RatcliffeBlog - Mitch Thinking Out Loud

Must we take the Turing test?

People talking to machines. That's the economic model of the information age breaking out everywhere. People ask machines for a news story, a movie or the sports scores and the machines charge them for it. People go away happy. Mostly, they just go away. For example, I read in the European Wall Street Journal recently that airlines see more than just added revenues from in-flight interactive entertainment: "Passengers busy playing computer games or watching movies will be less likely to harass flight attendants with endless requests." I can't wait to be lulled into that cooperative, complacent state. Peace, at last. But come to think of it, that's the condition we retreat to after voting every two years; and we always emerge in the next election more angry than before.

While the development of technology that can spit a video stream down a cable to a home, or an airplane seat, is really quite remarkable in this Paleolithic information epoch--we're really nowhere near the time when the whole world will be living together among easily accessible digital connections--video on demand is not the face of Helen that will launch a new economy.

Of course, that's not the way Time Warner sees it. Listening in Orlando last month to Time Warner CEO Gerald Levin gleefully anticipating his grab for a part of the $105 billion telephone market, it was clear that he doesn't want people to earn money in the information age; he just wants them to spend it.

I think we can do better by the people. You're probably thinking what my father would say: "Put up or shut up, Ratcliffe. What's this new economy supposed to look like?" Well. . . .

It's nine o'clock in the morning, sometime in 2017. Davis Allen, a 39-year-old man living in Nantucket, pulls himself up to the keyboard in his den. He's at work. He's an online star. As his computers boot up, the screens around him flicker to life; some contain text messages, others are video feeds from the places he'll be performing today. The screen directly in front of him, labeled "LIVE," is blank. This will let him see who he's talking to when he actually taps into the lives of his audience. There are approximately 75,000 online personalities (OPs) in the United States. Folks come into contact with five to ten OPs a day. Each OP has a micro audience of 3,500 or so people who would identify with that personality. The superstars, like Davis, are very influential, because they "personally" advise half a million or more people.

The new broadband lines are standard fare in Davis's community. Everyone has vast amounts of capacity available dynamically. There's no more making appointments for T1 bandwidth: it's there instantly. Davis gobbles bandwidth keeping connected to his audience. About 420,000 people in the region--and a few who have moved across country or to Europe and Asia--count on Davis's endorsement of products when shopping, as well as his wit and eye for the ironic to provide entertainment.

The broadband lines in the house are from one of the local phone companies. They are the second set laid in. The first, installed by the now-defunct cable system, were paid for by Davis's old employer, Paracom, the entertainment conglomerate. In those days, he was doing banter in the interface of the local interactive television system, hawking new programs, connecting gamers in huge virtual Zork tournaments, and giving folks the sense that they weren't alone in the digiscape.

Paracom Online spent heavily on developing online personalities in the late 1990s. These next-generation disc jockeys followed the lead of the MTV VJ and talk-radio hosts like Rush Limbaugh, who were the first to turn participation (no matter how inconsequential) into a mass medium. Davis Allen was one of the first, joining the Paracom network as a 19-year-old to cruise the youth-oriented newsgroups on the Internet, making friends, getting those friends to bring others into the conversation; soon he was a literal Pied Piper at the vanguard of the march into interactivity.

His own experience taught him to pick out the most interesting people he met in cyberspace. As more people took up the video camera and desktop video editing systems, or turned their keyboards into expressive outlets for their ideas, Davis became a valued source of contacts--a kind of virtual editor who connected his audience with others' creative work.

Late in the first decade of the new century, Davis left Paracom's employ and set up his own company. For almost a decade, he's been contracting with media companies, advertisers and service organizations, including Paracom, to provide the online personality for content, products and services throughout the Northeast. The average OP, working for a production company that taps many networks to distribute its content, has hundreds of these endorsement contracts.

Davis's latest venture is the virtual shelf-talker. Whether shopping at home or in a store, consumers plug a pcmcia card into their PDA that tracks their proximity to Davis-endorsed products. When they pass one on the store shelf, for instance, a Davis video pops up and explains the comparative benefits of the product. The video is manipulated by the computers on Davis' desktop to insert the customer's name in the rap. But if they have more questions, a light flashes on Davis' monitor and he can go live to assist them. Since he covers only a part of the country, and since his video talkers are recorded to answer most consumer concerns in the first minute, he doesn't spend much time in live conversations. When he's not at work, an assistant takes care of people.

The rest of the day, Davis spends time in forums, producing introductions to new films and shows on the interactive networks, and out in the field shooting tape for segments.

Davis found out early that the biggest challenge for the online personality was the shut-in. These people want to go live and just talk for hours, killing the time they fear, but also Davis's own production time. Two strategies paid off. First, he introduced the shut-ins to one another; but he also found out what kinds of activities were going on in their communities and got them to go out and try to join in society.

Davis, because he works at home, has considerably more time than his own father for involvement in the community and his family's life. He's on the school board and regularly meets a group of concerned parents for discussion at a local coffeeshop. He eats breakfast, lunch and dinner with his family (finally, intelligent agents and pdas are providing flexible access to the networks that facilitate working less, but working better), and knows his children's friends by name. Involvement keeps families growing stronger, no kids in the region have been murdered by other children for almost five years. . . .

That's a brief portrait of the world we could make. No one expects that an economy can be born in a single moment of transformation, but I think the op is an example of a recognizable job description undergoing a transformation in the information economy. These people will require a complex assortment of support staff and technology. Literally hundreds of new job descriptions might erupt in a world where the home is a permeable membrane that collects the power of human intelligence to serve the family living in it. Imagine, for example, that the power systems in a house--heat, air conditioning, lighting--are controllable from a remote location; there's a new industry in maintenance and consulting services that help consumers get the most out of their electrical consumption.

I'm afraid, though, seeing how little incentive people have for acting as creative beings in the so-called information age of video on demand, that we're building a dystopian society in which people will be treated as mere consumers. Like Robert Louis Stevenson's perfect child, there will be the expectation that people will speak only when spoken to--and then in a voice that says "Yes, I'll take two" through the mechanics of a handheld interactive TV control. We'll pay a terrible price for such mechanistic social perfection.

If you want your company to win a place in a robust economy, in a society where you will enjoy living, think beyond the media to the people using it. And think beyond their use of media, to their lives. What are we complaining about as a nation? I see many phenomena that orbit the issue of a growing sense that there is no humanity in the world. Keep in mind what Fred Rogers wrote in the Freedom Forum's Media Studies Journal recently: "Television may be the only electrical appliance that's more useful after it's turned off."