book publishing, newspapers, and magazines. Studies on other information industries, such as the computer industry, are numerous. For a detailed

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listing of many of these, see James W. Cortada, Second Bibliographic Guide to the History of Computing, Computers, and the Information Processing Industry (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1996; the first one, with additional citations, appeared in 1990).

WORK IN THE UNITED STATES For many Americans, Alvin Toffler kicked off the issue of information, computers, and work in America with his book, Future Shock (New York: Random House, 1970). That book, more than any other of its time, made Americans realize that things were changing in ways not understood before. Recently, economist Richard K. Lester took a look at what was changing in the economy during the 1990s and beyond in The Productive Edge: How U.S. Industries Are Pointing the Way to a New Era of Economic Growth (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1998). It is a really good read, not the dry stuff of more typical economic literature. Another view, from the perspective of consultants and managers implementing changes, is James W. Cortada and Thomas S. Hargraves (eds.), Into the Networked Age: How IBM and Other Firms Are Getting There Now (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). Work itself has recently been the subject of many excellent studies. One, now a minor classic, looked at how information affected factory workers, primarily in a paper mill: Shoshana Zuboff, In the Age of the Smart Machine: The Future of Work and Power (New York: Basic Books, 1988). For a well-done “doom and gloom” view, see Jeremy Rifkin, The End of Work: The Decline of the Global Labor Force and the Dawn of the Post-Market Era (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1995). A more balanced account of changes in the American work place in the 1980s and 1990s was prepared by a team led by Peter Cappelli et al., Change at Work (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). For additional discussion of a similar nature see Charles Heckscher, White Collar Blues: Management in an Age of Corporate Restructuring (New York: Basic Books, 1995). Essentially what the literature suggests is that the sociologists and business professors looking at specific


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case studies tend to see the problems associated with the transition to an information-based or services economy, while the economists and technologists are more positive about what is again going on. But one of the most balanced accounts, and set in historical context, on the effects of information on workers in the United States is Jorge Reina Schement and Terry Curtis, Tendencies and Tensions of the Information Age: The Production and Distribution of Information in the United States (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1995). On the changing relationship between “Old Economy” and “New Economy” work, see James W. Cortada, 21st Century Business: Managing and Working in the New Digital Economy (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall/Financial Times, 2001). The American government has published many studies about work and economics of information since the late 1920s. Normally the literature is intended to suggest positive aspects, particularly for the creation of new jobs. At the moment, the best analyses of the effects of the Internet on the United States are coming from government studies, all of which are readily available off the Internet by going to U.S. Government sites; some key ones are listed in the endnotes to Chapter 5. However, if you can read only one, try U.S. Department of Commerce, The Emerging Digital Economy II (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1999), available both electronically and in paper. It is less than 50 pages long. If you want a more detailed look, see the same department’s, The Economic and Social Impact of Electronic Commerce (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1998), which is about 150 pages in length. Both are intended for general audiences. At the moment, many of the books and articles appearing about the nature of information at work are being packaged as discussions about knowledge work. The best single introduction to the subject is by Thomas H. Davenport and Laurence Prusak, Working Knowledge: How Organizations Manage What They Know (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1998). But I would also recommend a book by Thomas A. Stewart, Intellectual Capital: The New Wealth of Organizations (New York: Doubleday, 1997).

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SOCIOLOGICAL VIEWS OF INFORMATION IN AMERICA For our purposes, literature on the period after the arrival of the Internet concerns us, although there is a long string of publications concerning the impact of the telephone, radio, television, and computers. Sherry Turkle’s latest book, Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995), can be trusted to take the reader through modern conditions in a responsible manner. For a survey of how children are responding to the Internet, see Don Tapscott, Growing Up Digital: The Rise of the Net Generation (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1998). There is also a massive study on the Information Age written by Manuel Castells, The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture, 3 volumes (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1996–1998), which is particularly useful in that he discusses developments around the world, although he includes a great deal about the United States. All three volumes have extensive bibliographies. For an anthology of writings on the subject, see James W. Cortada (ed.), Rise of the Knowledge Worker (Boston: ButterworthHeinemann, 1998).

LEISURE IN THE UNITED STATES A book still fun to read is Daniel J. Boorstin’s, The Americans: The Democratic Experience (New York: Random House, 1973), which is the third volume in The Americans, covering the modern period. The other two review American activities back to the 1600s and remain classics in American history. The hands-down best account of vacationing in America is by Cindy S. Aron, Working at Play: A History of Vacations in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). It also includes a great deal of bibliography. My only complaint with her book is that she ends the story in about 1940. So we still need a major study of the very modern period. There are a number of books on collecting books, but the best of the new ones is by Nicholas A. Basbanes, A Gentle Madness: Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes, and the External Passion for Books


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(New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1995). Don’t be fooled by the very stiff subtitle, this is a great read! Baseball has a library of books of its own. On the Negro Leagues, begin with Dick Clark and Larry Lester, The Negro Leagues Book (Cleveland, OH: Society for American Baseball Research, 1994). In the 1990s, the American public was entertained on the subject of baseball by its most popular documentary filmmaker, Ken Burns, who made a series on the game. The book from the series is a beautifully illustrated history of the sport, Baseball; An Illustrated History (New York: A.A. Knopf, 1994). He also made a set of 9 videos on the same subject, Baseball: A Film (1994); choose the film over the book if you have an option because of its old newsreels. Public libraries and bookstores routinely carry these. The whole question of whether education is an extension of work or is recreationally linked to what Americans do on their own time has been the subject of much debate. But hands down, the book to begin with is by Joseph F. Kett, The Pursuit of Knowledge Under Difficulties: From Self-Improvement to Adult Education in America, 1750–1990 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994). The standard book on the remarkable story of the World War II GIs going to college is told by Keith Olson, The G.I. Bill, the Veterans and the Colleges (Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky Press, 1974). For what is going on in higher education today, and the effects on American society, see Stan Davis and Jim Botkin, The Monster Under the Bed (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995). It is critical of academic institutions but is useful in linking higher education to American business activities, reminding us that higher education in the United States must have a practical purpose, one linked into the mainstream activities of the nation. Television rivals baseball in the number of publications available about its social, economic, and political influences on the nation. To put the subject, and so many other socially significant inventions, in sound historical perspective, there is the beautifully illustrated, well-written book by Steve Lubar, Infoculture: The Smithsonian Book of Information Age Inventions (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1993). For a detailed analysis of television and its related technologies there is the very reli-

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able book by Patricia Greenfield, Mind and Media: The Effects of Television, Video Games and Computers (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), but don’t ignore an equally useful study by Marsha Kinder, Playing with Power in Movies, Television and Video Games (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1991). The whole mix of entertainment, TV, and other technologies is nicely handled by an entertainment industry consultant, Michael J. Wolf, The Entertainment Economy: How Mega-Media Forces Are Transforming Our Lives (New York: Times Books, 1999). The only study on C-SPAN is by Stephen Frantzich and John Sullivan, The C-SPAN Revolution (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1996), which is both history and an analysis of where it might go next. The very important question of whether TV and the Internet will merge and what that means is covered thoroughly by Bruce M. Owen, The Internet Challenge to Television (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1999).

RELIGION IN THE UNITED STATES An excellent introduction to religious history and issues in the United States is by Mark A. Noll, A History of Christianity in the United States and Canada (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1992). He also has excellent bibliographies on many aspects of the story. For a solid study of the political and intellectual foundations of American thought concerning freedom of religion and how that plays out in American life, see John T. Noonan, Jr., The Lustre of Our Country: The American Experience of Religious Freedom (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). The Internet sites for such highly respected pollsters as Gallup and the Pew can keep one current on numbers of members by faith, their views, and stated religious behaviors. The roles of information technologies and information are most frequently looked at today by experts on mass media. The literature is vast and the practice of most authors is to provide excellent bibliographic references to other sources. Peter G. Horsfield, Religious Television: The American Experience (New York: Longman, 1984), is a detailed survey of the modern religious television situation with data on the 1970s


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and 1980s. Stewart M. Hoover, Mass Media Religion: The Social Sources of the Electronic Church (Newbury Park, CA: SAGE Publications, 1988), plays a similar role although Hoover is less neutral because he is demonstrating the increasing role of electronic media. On the promotional or marketing aspects of television for religious purposes, see Razelle Frankl, Televangelism: The Marketing of Popular Religion (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1987). For an anthology of chapters written by a large number of media specialists, see the excellent collection gathered by Daniel A. Stout and Judith M. Buddenbaum (eds.), Religion and Mass Media: Audiences and Adaptations (Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, 1996). Religion and technology as an integrated topic is beginning to draw the attention of historians and other scholars. See, for instance, David F. Noble, The Religion of Technology: The Divinity of Man and the Spirit of Invention (New York: Alfred D. Knopf, 1997). On the relationship between artificial intelligence (AI), human intelligence, and religion, see Steven Levy, Artificial Life: The Quest for a New Creation (New York: Pantheon, 1992), and J. Doyne Farmer and Aletta d’A. Belin, Artificial Life: The Coming Evolution (Los Alamos: Los Alamos Publications L.A., undated). For a book on the same theme and more comprehensively about religion and the Internet, see Brenda E. Brasher, Give Me That Online Religion (San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 2001). Most of the major radio and TV religious personalities have published books that either explain their views or are autobiographies. Noll’s previously mentioned book lists many of these, along with references concerning literacy and the role of the Bible. The Internet sources found in the endnotes for Chapter 7 suggest additional materials, especially on current activities.

THE INTERNET For a medium that has been available to the public for barely a decade, the Internet already has a substantial literature. Looking at it from a public policy perspective, begin with Andrew L. Shapiro, The Control Revolution: How the Internet Is

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Putting Individuals in Charge and Changing the World (New York: Public Affairs, 1999), because he has the best short introduction to the subject. A classic now on the subject of telecommunications is Anne W. Branscomb, Who Owns Information? From Privacy to Public Access (New York: Basic Books, 1994), but don’t overlook her earlier book related to the subject, Toward a Law of Global Communications Networks (New York: Longman, 1986). For a useful review of legal issues related to the Internet, there is Jessica Litman, Digital Copyright (Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 2001). General histories begin to put the role of government, society, and users into useful context. A slim, well-done book is by Janet Abbate, Inventing the Internet (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999). For a broader history, reaching back into the 19th century to the telegraph and everything in between, see John Bray, The Communications Miracle: The Telecommunication Pioneers from Morse to the Information Superhighway (New York: Plenum Press, 1998). For a history of the original development of the Internet by the U.S. Government, see Arthur L. Norberg and Judy E. O’Neill, Transforming Computer Technology: Information Processing for the Pentagon, 1962–1986 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996). For a detailed account of some of the original developers of net-based products, services, and technologies, see Stephen Segaller, Nerds 2.0.1: A Brief History of the Internet (New York: TV Books, 1998). The culture of the Internet has taken on much of the same mystique as life on the frontier or in the Wild West. Hackers come first to mind. A good introduction to this culture is by Steven Levy, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution (Garden City, NY: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1984). However, for a more contemporary look at that culture, there is Karla Jennings, The Devouring Fungus: Tales from the Computer Age (New York: W.W. Norton, 1990) and Eric Raymond (ed.), The New Hacker’s Dictionary (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991). For an account of life in cyberspace written almost as if by a pioneer in the Old West, see Howard Rheingold, The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley Publishing Co., 1993).


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Socio-cultural effects of the Internet are now starting to be examined in an organized manner. Social issues are discussed in considerable detail in an anthology of writings by various individuals, Lynn Hershman Leeson (ed.), Clicking In: Hot Links to a Digital Culture (Seattle: Bass Press, 1996). The most comprehensive of these kinds of anthologies at the moment is by David Bell and Barbara M. Kennedy (eds.), The Cybercultures Reader (London and New York: Routledge, 2000). Two books on the effects of the Internet on business practices stand out among the hundreds that now exist on the subject. The first is by Carl Shapiro and Hal R. Varian, Information Rules: A Strategic Guide to the Network Economy (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1999), which became a bestseller in the business community in the first couple of weeks after it appeared. The second one, also highly praised in the business community, is by Philip Evans and Thomas S. Wurster, Blown to Bits: How the New Economics of Information Transforms Strategy (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2000). Cortada’s, 21st Century Business also comments extensively on management’s responsibilities in the world of the Internet. Visions of the future regarding the Internet are numerous. However, two are taken very seriously. First there is Michael Dertouzos, What Will Be: How the New World of Information Will Change Our Lives (New York: HarperEdge, 1997), and second, Bill Gates, The Road Ahead (New York: Penguin, 1996). Both understand the technology involved, each has had to deal with it within the context of American society. It seems that every CEO of an Internet company now has a book out. Most are wild claims about the future; however, a short, practical explanation is available from a CEO of Lotus Corporation, Jeff Papows, Enterprise.com: Market Leadership in the Information Age (Reading, MA: Perseus Books, 1998). But look also at Paul Levinson, The Soft Edge: A Natural History and Future of the Information Revolution (London: Routledge, 1997) which places the Internet into the wider context of other communications technologies, such as the telegraph and telephone. Increasingly, a variety of elec-

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tronic communications media are being viewed by historians as part of a much larger mosaic of technological transformations. For an excellent example of this kind of history, see Peter J. Hugill, Global Communications Since 1844: Geopolitics and Technology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), which, while it does not cover the Internet, is the clear winner for a background history up to the point of modern telecommunications.

PUBLIC POLICY AND INFORMATION Government policies toward information and information technology have long been the subject of public discussion, just as the Founding Fathers would have wanted. Of all the major topics discussed in our book, this is the one area where the amount of material on the Internet is the greatest, and the best organized. Every major and minor U.S. government agency, and most state governmental departments, have sites on the Internet rich in information, well organized, and crossindexed to each other. Since government agencies do not copyright material—it is kept in the public domain—there is less incentive to hold back reports, for example, than would occur in a private organization that would rather sell you a copy of their document. As the endnotes for Chapters 7 and 8 demonstrate, all the annual reports, key studies, press releases, and so forth for every major agency are available on the Internet, seconds away from your terminal. For my money, it is the first place to search to understand an agency or some public policy. Then, turn to printed sources such as newspaper articles (many now available online from their publishers), and finally to books. Having said that, however, there are a few books that summarize important issues related to the role of government agencies in the information arena. For a general history of telecommunications, with comments on governmental regulations, see Stone, How America Got On-Line. Two books by Kenneth Flamm tell the story of the U.S. Government’s investment in computers, Targeting the Computer: Government Support and International Competition (Washington, D.C.:


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Brookings Institution, 1987) and Creating the Computer: Government, Industry and High Technology (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1988). The effects of the Cold War on government strategies are discussed by Edwards, The Closed World. Regarding regulatory activities, on the Telecom Act see Peter W. Huber, Michael K. Kellogg, and John Thorne, The Telecommunications Act of 1996 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1996). On the FCC, Robert Britt Horwitz looked at the whole issue of deregulation of telecommunications in The Irony of Regulatory Reform: The Deregulation of American Telecommunications (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989). A lawyer looks at the whole issue of AT&T’s breakup in Alan Stone’s Wrong Number: The Breakup of AT&T (New York: Basic Books, 1989). For a general history of the FCC, see Gerald V. Flannery (ed.), Commissioners of the FCC, 1927–1994 (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1995), and James L. Baughman, Television’s Guardian: The FCC and the Politics of Programming, 1958–1967 (Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 1985). See also John R. Bittner, Law and Regulation of Electronic Media, 2d ed. (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1994). More specifically about the Internet, see Mike Godwin, Cyber Rights: Defending Free Speech in the Digital Age (New York: Times Books, 1998). Access issues are important for the Internet as they are with other electronic media. For that topic, see Brian Kahin and James Keller (eds.), Public Access to the Internet (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995). The issue of the role of government in stimulating the information economy and development of information technology has, as a whole, a highly polemical literature because of the various agendas of interested parties. However, a good start on the general economics involved is a collection of essays edited by Robert W. McChesney, Ellen Meiksins Wood, and John Bellamy Foster (eds.), Capitalism and the Information Age: The Political Economy of the Global Communication Revolution (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1998). An excellent collection of papers, reflecting a variety of very wellinformed perspectives, is Lewis M. Branscomb (ed.), Empowering Technology: Implementing a U.S. Strategy (Cambridge,

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MA: MIT Press, 1993), also available in paperback. He includes an excellent bibliography on public policy matters concerning technology in general. On the freedom of the press and government practices regarding this issue, an anthology of writings from the past two centuries offers much insight: Harold L. Nelson (ed.), Freedom of the Press from Hamilton to the Warren Court (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1967). On the role of libraries in blocking access to books, see Evelyn Geller, Forbidden Books in American Public Libraries, 1876–1919: A Study in Cultural Change (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1984). Book banning has a very large literature, but one of the most useful introductions to the subject is by William Noble, Bookbanning in America: Who Bans Books?—and Why (Middlebury, VT: Paul S. Ericksson Publisher, 1990). Covering the subject on a more global basis is Nicholas J. Karolides (ed.), Banned Books: Literature Suppressed on Political Grounds (New York: Facts on File, 1998). Because schools so often ban books, their role cannot be ignored; for that topic, see Lee Burress, Battle of the Books: Literary Censorship in the Public Schools, 1950–1985 (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1989). For electronic media, see Fred W. Friendly, The Good Guys, The Bad Guys and the First Amendment: Free Speech vs. Fairness in Broadcasting (New York: Pantheon Books, 1975). Democracy via the Internet is introduced by Graeme Browning in Electronic Democracy: Using the Internet to Affect American Politics (Wilton, CT: Pemberton Press Books/ Online, Inc., 1996). If you could read only one book on contemporary political issues related to information and its technologies, go to Lawrence K. Grossman, The Electronic Republic: Reshaping Democracy in the Information Age (New York: Penguin, 1995), which covers a wide range of issues. Shapiro does the same in his The Control Revolution. Privacy is a major issue that we have barely discussed in this book. But for a good survey of the issues, see Whitfield Diffie and Susan Landau, Privacy on the Line: The Politics of Wiretapping and Encryption (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998). David Flaherry has also written an important book on the subject, Protecting Privacy in Surveillance Societies


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(Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1989). For a very detailed discussion of the topic, set within the context of today’s digital information world, see Winn Schwartau, Information Warfare: Cyberterrorism, Protecting Your Personal Security in the Electronic Age (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1996, 2d edition). If you could read only one book on privacy issues, then go to David F. Linowes, Privacy in America: Is Your Private Life in the Public Eye? (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989). Even though it predates the Internet, all the issues are the same, and this book provides historical and political context.

FUTURE OF INFORMATION IN AMERICA Since technological innovations are currently having the greatest influence on the future of information in America, begin by understanding where technology is headed. One of the best and most sober discussions about the future of technology can be found in a collection of papers written by experts in the subject, and edited by Peter J. Denning and Robert M. Metcalfe (eds.), Beyond Calculation: The Next Fifty Years of Computing (New York: Copernicus/Springer-Verlag, 1997). A highly respected commentator on information technology, Donald A. Norman, writes thoughtfully about the future of information appliances in a very readable book, The Invisible Computer: Why Good Products Can Fail, The Personal Computer Is So Complex, and Information Appliances Are the Solution (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998). A third volume that has received wide attention, not an easy read but well informed, is by Thomas L. Landauer, The Trouble with Computers: Usefulness, Usability, and Productivity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995). Finally, on evolving technology into new applications within the context of how corporations are transforming, see Cortada and Hargraves, Into the Networked Age. The implications of information technology for the future of American society is getting a great deal of attention. To begin appreciating the effects, understanding the way digitally based information is transforming use of data and machinery is

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essential. A very approachable book on the implications of the digital, written by an MIT technologist, is an excellent introduction: Nicholas Negroponte, Being Digital (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995). We turn to another MIT professor for a broader discussion about the effects of technological change on society in general, Michael Dertouzos, What Will Be: How the New World of Information Will Change Our Lives (New York: HarperEdge, 1997). Mortimer B. Zuckerman, the chairman and editor-in-chief of U.S. News and World Report, wrote a charming article about the future of America, a nation driven in large part by information, “A Second American Century,” Foreign Affairs 77, no. 3 (May/June 1999): 18–31. Because television and the Internet are now such important aspects of our lives, understanding their interrelationship is crucial to any appreciation of what may soon come down the road. For that task, turn to Bruce M. Owen, The Internet Challenge to Television (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999).

INDEX

Alien, 86 Allen, Robert, 323 Almost Fourteen, banned, 305 Altair, 65 AMACOM, 146 Amazon.com, 153 birth of, 103 case of, 10–11 America Online (AOL), 11, 319 religion and, 282, 283 American Bible Society, 266 number of Bibles published by, 257 American Camping Association, 211–212 American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), during World War II, 310 American Library Association, policy on censorship, 304 American Magazine, 159 American Medical Association (AMA), 348 American National Preacher, 257 American Religion Data Archive (ARDA), content of, 279–280 American Religious Experience Project, 279

A ABC, 174, 228, 231, 264, 273 ABC News, 125 Abelard, Peter, 425 Academic Information, described, 278 Accounting, changes in (1890–1920), 39 Adams, John, quoted, 17 Adding machine, patented, 15 role of, 35–38 Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET), origins of, 74, 99–100 use of, 101 Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The, 306 Advertising, on Internet, 176–177 African Americans, attracted to Bible, 266 colleges for, 13 19th century use of oral traditions, 8 religious fervor of, 254–255 right to vote, 19 Age of Paper, 1–6 Air and Space Museum, popularity of, 210 Air mail, start of, 300 451

452

INDEX

American Revolution, attendance at church during, 261 American Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, founded, 18 American Standard Bible, 265 American Sunday School Union, role, 258 American Track Society, amount published, 257 American Weekly Mercury, founded (1719), 155 America’s Most Wanted, 232 Ameritech, creation of, 322 Animation, role of computers in, 85–87 Anstrom, Decker, 319 Antiques Roadshow, 237 Antitrust Division, role, 323, 328 AP, 175 Apple Company, Newton PDA, 122 software, 71 Apple II, 65 Aquinas, Thomas, 425 Arithmometer Company, founded, 36 Armstrong, Ben, “electric church,” 268 Armstrong, Michael, 145, 323, 324 Aron, Cindy S., quoted on vacationing, 213 Aronson, Sidney H., on telephone usage, 43 Artificial Intelligence (AI), 55 religion and, 424–425 Ashcroft, John, e-mail regarding confirmation, 348 Asia, information trends in, 392 Assemblies of God, number of, 260 AT&T, 112, 181, 315, 322–324 acquiring cable companies, 144–145 early role in TV, 48–49 expanded availability of telephones, 43–44 Atari, 82 Australia, unmetered Internet in, 111 Author Meets the Critiques, 50 Automatic Teller Machines (ATMs), origins of, 81

Automobiles, compared to Internet, 105–106 Internet sales, 177–178

B Bacon, Francis, quoted, 370 Banking industry, effect of computers on, 169 Baptist Press (SBC), 277 Baptists, establish colleges, 258 number of, 260 Barber, Red, broadcaster, 201 Bardeen, John, co-invented transistor, 66 Barnes & Noble, Amazon threatens, 11 Barnessandnoble.com, 153 Basbanes, Nicholas A. studied book collectors, 205–206 Baseball, age of, 198 Baseball Encyclopedia, 195 role of information in, 193–197 Baseball, game on computer, 82 BASIC, 70 Basketball, information in, 198 Battle of the Wilderness, 262 BBC, 394 Bell, Alexander Graham, invents telephone, 42–44 Bell, Gordon, on future, 383 Bell Labs, 31 early computer research at, 52 early role in TV, 48–49 invented transistor, 66–67 Bell System, 16, 145 Bellamy, Edward, quoted, 413 Beniger, James R., views of, 13, 22 Bentley, William, early book collector, 204–205 Bible, on Internet, 278–281 percent reading, 261 role of, 261–268 preferred source on religion, 238 significance of, 249–250, 252, 257–258 Bible Browser Basic Home Page, 278

453

INDEX

Biblical Archaeologist, 280 Biblioeconomics, described, 263–264 Bibliography, history of information, 431–450 Bigelow, Jacob, popularized technology, 412–413 Bill of Rights, as information policy, 295 Billboard Magazine, 175 Billings, John Shaw, quoted on census problems, 39 Black, Hugo La Fayette, quoted on First Amendment, 294, 295 Bloom, Alan, views of, 204 Bookmarking, role in Internet, 388 Bookmobiles, origins of, 301 BookNotes, 203 Books, banning history, 302–307 collecting history, 204–206 publishing, 150–154 popularity of religious, 259–260 role in America, 202–206 transformation of, 388 why popular, 150–151 Boorstin, Daniel J., quoted, 396 quoted on baseball, 195 quoted on higher education, 3 Borders, Amazon threatens, 11 Boston, book banning, 303, 305–306 publishing role, 255–256 Boston Booksellers Committee, banned books, 305 Boston Globe, 175 Bowmar Brain, early calculator, 117 Boy Scouts, camps, 211 Boys, like to build high-tech devices, 90 Brandford, Andrew, published American Magazine, 159 Branscomb, Lewis M., quoted, 328 Brattain, Walter, co-invented transistor, 66 British Post Office, role with telephones, 45 Brown, Richard D., quoted on informed citizens and education, 19 Browsers, for children, 319–320 Burkett, Larry, broadcasts of, 263–264 Burns, Ken, contributions of, 239

Burroughs, William S., patents adding machine, 15, 36 Burroughs Adding Machine Company, 10, 35–37, 40, 53, 64, 74, 76 Burton, John Hill, quoted on book collecting, 205 Bush, George H.W., watched CNN during war with Iraq, 394 Bush, George W., 365 on role of churches, 275 Bushnell, Nolan, created Pong, 83 Business-to-Business (B2B), benefits of, 163–165 Business Week, 159 Bwana Devil, 86

C C+, 70 C-SPAN, 153, 324, 360 books and, 203 role of, 231 Cable Communications Policy Act (1984), passed, 317 Cable TV, 321 firms merging, 322 Calculating machines, role of, 35–38 California Institute of Technology, 64 Cameras, digital, 88 Campbell, John, first newspaper publisher (1704), 155 Campfire Girls, camps, 211 Camps, role of, 211–212 Canada, unmetered Internet access, 111 Canals, moved information, 300 Candyland, 226 Carbon paper, 35 Carnegie, Andrew, strategy for supporting libraries, 362 Cash registers, 53 Castells, Manuel, perspectives on Information Age, 92 Castro, Fidel, 127 Cathode Ray Tube (CRT), importance of, 47

454

INDEX

Catholic Bible Association of America, on Internet, 279 Catholic Hour, described, 271–272 CBS, 228, 231, 264, 273 early role in TV, 49, 50 CD, baseball cards on, 201–202 copying music from, 296 CD-ROM, books in, 388 Cell phones, arrival in America, 119–120 in Europe, 126, 391 Censorship, during Civil War, 21 during war time, 309–310 early history of, 304 pre-Civil War South, 309 Center for Media and Public Affairs, studied religious press coverage, 264 Center for the Study of American Religion, 279 Ceruzzi, Paul, on calculator technology, 117 Chandler, Jr., Alfred D., historian of corporations, 22 on software, 70 views on information, 10 Change, nature of, 370–371 Chapter, molecule of books, 388 Chautauqua Movement, history of, 208–209 Chewning, Zed, religious practices of, 261–263, 267 Chewning, Zip, military career, 262 Chicago’s World’s Fair, 214 Children, browsers for, 319–320 camps for, 211–212 comfortable with calculators, 37, 117 effect of computers on, 69 Internet use by, 84–85, 129 sale of books for, 204 Chips, 23 influence on IT, 222–227, 382–384 origins of, 67–70 physical features of, 62–63 Christian Advocate and Journal and Zion’s Herald, The, 257

Christian Financial Concepts, biblioeconomics and, 263–264 Christian Pirate Radio, 280 Christian Right, political role, 274–275 Christian Science, on Internet, 279 Christian Webmaster, quoted, 277–278 Christianity, AI and, 425 dominant American religion, 260 Churches, attendance patterns, 260–261 Internet uses by, 283–285 Church of the Lutheran Brethren of America, on Internet, 279 Cisco, 69, 122, 386 Citicorp, 81 Citizens, consequences and possibilities of information for, 425–428 proposed role of, 358–367 Civil War, censorship during, 309 role of Bible, 265 role of information in, 20–22, 155 Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), improve historic parks, 209 Clancy, Tom, 152, 203 Clay, Henry, 309 Cliff Notes, 402 Clinton, Bill, 311, 354 Internet and, 6, 329–332 scandals reported by press, 308 supported technology R&D, 327–329, 381 Club Med Japan, 222 CNN, 47, 125, 174, 176, 199, 228, 230–232, 360, 394 C/NET, 174 Headline News, 201 Cobb, Jennifer, quoted on cyber-religion, 282 COBOL, 70 Cold War, effect on computer developments, 73–76 information technology and, 327, 405 College Bowl, 82 Colleges, religious affiliations of, 258 Collier’s, 160

455

INDEX

Commodore, 65 Common Sense, significance of, 2 Communications, future of, 385 proposed public policy on open, 360–362 Communications Act (1934), supports religious broadcasting, 270 Companies, put information on Internet, 176–177 Competition, future of in America, 182–183 Computer-Aided Design/ComputerAided Manufacturing (CAD/CAM), origins of, 375 Computer industry, birth of, 64–65 Computers, applications of, 61–64, 76–81 baseball and, 196 bibliography on, 435–436 consequences of, 87–92 deployment data, 69–70, 92–93 early development supported by government, 325–326 entertainment uses of, 82–87 helped lower inflation, 163 how Americans learned about, 52, 53–54 military uses, 73–76 patented, 15 role in Cold War, 327 significance for America, 61–63 technical workers and, 162–170 under development 52, 63–70 why America adopted, 62–63 Comstock, Anthony, banned books, 305 Confederate imprints, 20 Congress, e-mail to, 348 Consumer electronics, information appliances, 114–124 Consumers, Internet and, 163–166 Continuing education, role of, 217–222 Control Revolution, The, thesis of, 13 Cook books, value of, 236 Cooper, Thomas, early defender of press, 308

Coppelli, Peter, studied workers, 171 Corporations, led in use of computers, 76–81 role in education, 219–220 value of information to, 10 Coughlin, Father Charles, role, 270 Courant, 155 Covey, Stephen, 18 Institute, 214 Cozens, Frederick W., quoted, 200 Crown Ministries, bibioeconomics and, 263–264 C-T-R, founded (1911), 39–40 Cuba, embargo of music failed, 126–127

D Dale Carnegie, self-improvement courses, 218 Daley, Rosie, 20 Daley, William M., quoted about Internet, 55 Declaration of Independence, 299 DeLacey, James, 306 Dell Computers, 386 Democracy, bibliography on Internet and, 448 contemporary, 340–367 future of, 345–350 Democratic Party, 275 Dertouzos, Michael, quoted, 330 reactions to his book, 415 Desert Storm, role of CNN, 231 use of computers in, 75 Detroit News, 196 Dewan, Sanjeev, studied American economic productivity, 178–179 Dialog Information Services, on Internet, 175 Digital devices, portable, 114–124 Digital divide, 12–13 Digital technologies, government investments in, 324–329 Digital watches, role in America, 118–119 Direct democracy, described, 346 Disciples of Christ, number of, 260

456

INDEX

Discovery Channel, 176, 228, 420, 421 Disney Institute, 214 Disney World, self-improvement activities at, 214 Distance learning, popularity of, 216–217 Douglass, Frederick, edited Douglass’ Monthly, 159 Douay-Reims Bible, popularity of, 265 Dotmusic, 175 Downsizing, effect of computers on, 167 Dun & Brandstreet, 176 Durant, Will and Ariel, quoted, 136 Dwyer, John C., quoted, 313

E eBay, 102 e-business, role in work, 141 e-commerce, role in economy, 141 trends, 162–167 e-democracy, future of, 345–350 e-mail, effect on politics, 348–349 origins of, 79–80 volume of, 213 E. Remington and Sons, 32 e-stamps, introduced, 332 e-voting, see Voting East Asians, attitudes toward learning, 221–222 Eckert, John Presper, patents computer, 16, 66 Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation, 64 Ecole Initiative, 278 Economics, affordability of Internet, 107–108 Economy, bibliography on information issues, 437–438 early effects on use of information, 11–19 features of in America, 139–145 future of, 170–174, 379–382 government role in, 296–297 helped by computers, 163–164 payback from technologies, 385–388 Ed Sullivan Show, The, 228

Edison, Thomas A., 31, 55 quoted, 28 role in information technologies, 28–29 Edison Electric Light Company, founded, 31 Education, Americans value, 7 amount of formal, 219–220 as self-improvement, 216–222 future of, 380–381 public policy and, 364 role of public, 18 EDVAC, 64, 66 Edwards, Paul N., quoted on Cold War computing, 76, 327 Elections, implications of 2000 national, 340–344 Electronic Freedom of Information Act Amendments (1996), passed, 313 Electronic information, birth of tools, 2–3 government policies toward, 314–318 Electronic magazines, origins of, 160 Electronic signatures, now legal, 351 Ellsberg, Daniel, 302 English, language a competitive advantage, 182–183 ENIAC, 61, 64, 66, 73–74 Entertainment, as incentive to learn, 215–216 bibliography, 440–442 books as form of, 202–206 news as, 229–232 PCs and Internet, 222–227 role of TV, 47–51 V-chip issue and, 318–320 Epcot, 214 Episcopalians, number of, 260 Espionage Act (1917), described, 309 ERA, founded, 64 ESPN Network, baseball data, 194–195 other sports, 199 Eternal World Television Network News, 277 Europe, adopted telegraph, 14, 44 book production in, 153

457

INDEX

Internet pricing in, 111–112 number of newspapers published in, 158 privacy issue in, 130 trends in information use, 390–391 Evangelists, role of, 258 Evening Post, first daily newspaper, 155 Everson, George, 49 Expedia.com, 165

F Fairchild, 67, 118 Falwell, Jerry, 274 Farewell Address, 18 Farmers, use of information tools by, 136–137 Farnsworth, Philo, role in developing TV technology, 49 Faulkner, William, books banned, 306 Federal Communications Commission (FCC), 297, 364 Internet and, 329–332 role of, 19, 270, 315–318 Federal Express, 147, 212 Federal Radio Act (1927), passed, 317 Federalist Papers, 17, 299 Felt & Tarrant, 36 taught use of adding machines, 34 Fiction, role of, 203–204 Finland, Internet usage in, 112 First Amendment, 360 book banning and, 303–304 quoted, 17, 295 Flamm, Kenneth, quoted, 325 Flight, computers and, 74–75 Florida State University, 201 Football, age of, 198 information in, 197–198 Superbowl as information event, 190–191 Ford Motor Company, 31, 166 Forecasting, problems with, 369–371 Forster, E.M., 106 Fort Sumpter, 21 FORTRAN, 70 Fortune, reports on use of computers, 87–88

48 Hours, 232 Founding Fathers, on information, 296 Four Freedoms Speech, 295 Fox News, 232 France, railroads in, 21, 22 telegraph policy of, 44 telephone practices compared to American, 45–46 Frankfurter, Felix, views of, 308 Franklin, Benjamin, edited Pennsylvania Gazette, 155 Franklin, James, founded Courant (1721), 155 Free Speech Era, 146 Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), passed, 312–314 Freelance, software tool, 145 Freeland, 166 Fritts, Eddie, 319 Fuller, Charles, radio preacher, 270 Fundamentalists, used radio to deliver messages, 269–270 Future, assumptions regarding, 378–382 Future Shock, on books, 151

G Gallup, Jr., George, quoted on American religious behavior, 251 GameBoy, 69, 83, 84 Games, computers and, 69, 82–85 Internet-based, 175, 222–227 TV shows, 82 Gates, Bill, 66, 324 Internet and schools, 3 Gelber, Steven M., on hobbies, 240–241 General Electric (GE), 31, 64, 77 early role with TV, 48, 49 General Magazine, and Historical Chronicle, 159 General Motors, worth less than Microsoft, 179 General Telephone Company, 45 Germany, railroads in, 21, 22 Gerstner, Louis V., 324 GI Bill, what it did, 52, 220–221 Gibson, William, 106

458

INDEX

Gideon Bible, 249 Gifts, Bible as, 267–268 Girl Scouts, camps, 211 Gizmo, concept of, 90 Globalization, effects on U.S. uses of information, 124–127, 390–395 information’s role, 181 God on the Internet, 282 Goldberger, Ludwig Max, quoted, 371 Good News Bible, 265 Gore, Al, 313 Gospel Communications Network, visitors to Internet site, 282 Government, losing control over information flows, 125–126 policy toward information, 294–335 Government Printing Office (GPO), 139 GPS (Geo-position sensing), government R&D and, 325 computer applications, 75 on vacations, 215 Graham, Billy, 269, 271 Crusade described, 270 on TV, 271, 272 role of, 270 Gray, James N., quoted on future, 383 Gray, John, 203 Great Britain, railroads in, 21, 22 telephone practices compare to U.S., 44–45 Grisham, John, 203 Grossman, Lawrence K., 341 on future role of citizens, 359–361 quoted, 340 GTE, airplane phone from, 123 Gulf War, computers and, 182 Gutjahr, Paul C., quoted, 28

H HAL, 86 Handed-down values, 370–371 in U.S. society, 412–416 political role of, 355–357 Handheld calculators, role in America, 116–118 Hangman, played on computers, 82

Harvard University, library, 301 HBO, 176 Headrick, Daniel, quoted on American use of data, 14 Hemingway, Ernest, books banned, 306 Herald, 200 Hewlett-Packard, calculators from 116, 117, 118 High definition television (HDTV), 321–322 Higher education, role in America, 3–4 number of students, 220–221 History, bibliography on information, 432–434 History Channel, 153, 228, 229, 420 History’s Mysteries, 229 Hitler, Adolph, 355 Hobbies, role of information, 236–237, 240–241 Hollerith, Herman, patents punched card equipment, 15–16, 38–42 Honeywell, 64 HotWired, 160, 174 Hour of Power, 273 Howdy Doody, 47 HP-65, programmable calculator, 117 Humbard, Rex, 269 Hustler, 305 Hussein, Saddam, watched CNN, 394 Huxley, Aldous, 106

I IBM, 31, 36, 60–61, 64, 68, 69, 74, 76, 131, 145, 415 considered selling baseball statistics, 196 introduced electric typewriter, 53 origins of, 33–34, 39–42 PC ad campaign, 61, 65 PC software, 71 S/360 at Randolph-Macon College, 59–60 significance of S/360 for, 59–60, 65, 78 small products from, 114–115 studied nature of work, 171–172

INDEX

unbundled software, 71 Imagine Games Network, games, 175 IMAX, 86 Immigrants, value of literacy to, 4–5 Incentives, economic for using information, 15–16 India, railroads in, 22 Indianapolis News, prosecuted, 308 Information, bibliography on, 431–450 bibliography on future of, 449–450 definition, 6–8 effect on productivity, 178–183 electronic and government policies toward, 314–318, 380–381 expanded access to, 311–314 future of, 369–406 global uses, 390–395 government policies in Age of Paper, 299–302 how Americans viewed (1940s), 51–54 in religious practices, 249–289 leveraging, 412–429 patterns in U.S. society, 6–11, 395–406 quality of, 238–240 role as objects, 237–238 trends (1600s-1800s), 22–24 work growing in importance, 170–174 Information Age, birth and evolution of, 12–19 Information appliances, 382 described, 114–124 invention of early devices (1800s), 31–32 Information Concepts, Inc., collected baseball data, 195 Information Highway, 98 origins and nature of, 17–18 Information Technology (IT), defined, 9 government policies toward, 299–299 how affects future, 382–390 in 2000 national elections, 3342–343 information workers, 141–143, 145–150

459

infrastructure, 299–302, 324–329 patterns of deployment, 54–56 recommended actions, 358–367 regulatory trends, 320–324 R&D role in mid-19th century, 20–22 support for, 324–329 work and, 416–418 workers in, 162–170 Infoseek, 100 Infrastructures, origins of, 5–6 Inkeles, Alex, quoted, 355, 356 Institute for the Study of American Evangelicals, 279 Intel, 415 International Data Corporation (IDC), 392 Internet, 10–11, 24 access approved by public, 97–132, 357–358 applications of, 101–105, 177 as entertainment, 222–227 as source of information, 174–178 basketball data, 198 bibliography on, 439, 443–446 bookmarking on, 388 books on, 388 children and, 319–320 democracy and, 340–367 deployment, 100–102, 109–110, 163–167 effect on book publishing, 151–153 effect on information, 402 encouraged use of computers, 80, 131 freedom of expression and, 303 games on, 84 Gates invests for schools, 3 in Asia, 392 in support of personal freedom, 397–398, 399 Internet II coming, 381 magazines on, 160–161 music on, 296 newspapers on, 158 number of web sites, 113, 392 origins of, 74, 99–114 pricing effects on usage, 111–112

460

INDEX

Internet, (cont.) public policy regarding, 140–141, 329–332, 358–367 religious role, 249–250, 286–289, 422–424 significance of, 97–99 speed of deployment, 55 vacationing and, 214–215 Internet for Christians (IFC), 280 Internet Service Providers (ISPs), role, 112 Interstate Commerce Act (1887), passed, 317

J Japan, vacationing practices in, 222 Java, 170 Jefferson, Thomas, 299 Bentley and, 205 book collector, 204 built Monticello, 138 quoted, 310, 360 Jenkins, Charles, early TV R&D of, 48 Jeopardy, 82 Jesus Seminar Program, 279 Jian Dao Journal, 280 Jim Crow, 4 Johnson, Samuel, quoted, 431 Jones, Charles I., quoted, 387 Journal for Christian Theological Research, 280 Jurassic Park, 85, 86 JWNet, 279

K Kahin, Brian, quoted, 329 Kett, Joseph F., research on continuing education, 217–218, 219 Kendall, Amos, postal censorship role of, 309 Kennard, William E., quoted, 319 Kennedy, John F., 395 Kilby, Jack, co-invented computer chip, 67 Kiley, Michael T., quoted, 385 King, Martin Luther, 313 King, Stephen, 203

King James Bible, popularity of, 265 Knight-Ridder, 175 Knowledge management, role in U.S. economy, 145–150 work growing in importance, 170–174 Kolenda, Don, knowledge workers, 145–146, 148, 168, 179–180 Koran, 425 Korean War, press freedom during, 310 spurs military interest in computers, 74 Kraemer, Kenneth L., studied American productivity, 178–179 Kraft Television Theater, 50

L Ladies’ Home Journal, 160 Lady Chatterley’s Lover, banned, 306 Lamb, Brian, role at C-SPAN, 231 Lands End, online, 103 Laptops, 114–115 merged work and vacations, 213 Larry King Live, 216 Lawrence, D.H., book banned, 306 Leaves of Grass, banned in Boston, 305 information and, 190–241 Leisure, bibliography on, 440–442 Lester, Richard K., quoted on U.S. economy, 170–171, 379–380 Letterman, David, 400 Letters, during Civil War, 20 how written over time, 137 Lewinsky, Monica, 311 Lexis-Nexis, on Internet, 175 Libraries, part of information infrastructure, 300 public embracing Internet, 153 Library Bill of Rights, 304 Library of Congress, size of, 140 Life, 159–160 Life Is Worth Living, 272 Light bulb, invention of, 31

461

INDEX

Lily, A Ladies Journal Devoted to Temperance and Literature, 159 Lincoln, Abraham, cited Bible, 265 suppressed press, 309 use of telegraphy by, 21 Lippmann, Walter, quoted on voting, 353 Lists, role in U.S. society, 400 Literacy, extent (1950s), 53 future of, 379 in poor countries, 393 influence of Puritans on, 2, 256 public policy and, 364–365 rates and role in America, 1–5 Little League, 195 Living Bible, 265 Localism, in politics made possible by IT, 349–350 Looking Backward, 43 Lotus Notes, 145 Lotus 1–2-3, 47 Lozowick, Louis, quoted, 59 Lunar Lander, 83 Lutherans, number of, 260 Lycos, 100 religion and, 282, 283

M Macrae, Norman, quoted, 369 Madison, James, 299, 351 influence on public information policy, 294–295 Madison, Wisconsin, home of knowledge workers, 146 Magazines, role of, 154–162 subscription rates (1940s-50s), 52–53 Malone, John, 323 Mann, Horace, 18 Marx, Leo, on technological determinism, 374 Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), 64 built Whirlwind, 74 early computer research at, 52 Mauchly, John W., 66

patents computer, 16 McCain, John, Internet fund raising by, 358 McCarthy Era, effect on books, 302 McCaw, Craig, 323 McClure’s, 160 McDonald, E.F., quoted on TV, 49 McDonald’s, computing in, 69 McGraw-Hill, 146, 388 online, 180 McKinley, William, 156, 352, 354 influenced by press, 307 McKnight, Lee, on political reform, 360–361, 364 McLuhan, Marshall, quoted, 191 Media, influence of, 359–360 mixing of, 389 types affects information and use of, 8 Meet the Press, 50 Men, use of Internet by, 112–114 Mergers, among information companies, 321–323 Metcalf, Robert, ideas of, 106–107 Metcalf’s Law, defined, 106–107 Methodists, established colleges, 258–259 number of, 260 Michener, James, 152 Microprocessors, in American homes, see also Chips Microsoft, 11, 69, 112, 131, 386 antitrust suit, 296 early software at, 71 Windows, 41 Word, 145, 166 worth more than GM, 179 Military, early uses of computers by, 73–76 Military Telegraph Corps, organized, 21 Miniaturization, effect on computers, 62–63 Ministers, extensive users of radio and TV, 268–276 Minitel, 110 Modern Bride, 159 Mohammed, 425

462

INDEX

Money Magazine, 400 ranks Madison, WI, 146 Money Matters, 263–264 Monroe, James, 36 Monticello, 138 Mormons, number of, 260 Morse, Samuel, 2 Mortal Kombat, 84 Mosaic, 99–100 Mother Jones, 161 Motorola, 122 Movies, Turner acquires, 322 use of computers to make, 85–87 Ms., 159 MTV, 176 study on Internet, 233 Music, on Internet, 176, 226–227

N N64, video game, 224 NAACP, wanted to ban Twain’s books, 306 Napster, impact on music industry, 226–227 NASDAQ, technology stocks and, 386 National Association of Manufacturers, 102 National Football League (NFL), 197 National Law Review, 161 National markets, made possible by information, 10 National Park Service, reports number of visitors, 207, 209–210 National Rifle Association (NRA), 348 National Science Foundation (NSF), funded technology investments, 298, 326 managed Internet, 99 National Semiconductor, sold digital watches, 119 National Telephone Company, 45 NBC, 50, 228, 231, 264, 273 Catholic Hour broadcast by, 272 NBC Nightly News, The, 216 NCR, 36, 37, 40, 76 size (1940s-50s), 53, 64

Negroponte, Nicholas, views on digital future, 150 Neibuhr, Gustav, wrote on Rhem, 283 Netscape, 11, 100, 102, 319, 386 Neuman, W. Bussell, on political reforms, 360–361, 364 New England Watch and Ward Society, established, 305 New Thought Movement, on Internet, 279 New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, 305 New York Herald, 155, 196, 200 New York Journal, 155 New York Times, The, 175, 264 on Rhem incident (1996), 283 New York Tribune, The, 196 first national newspaper, 155 New York World, 155 prosecuted, 308 New Zealand, unmetered Internet, 111 News, growth of TV as source for, 228–232 News-Letter, founded (1704), 155 Newspapers, affordability of, 15 circulation of, 11, 52–53 effect on telegraph, 156 effect on TV, 235 expanded with U.S., 300 number bought and sold, 156–157 on Internet, 174–175 role of, 154–162, 307–311 Newsweek, 159, 160, 264 Newton, Apple PDA, 122 Nineteenth Amendment, a disaster, 354 significance of, 19 Nintendo, 82, 83–84, 224 NIPSCO, use of computers by, 91–92 Nissan, use of computers by, 181 Nixon, Richard, 314 denied Watergate, 311 reaction to Pentagon Papers, 302 Washington Post and, 307–308 Noblitt, James S., quoted, 217 Noll, Mark A., historian of religion, 265 quoted on Bible’s role, 265, 266 Northwestern University, 145 Notre Dame University, 201

463

INDEX

Novels, reflect social values, 152 Novo Mesto, 280 Noyce, Robert, co-invented computer chip, 67 Numbers, feature of U.S. information, 14–15, 400–401

O Office Appliance Industry, origins of, 32–47 Office workers, 20th century surge in number of, 41, 148–149 Offices, expansion in number of, 141 machines in (1940s-50s), 53 Official Baseball Register, 195–196 Old-Fashioned Revival Hour, The, 270 Online Gaming Review, 175 Operating systems, origins of, 70 Oral traditions, 8 Orange, VA, 351 Chewning in, 262 Orange Review, 262 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), on Internet pricing in Europe, 111–112 Orthodox Church of America, on Internet, 279 Osborne, 65 Out, 161 Outward Bound, described, 214 Owen, Bruce M., quoted on changing TV technology, 234–235 Oxford University Press, 146

P Packages, software tools, 70–71 Pac-Man, 83 Pager, functions of, 69 role in America, 119–121 Paine, Thomas, ideas of, 2, 17 Paley, William, early interest in TV, 49 Palmtops, described, 121–122 Patents, role of protection, 15–16 Pathfinder, 174 PBS, 176

PC Magazine, 161, 175 Peace Corps, 146 Pennsylvania Gazette, run by Franklin, 155 Pensions, effect on vacationing, 421 Pentagon Papers, 302, 306 Penthouse, 305 People, 161 Personal Computer (PC), business applications, 79–80 children’s exposure to, 222–227 deployment compared to TV’s, 49 early history of, 65–66 games on, 83–84 impact of TV on, 47, 228 extent of deployment, 69 software for, 71 Personal digital assistant (PDA), 69 role in America, 121 software in, 71 Pervasive computing, described, 114–124 Pew Internet and American Life Project, study by, 113 Pew Research Center, role, 229 Philco, early role with TV, 49 Philanthropy, favors education and libraries, 3 Phonograph, information and entertainment roles, 29 Pilgrims, values of, 1–2 Pilotless aircraft, coming, 381 Play, see Leisure Playboy, 305 online edition, 161 Players, consequences and possibilities of information, 419–421 Playstation, popularity of, 224 PL/1, 70 Point-of-sale terminals (POS), replaced cash registers, 81 Poker, computer-based, 84 Police Gazette, 305 Politics, effect of e-mail on, 348–349 impact of TV on, 347–348 religion’s contemporary influence on, 274–275 values and information, 16–19

464

INDEX

Polls, role of, 347 Pong, significance of, 83 Pony Express, 301 Population, future of, 379 Portable phone, made intelligent, 69 Porter, Michael E., quoted, 386 Post office, as information infrastructure, 5 origins and role of, 17–18, 300 postmasters’ early role, 154–155 U.S. Postal Service (USPS) and Internet, 331–332 Potter House Sanctuary, uses of Internet by, 285 Prayer wheels, on Internet, 281 Prentice Hall, 388 online, 180 Presbyterian News Service, 277 Presbyterians, number of, 260 Press, coverage of religious themes, 264 freedom of, 5 Freedom of Information Act and, 311–314 role, 307–311 Princess Diana, funeral on TV, 394 Princeton University, library of, 301 Printing technologies, affects supply of information, 301–302 first press in America (1539), 155 Privacy, bibliography on, 448–449 Internet and, 105–106, 329 issue described, 129–130 Privacy Act (1974), passed, 312–314 Programming languages, origins of, 70 Progressive Grocer, 161 Proposition 13, 352 Protestants, Bible fosters sects, 265 Public education, book banning in, 307 origins of, 256 Public libraries, 52 expansion of, 3, 218, 301 Public officials, consequences and possibilities of information, 425–428 Public policy, bibliography on, 446–449 regarding Internet, 294–335 Publications, on religion, 257–260

Publishing industry, America’s compared to Europe’s, 377 industry’s boundaries shifting, 180 19th century expansion of, 300 Punched card equipment, origins of, 38–42 patented, 15–16 Purchasing, over Internet, 104–105 Puritans, religious beliefs, 255–256 Pursell, Carroll, on criticism of technology, 131–132

Q Quaker Corner, The, on Internet, 279 Quicken InsureMarket, 176

R Radio, baseball on, 196 cut into book sales, 152–153 deployment rate (1940s-50s), 52–53 Money Matters program, 263–164 public policy toward, 314–318 religion on, 268–276 role in America, 46–47 sports on, 201–202 Railroads, influence of information on, 9–10, 16 telegraph used by, 21, 22 Rainie, Lee, quoted, 114 Randolph-Macon College, acquired IBM S/360, 59–60 founding and role of, 258–259 RCA, 31 with TV, 48–50 Reading, modern practice of, 203–204 Reagan, Ronald, Contra issue and, 311 Star Wars Initiative, 74 Readers Digest, 175, 402 RealPlayer, 176 Redfield, James, 203 Referendums, on rise, 346–347 Regulatory trends, information and media, 320–324 Religion, bibliography on, 442–443 camps for, 211

465

INDEX

consequences and possibilities of information, 421–425 in print, 154 information and, 249–289 Internet’s role, 276–286 origin of practices, 255–261 sale of books on, 204 uses of IT by churches, 421–425 Religion News Service (RNS), 277 Remington Arms Company, 10 Remington-Rand, 33, 36, 37, 53, 64 Remington No. 1 typewriter, 32 Reporters, attitude toward freedom of expression, 310 Representative democracy, described, 345–346 Republican Party, constituencies of, 353 influence of Christian Right on, 274 Research and development (R&D), future of, 381 role of, 386–387 Reuters, 176 Rheingold, Howard, homesteaded on Internet, 97, 101 Rhem, Richard A., incident of, 283 Roads, moved information, 300 Roberts, Oral, 269, 271 on TV, 273 Robertson, Pat, hosts 700 Club, 273–274 Robotic soldiers, 76 Roman Catholics, number of, 260 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 354 on freedom of speech and expression, 295 Roosevelt, Theodore, prosecuted newspapers, 308 Royal, 36 Russell, Steve, invents first video game, 82 Russia, railroads in, 22

S SABRE, 165 SAGE, developed, 74 Samuelson, Paul A., quoted, 370

Sarnoff, Abraham, role in promoting TV, 49, 50 Satellites, expanding services, 235 Saturday Evening Post, 160 Schenck v. U.S. ruling, 311 Scholes, Christopher Latham, 32 patents typewriter, 15 Schools, attendance rates (1950s), 53 Gates invests in Internet, 3 Internet deployment in, 100–101 role in America, 3 Schuller, Robert, on TV, 273, 274 Scott, Ridley, 86 Scrabble, 226 Sears, 10 Secretary, origins of modern job, 32 Sega, 82, 83 Self-help, organizations and origins of, 18, 207, 208–209, 214, 216–222 Semiconductor industry, workers in, 63 Servicemen’s Readjustment Act, see G.I. Bill 700 Club, described, 273–274, 280 Shapiro, Carl, views on government information policy, 361–363 Shapiro, Robert J., quoted, 97 quoted on innovations, 110 views about Internet, 98 Sharp, 122 Sheen, Bishop Fulton J., role of, 271–272 Shockley, William B., co-invented transistor, 66 60 Minutes, 232, 313 Slaves, literacy of, 4 Smith, Merritt Roe, on technological determinism, 374 Smith, Ray, 323 Smith-Corona, 33 Smithsonian Institute, 206 popularity and role of, 210–211 Soccer, information’s influence on, 198–199 Society, assumptions regarding future of, 378–382 bibliography on, 440

466

INDEX

Society, assumptions regarding future of, (cont.) Dertouzos on future of, 330 importance of religion to, 250–252 information habits and beliefs, 395–400 optimistic nature of U.S., 370–373 religious makeup of, 260 taste for technology, 373–378 Software, game products, 225–226 industry’s birth, 71 invention of, 70–72 Solomon, Richard Jay, on political reforms, 360–361, 364 SonicNet, 175 Sony, 224 distributed music online, 103 Southern Baptist Convention, role, 258 Southwest Airlines, 165 Soviets, early computer developments by, 73 Spacewar, 82 Spanish-American War, 352 Speed, feature of American information, 403–404 Spirit of the Times, history of, 200 Sports, cards, 201–202 information on, 193–202, 237 phenomenon of sports page, 200–201 Sports Illustrated, 199 Spottsylvania Court House, 262 Spring, Gardner, quoted, 422 Standard of living, effect on information acquisition, 12–13 Standards, significance in computing, 81 Star Trek, 87 Star Wars, 86 Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace, 85, 86 Star Wars Initiative, concept of, 74 Statistics, in sports, 193–202 Steele, Danielle, 203 Stephenson, Neil, 106 Stone, Alan, quoted, 320 Stored program, concept described, 64 Students, statistics on, 219–220

Stumpf, Florence Scovil, quoted, 200 Sun, 200 Sun Microsystems, 386 Super Mario, 83–84 Superbowl game, information-laden event, 190–191, 193 Supreme Court, freedom of speech case (1919), 311 Swaggart, Jimmy, 269, 274 Synoptic-L web site, contents of, 279

T T2, 86 Tabulating Machine Company, founded (1896), 39 products, 40–42 Tandy, 122 Tapscott, Don, quoted on home use of computers, 84–85, 223 Taxes, Internet issue, 126 TCI, role of, 322 TCP/IP, 170 Technology, changing TV, 227–236 determinism and, 373–378 government supported, 296 influence on government officials, 356–357 need for R&D, 365–366 origins of word, 412–413 problem of forecasting deployment, 55–56 trends in, 369–406 use conditions Americans, 107–109 value to military, 73 Telecommunications, public policy practices, 314–318 Telecommunications Act (1996), 361 influence on regulatory practices, 320–321 passed, 316–317 Telegraph, effect on newspapers, 156 in Civil War, 20–21, 2 in post Civil War, 22 used by railroads, 9–10 Telephone, bibliography on, 434–435 companies merging, 322

467

INDEX

costs effects on Internet usage, 111–112 deployment in Europe, 391 extent of deployment in U.S., 16, 42–46 role on vacations, 212 Teletext, 110 Television, 215–216, 321–322 arrival of, 47–51 books and, 203 cut into book sales, 152–153 deployment in America, 52–53 deployment in Europe, 391 effect on soccer, 198–199 globalization of, 394 impact on politics, 347–348 in transition, 227–236 on the Net, 176 public policy toward, 314–318 role in America, 192 role in religion, 268, 272–276 sports on, 201–202 TV Guide, 159, 175 V-chip issue, 318–320 Terminator 2: Judgment Day, 86, 87 Texas Instruments (TI), 67, 118 calculators, 37, 116 digital watches from, 119 Thoreau, Henry David, quoted, 238 Tickle, Phyllis A., views of, 282 Time, 159, 160, 161 Time Warner, acquired Turner Broadcasting, 322 Timex, 119 Titanic, 86 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 356 on American religion, 253 on American work habits, 179–180 quoted, 1, 371 Tocqueville, Angelique de, on American religion, 249, 253–254 Toffler, Alvin, on books, 151 quoted, 412 Tonight Show, The 400 Tourism, role of information, 206–216 Transcript, 200 Transformation, who makes political, 354–355

Transistor, 23 origins of, 66–67 Transportation, to move information, 13–14 Travelocity.com, 165, 403 Trivial Pursuit, information based, 82 TRS-80, 65 Truth or Consequences, 82 Tulskie, Jr., William B., quoted, 384 Turner, Ted, old movies and, 322 quoted, 322–323 Turner Broadcasting, 322 content provider, 144 Twain, Mark, NAACP and, 306 quoted on work, 190 Twenty-Fifth Amendment, described, 354 20/20, 232 2001: A Space Odyssey, 86 Typewriter, patented, 15 role of, 32–35

U Underwood, 33, 36, 37 United Church, number of members, 260 United States (U.S.), conditioned to use Internet, 108–109 economic features of, 139–145 handed down values, 412–416 Internet usage, 112–114 nature of information in, 400–404 phone usage compared to Europe’s, 44–45 role in global economy, 390–395 United States (U.S.), (cont.) role of computers in, 59–96, 110–111 values, beliefs, and habits of, 395–400 U.S.A. Today, role of, 11, 158, 174 U.S. Air Force, role in CAD, 375 U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), R&D in information technologies, 326

468

INDEX

U.S. Bureau of the Census, used punched card equipment, 38–39 U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), role and data from, 142–143 U.S. Constitution, 299 on information, 55, 294–295 on religious freedom, 257 policy relevance, 342 voting and, 353 U.S. Department of Defense (DoD), R&D in information technologies, 326, 327 U.S. Department of Interior, published travel guides, 210 U.S. Department of Justice, 323 see also Antitrust Division U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC), see FCC U.S. Federal Reserve Board, 387 U.S. Government, early telecommunications practices of, 43–47 Internet interests of, 128–129 produces information, 139–141 U.S. Government Printing Office (GPO), largest publisher, 358 U.S. Library of Congress, 204 U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), R&D in information technologies, 326 U.S. Post Office, freedom of the press and, 308–309 U.S. Social Security Administration (SSA), used office equipment, 41 U.S.S. Maine, 156 Union Seminary Quarterly Review, 280 UNIVAC I, 16, 64, 66 significance of, 33 Universities, built libraries, 301 University of California-Berkeley, library of, 301 University of Pennsylvania, 64 University of Virginia, 138

University of Wisconsin, 146 library of, 301 Unmanned airplanes, 75 UPI, 175 UPS, 147, 212 Upper Deck Card Company, introduced CD-ROM sports cards, 202

V V-chip, issue described, 224–225, 318–320 Vacationing, affordability of, 420–421 use of information, 206–216, 403 Vail, Theodore, built AT&T, 144–145 Valenti, Jack, 319 Valparaiso University, 145 Varian, Hal, views on government information policy, 361–363 Victor, 53 Video games, 224 negative reactions to, 224–226 origins of, 82–85 Vietnam War, Pentagon Papers and, 302 press freedom during, 310 Violence, role of video games, 224–225 Virginia, Civil War telegraph in, 20–21 19th century religious practices, 262–263 Virginia Polytechnic Institute (VPI), 262 VisiCalc, 71 Von Neumann, Johnny, role in early computers, 63–64, 66 Voting, 340–344, 360 using Internet, 350–354

W Wall Street Journal, 137, 175 Warfare, automating, 75–76 Warren, Morimer, 305 Washington, George, 18 Washington Post, 175, 264 Watergate and, 307–308, 314 Watergate Scandal, 311, 314 role of Washington Post, 307–308

469

INDEX

Watson, Jr., Thomas J., views of, 60–61 Watson, Sr., Thomas J., joins C-TR/IBM, 40–41 quoted on machine-readable information, 60 Weather Channel, 176 Web Announcement Center, 279 WebTV, 107, 228 Webster, Daniel, 309 Webster, Noah, on role of public education, 18 Weekly Herald, edited by Edison, 28 Weitzner, Daniel J., quoted, 330 Westinghouse, 48 Westlaw, on Internet, 175 Whirlwind, 74 Whitman, Walt, banned in Boston, 305 Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, 86 Windows 98, 63 Wired, 160 covers religion, 281 Williams, John C., quoted, 387 Wilson, Woodrow, quoted, 371 Windows NT, 170 Winfrey, Oprah, books and, 203 Wireless communications, impending changes in, 181 Wise, Henry, 18 Wolf, Michael J., research on role of entertainment, 216, 233 Women, effect of vote, 18–19 information technology and, 90 Internet use by, 113–114 19th century use of information, 8–9 went to college, 221 Woods, John, as knowledge worker, 146–148, 179–180 Work, bibliography on, 438–439 changing nature of, 136–139 how computers changed, 80–81 on IT, 385 role of information in, 136–184 while on vacation, 212–213

Workers, consequences and possibilities of information, 162–170, 416–418 current conditions of, 170–174 income tied to education levels, 221 productivity of, 178–183 World Cup, links world together, 394 World Series, on radio (1920), 196 World Showcase, 214 World Wide Web (WWW), birth of, 99–100 World Trade Organization (WTO), power of information and, 349 World War I, censorship during, 309–310 World War II, censorship during, 310 influence on information technology, 405 Wright, Richard, books banned, 306

X Xerox, use of machines from, 55 Xerox PARC, software developments at, 71

Y Yates, JoAnne, research of, 10 Yearbook of American and Canadian Churches, 277 Yellow Silk, 161 YMCA, camps, 211 taught typing, 34 Young Life, camps, 211

Z Zenith, 49 Zuckerman, Mortimer B., quoted, 396–397 Zworykin, Vladimir, role in development of TV, 48

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