George Gilder calls the networked computer “a powerful force for democracy, individuality, community, and high culture.” Newt Gingrich boasts that THOMAS, the Library of Congress’s online system, will shift political clout “toward the citizens and out of the Beltway” because, after all, ” knowledge is power.” At the opposite end of the spectrum, Dr. Timothy Leary exults “Never before has the individual been so empowered. . . . We wrestled the power of LSD away from think CIA, and now the power of computers away from IBM.”
It all has a familiar ring. Eighty years ago, Soviet rhetoric promised the rise of a New Man after the “reengineering” of the means of production. In the United States in the 1920s, the NBC network heralded the Age of Radio by dressing musicians in evening clothes and presenting the NBC Symphony of the Air. In 1952, an advertisement for the new medium of television forecast that “citizens will “be better informed than they ever were before.” Among the results of these three revolutions were, respectively, the Gulag, Howard Stern, and the Home Shopping Network.
Now the new century approaches, and we’re told that global computer networks will bring us another revolution, this one literally at our fingertips. Print, it’s said, will go the way of the Soviet Union; the daily paper will be an artifact of a quaint past, like NBC’s tuxedoed symphony.
Hold on a nanosecond. The detector that Hemingway said every journalist should have, ought to be spiking right now — yet plenty of American journalists are swallowing (and spreading) the hype. Leading media companies are racing to secure a place in cyberspace. They’re hastily putting the contents of their newspapers and magazines online, offering interactive services, opening home pages on the World Wide Web, forming alliances with telecommunications systems.
The latest entrant is the Washington Post. Promoting its online service, Digital Ink, the Post now appends a kind of footnote to some news articles urging readers to log in for related information. The quarter you pay for the paper entitles you to learn what the editors thought important in a Clinton speech; pay a few bucks more and wade through the Big Muddy yourself. Not that the Post service is singlemindedly devoted to civic empowerment. A promotional mailing boasts that the service lets you “search for a new restaurant by type of cuisine and location — or ask restaurant reviewer Phyllis Richman herself.” One recent footnote dispatches Post readers to Digital Ink “for a list of Emmy nominations won by Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman.”
At least the Dr. Quinn list is accurate. One can’t say the same of a great deal of online info. Modems make every man a cyberjournalist (the great majority of Netters are in fact guys). Bulletin boards and chat groups churn out a huge stew of fact, error, myth, hoax, and fantasy. The creators of this online content have effectively pushed news back down the evolutionary tree.
The written word evolved in part to stop rumor. As Mitchell Stephens points out in A History of News, print journalism was like turning on a light; dragon sightings got farther from London as the light grew. Since the penny press of the 19th century, the general trend in the news business has been upward, toward credibility and (approximate) respectability. Twentieth- century journalism has defined itself by applying the test of (approximate) truth before disseminating stories — always with the exception of such devolutionary cousins as Bernarr MacFadden’s notorious Daily Graphic of the 1920s and, more recently, supermarket checkout magazines and tabloid FV shows.
Proclaiming their freedom from hierarchies, editors, controls, the onliners have brought back the dragon-sightings. In July, right apter the papers carried news of Wolfman Jack’s death following a heart attack, one user posted the “real” story: The deejay was killed by the same nitrate sodium poison pill that the CIA used to terminate LBJ. Mainsteam journalists may debate the ethics of outing closeted homosexuals. Not Net users. Posts to the Internet newsgroup alt. showbiz. gossip routinely matter on about which particular Hollywood actors are gay (and/or wear a toupee).
Sex and sexuality, in fact, account for a good deal of online journalism. In the last two months, the New York Times, USA Today, Time, and Newsweek all reported in page-one stories and cover articles how shocked, shocked they were to find sex of every shape, kind, and permutation on the Net. Their stop-press news was as old as the Internet itself; 15 years ago, the graduate students who hacked around ARPANET, the Pentagon’s advanced research computer network that formed the basis for the Internet, exchanged boys’ locker-room humor along with Defense Department data as soon as their professors left the lab.
Today, Penthouse magazine’s home page is among the most visited sites on the World Wide Web — the service that makes your computer look like a magazine cover or a publicity press kit. Time Warner’s Pathfinder home page on the Web offers access to selected contents of seven of its magazines, and was registering 100,000 visits a week to the site by Internet users until Sports Illustrated came out with its swimsuit issue, when the numbers rose to 100,000 an hour. Actually, the Pathfinder images of Kathy Ireland, et al., were grainy compared to the swimsuit photos in the newsstand SI, but that hardly slowed the Web’s testosterone-heavy audience.
Right behind sex is violence (as American as Apple Computers). The visionaries talk up the glories of providing links to an endless supply of electronic information, but the journalists’ old gatekeeper role is quickly missed. Net surfers can easily visit Holocaustdenial bulletin boards (active in the U.S. and in Germany). A few weeks ago, one online magazine ran an article about the militia movement, in the process offering readers instant links to megabytes of militia propaganda. News outlets normally wouldn’t publish the 800 number for Posse Comitatus (free of charge, anyway); Internet hyperlinks — which allow users to jump from one site to another automatically — accomplish the same thing.
“Journalism,” New York Sun editor Charles A. Dana once said, “consists in buying white paper at two cents a pound and selling it at ten cents a pound.” Despite the gold-rush fever, it’s hardly clear whether media companies will profit in cyberspace. Beneath all the hype about Third Wave communications, the true business of cyberspace has been, and is likely to remain, e-mail and electronic information exchange (e.g., chatlines, bulletin boards, home pages). Consequently, the likely model for hypermedia is not a newspaper or magazine, even one created by cybersharpies working for Time Warner. The model is the telephone company, old Ma Bell and her brood, who daily make possible hundreds of millions of private conversations — that is, people creating their own content. People will post messages to each other, use shareware, run up phone bills (their own or their universities’ or their employers’), but they won’t necessarily purchase information services. At least at this early stage, users are more interested in gaming a personal conduit than in buying someone else’s content.
Industry people recognize the apparent mismatch between their expertise and consumer desires. At the conference on “Magazines & New Media,” sponsored by the Magazine Publishers f America in New York in July, one of the symposia asked, somewhat plaintively, “The New Media Magazine: Has Anyone Found the Model?”
This uncertainty didn’t slow thee usually cautious New York Times. Last year, the company sold off its women’s magazine group and reacquired a substantial interest in the paper’s news databases (from the Nexis and Lexis services). Arthur O. Sulzberger, Jr., the Times’s 42-year-old, computer- literate publisher, brashly declared that he was prepared to put the paper on the Internet, CD-ROM, whatever. (“If someone would be kind enough to invent the technology, I’ll be pleased to beam it directly into your cortex.”)
In hopes of finding the holy grail of cyberprofit, media companies like the Times are trying to figure out a place for advertising on the desktop screen. At the commercial online services, companies pay to have their logos displayed on computer screens along with program menus. When some services began to run these logos along the bottom of the screen, users responded by blocking them out — literally, fastening black electrical tape on the screen. Since then, logorrhea has grown more sophisticated. Visitors to the home page on the Web run by Netscape, the hottest company in the Internet world, can get a free information search with a marketing hook: The results come back together with an ad for one of the search “sponsors” (Sun Microsystems Inc. and the Internet Shopping Network were among the first advertisers).
Old gimmicks or new, the logos’ promotional value is on a par with the signs promoting beer, banking services, and fast food plastered on National Hockey League rink boards or courtside at NBA games. For the online user, as for the TV sports viewer, the play’s the thing. At most, such messages exert only a marginal influence — and sometimes represent a major annoyance.
Perhaps that’s why Virtual Madison Avenue’s latest approach is to go beyond brand awareness and make cyber ads that appeal to Netters’ Nintendo sensibilities.
On America Online, McDonald’s employs full-animation techniques to make a computer game of “driving through” a McDonald’s roadside stop. Brewer Adolph Coors Co. sponsors the Tribe Z (for Zima beer) chat room; admission to the site requires information about drinking habits as well as a home address. Then the “interactivity” kicks in: Coors mails out coupons and other promotional materials. Toyota’s ad agency also tries an interactive come-on, letting users pick from various colors to give “paint job” to the graphic of a showroom Toyota. Fun and games, no doubt, but will players then go out and buy a Big Mac or a Zima, let alone a new Corolla sedan?
We suspect that the present print- and broadcast-based media system will prevail far into the future. Online media will be additive rather than dominant. Radio didn’t replace “newspapers, and television didn’t replace radio; electronic news and chat groups will find a modest niche among existing information systems. Hopeful, we tell journalism students that they will still be able to earn a living doing news work, if they master the traditional basic writing and reporting skills (they should be computer- literate, too).
But it’s the media owners who need reassuring. For years, they’ve lived with their “garage nightmare” — that some school kid, working out of his (or her) parents’ home, will invent the killer application rendering them obsolete: Digital David slays Print Goliath.
This past May, the Nieman Foundation at Harvard University invited Omar Wasow to speak about the future of communications to a national conference of editors and publishers. Wasow, 24, is co-founder of New York Online, a ” neighborhood” bulletin board with all of 600 customers in the city, and another 600 mostly in the tristate area. That’s no misprint — 1,200 customers. Yet after Wasow spoke to the print pooh-bahs, he told a reporter: ” I was surprised how scared they all were.”
