Imagine now your newspaper of the future. Instead of buying your bulky set of large paper pages, many of which you immediately shed, especially on weekends when half of the paper is ditched unexamined, you will one day take one or two pages, click your paper of choice into them, add whichever sections you fancy, ignoring the others, and be charged according to your selection. No more printing lorry loads, carting paper to every town and outlet in the land; no more tonnes of unread returns, no more landfill.
So why not stick to screens only? Because people won’t. Newspapers and magazines on your computer have been available for ages, but folk still trudge to the shop and pick up newsprint. In future they will get their newsprint, but without the trudge. And that newspaper will be updated to the minute.
Books and newspapers: two examples of hundreds that the communications revolution might offer. On what basis should our future technological choices be made? My criteria are 1. environmental impact 2. efficiency and convenience 3. public demand 4. overall economy.
Earlier I noted that the two main functions of communication are to exchange useful information and to gossip. I have assumed that gossip will look after itself. The only constraint on my generation’s phone chatter 30 years ago was the cost of a call. Let teens chat on-if they can afford it. In the process they will redefine ‘appointment’, ‘conversation’ and even time. Meetings and interaction will become almost continuous. We shall watch the social results with interest.
The way forward for communications, in future, is streamlining and focus. Can we possibly cart yet more instruments (than phones, laptops, organisers)? Obviously not and, as we know, the move is well underway to give us something like my ‘Hypertel’, a computer/phone/camera/diary in one device.
What about focus? The greatest frustration for most of us mired in this present e-revolution is the way information is fragmented. The TV in your American hotel with 240 channels and nothing to watch. The Googled reference with a dozen spellings of the name you want to check. A thousand possible sources offered when you want only one. What to do?
Project BabelFish
Do you remember the fish in Douglas Adams’s book The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy?
‘You’ll need to have this fish in your ear.’
‘I beg your pardon?’ asked Arthur [Dent].
Ford was holding up a small glass jar which quite clearly had a small yellow fish wriggling around in it… [Arthur] gasped in terror at what sounded like a man trying to gargle while fighting off a pack of wolves.
Once he had the Babel Fish in his ear, Arthur understood perfectly. The Babel Fish lives on brainwave radiation from every source but its host. It then excretes energy in the form of exactly the correct brainwaves needed by its host to understand what was just said.
The Babel Fish reverses the problem defined by its namesake; the original Tower of Babel (according to the Bible) inspired the Deity to confuse human beings by making them unable to understand each other.
The Babel Fish made me think. What if we took all the thousands of hours of science programs my colleagues and I have broadcast over the decades and mined them for specials on any named topic? Suppose you wanted to know about AIDS and fancied hearing the pioneers who first identified HIV, Montaigner and Gallo, then find out about the tracking of transmission, attempts to find treatments, and the search for a vaccine-the whole story told by those who were involved, in a format you could listen to anywhere. If a discovery were made next week of a proven vaccine or a cure, we would add that to the recording and you would be up to date. Transcript included, of course. Pick any other topic: nuclear power, GM crops, cyber sex, asteroids, black holes, Einstein, omega 3 fatty acids, trees, carbon trading, deep sea vents, the kakapo bird, windmills, Shere Hite, photovoltaic cells, slime moulds, cosmology, warts, piles, Neptune, NASA, pus, a history of the penis, Kropotkin, hippos, meditation, schizophrenia, global wanning, knees-we have recordings of the world’s experts saying everything imaginable on all these subjects, from the oldest recording of Florence Nightingale in 1890 to Stephen Hawking talking through his voice-generator machine.
Each one-hour offering in our version of BabelFish would be a scripted story using these voices to give the essential, definitive briefing on the topic chosen. You would select it off the Web, download it as a podcast, and stick it in your ear to listen to it on a digital music player as you jog, stroll or clean out the shed.
The plan is to set up a team within the ABC led by seasoned producers. We would then use slave (student) labour and mine our archives (now rotting in cupboards) as source material. The students’ expertise with the technology would meet our experience with production and selection. They would learn journalism and broadcasting techniques; we would build a source of reference material for the world.
But isn’t it the case that most Australians can hardly identify a scientist beyond Einstein? In fact New Scientist magazine revealed in 2006 that 78 per cent of British people it polled couldn’t name a single living scientist. Of those who could, most named Stephen Hawking. But so what if they had never heard of Rutherford, Dirac, Bragg, Crowfoot Hodgkin, Goodall, Chandrasekhar, Venter, Dawkins, Burnet or Perutz? Is that a reason to give up and consign these names to oblivion? They are (or were) giants in their fields and compelling speakers. Their words on the nature of the world could move as well as edify.
Who would use such a resource? Well, given our stunning experience with podcasting over the last two years-with ABC programs being downloaded across the planet as if they were free banknotes-I suspect demand would be impressive. But imagine the new science students in China and India (400,000 engineers graduated in China last year, together with one million scientists) with their keenness to become fluent in English. Even a fraction of their growing number could amount to millions.
And BabelFish would grow. Once a one-hour topic was up, it would stay. Soon there would be a comprehensive list to tempt anyone. Say you wanted to get up to speed on the disposal of nuclear waste. Voices ranging from Robert Oppenheimer to Helen Caldicott and John Holdren could give background, followed by Ted Ringwood on the development of Synroc, followed by the latest assessments of hazards versus advantages. Within an hour (or less if you chose) you’d be in the loop.
I took the idea to colleagues around the world. They were universally enthusiastic. As broadcasters they felt it would give new life to their archives. Most science programs or reports begin in much the same way, explaining what a quark, a synchrotron or a guppy might be. Then comes the argument, then the payoff. If we combined our global storehouse of recordings, we could have a G8 of reliable, listenable, edifying e-science. The BBC agreed; so did CBC, PBS (USA), Scientific American, Radio NZ and a few others.
If BabelFish comes off, one day (communications, like science, deals with split seconds but moves managerially like continental drift) it will be but one example of how the future of media might be managed. It will offer you clear choices instead of an incomprehensible maze of options; interaction producing something more satisfyingly complex than what you started with; more democracy instead of simply more noise; decentralisation in place of mega-baronies; stillness where once there was turmoil.