The Western world beholds the advent of a cultural revolution. Computers have existed for 50 years and personal computers for 25, but until now they have been tools of the elite. The arrival of the Internet-ready $500 computer this year will make this machine as common as the telephone, the radio, the television and electric light. Like the Model T (which also sold for $500), the cheap computer will annihilate distance. Like electric light, it will annihilate the night. Some even fear it might annihilate personality.

Marshall McLuhan pointed out that new technologies are always considered initially (and falsely) as extensions of the old ones. No one predicted, for instance, how electric light would enable the 24-hour day or how the automobile would give birth to the suburbs. Or how television would dominate politics, culture and even the family—and make all other media its satellites.

TV, however, is a one-way device—"push" to use the current jargon. You can talk back to it, but it does not listen. The computer—when linked to the Internet—both pushes and pulls. It permits, even demands, instant feedback from anyone to anyone anywhere in the world. It is radically egalitarian. No longer do networks or press barons control information. The Internet is every man's megaphone and printing press. To many it is also an obsession.

The first personal computer, the Altair, did nothing except blink lights. Still, thousands of enthusiasts paid about $500 to have one. It was a dumb box, but they would teach it. Despite this evidence of pent-up demand, when Steve Jobs famously offered the Apple computer to Hewlett Packard, the then-giant turned him down. Its research "proved" that only 10 such machines could be sold. Soon enough millions would be. IBM, the mainframe giant, then got into the game, but in the 1980s the PC was either a business investment or a rich man's toy.

The arrival of the "clones"—generic knock-offs of the IBM design—forced prices down. As sales rose, chip manufacturers slashed their prices. In the last year, first "bucket shops"—stores that assemble computers from off-the-shelf components—and then retail chains have broken the $1,000 mark. Prices continue to tumble, and the machines grow ever faster. "You can spend a few hundred dollars and get a TV or spend the same and get a computer," says Future Shop's Eric Ommundsen. Its hot new deal, a computer that (after rebate) sells for just under $500, "certainly seems to be bringing a lot of people into the market who before saw price as the main barrier."

A report on the "digital decade" by Forrester Research Inc. forecasts that North American sales of personal computers will reach 13.2 million in 1999. Over four million of those computers will be purchased by first-time buyers. The report also predicts that 38% of households will be connected to the Internet by the end of 1999. That figure is expected to reach 56% by 2003. Forrester expects that by 2003 consumers will separate into two distinct groups—those who constantly turn to the Internet for their shopping, banking and information needs and those who use it grudgingly. "This divide will exist for 10 years—until Generation Next begins to form new households," says the report. Statistics compiled by International Data Corp. (Canada) Ltd. support Forrester's findings. A recent survey found that 50% of all Canadian households contain at least one person who has access to the Internet, whether through work, school or a home computer.

Marshall McLuhan liked to call his sometimes outlandish, more often amazingly prescient predictions "probes." BC Report asked several close observers to probe the new media and suggest its messages on the future of employment, commerce, the cities, social interaction, education, politics, the nation-state and crime.

Employment
In the U.S., the percentage of the workforce engaged in production has fallen below information processing," reports University of B.C. computer science professor Richard Rosenberg. The Industrial Revolution and the rise of mass production had required workers to pool their labour in cities. "Technology has reversed that trend," says Prof. Rosenberg. He cites Alvin Toffler's notion of the "electronic cottage" and predicts, "Just as the Industrial Revolution meant the demise of working from home, the computer revolution is the demise of labour centralization."

Shelley Morrisette of Forrester Research confirms that "three well-documented trends"—telecommuting (currently done by about 4% of the population, although an additional 11% regularly take work home), independent contracting and the "office hotel" (space sharing at the workplace)—have resulted in "more and more knowledge-workers at home."

The Cities
The move by employers to cut down on rent and office overhead has dire implications for central cores of cities: the buildings where people used to work," Prof. Rosenberg concludes. Working from home could spell the death of the downtown core. People who do not travel into cities to work are much less likely to patronize restaurants, theatres and shops. However, "Urban decline is already occurring," Mr. Morrisette points out. "Cities are populated during the day, then everybody goes to the suburbs. The growing number of knowledge-workers based at home will increase that trend, but I don't think it will be as pronounced as previous flights."

"Telecommuting is adding to the trend towards homogenization and the deterioration of mom-and-pop businesses," concedes writer Howard Rheingold, "but it didn't start it. All this predates the Internet. Telecommuting is not going to work all the time for all people. It has to be a fraction, maybe one-10th of the workforce working at home one day out of 10, not the entire population. If you work for a large company, you have to be there for meetings."

Commerce
The flight from city centres will be a boon to e-commerce. "This is what drives the Internet," says Prof. Rosenberg. Currently, 10% of North American households regularly engage in banking and retail activities on-line, according to Forrester Research. This is predicted to more than triple within the next five years. However, "People trust information they get from the Internet less than other sources," warns Mr. Morrisette. "Books and music are selling well, but most people still want to see what they're buying."

Privacy concerns have left consumers wary. "When asked for personal information as a condition of entry into a website, people are giving false information because there aren't any policies to guarantee how the information is going to be used," Mr. Morrisette reports. "Sophisticated consumers know to lie. They've had bad experiences with being spammed"—a mass-marketing practice that sends junk mail to e-mail addresses.

University of Ottawa law professor Michael Geist predicts consumer reluctance will be overcome by "a reliance on private initiatives and private solutions." He has followed with interest a number of cases in U.S. and Canadian courts that have attempted to deal with spamming and thinks the problem can be addressed by "terms of use" contracts required by Internet service providers. "Companies will do their best to make people feel comfortable," he says.

Social Interaction
Computers are changing our social interaction in two ways: the social groups we interact with and the language we use. A recent survey by Carat Canada reports that 11% of on-line Canadians are using the Internet to meet friends and lovers, and 22% are visiting pornography sites. Increasingly, technology will encourage us to interact electronically in what Mr. Rheingold calls "virtual communities." These fellowships organized by affinity are "much larger than the Internet," he asserts. "We're already living in a society where place-based interaction is severely fragmented. With the Internet, we can communicate in a way that we're not able to communicate in mass media. Chat-room interaction is not the only example; it is just the most shallow."

According to University of Lethbridge political scientist Peter McCormick, "In one very obvious sense the Internet trumps the need for geographical continuity, and this plays right into the hands of 'identity politics.'" He explains, "People can belong to any kind of group or 'community' they want: ecologists, Pokemon fanatics, Star Trek fans and people whose last name is O'Brien. And, unfortunately, white supremacists, survivalists and pedophiles. The medium cannot censor the message, particularly not when your keystrokes can make you out to be whatever you want to be: manufactured identities, with no credible chance of ever having your bluff called."

The impact of the Internet on language is equally dramatic. The world domination of English will only increase. Several years ago a British Council report estimated that 80% of the information stored on computers is in English. And the trend towards communicating with people we will never meet is placing greater demands on our writing ability. "Something you think is witty and smart can be misconstrued in so many ways," says Mr. Morrisette, "because when you write, there are no other cues. Little symbols ('emoticons') help but people are having to do a better job with spelling and grammar, things they used to not worry about."

But for those who receive dozens, or hundreds, of e-mails messages a day, brevity is more than the soul of wit. They adopt an abrupt, unpunctuated, lower-case (or upper-case) style difficult to comprehend even by their correspondents. Chat-room frequenters have developed Balkanized languages that "employ a series of abbreviations salient to each particular area," says Mr. Morrisette. "The only way you're able to learn them is to participate in the group."

"There are two groups of people on-line," Mr. Morrisette explains. "Those who use the Internet an average amount of time, about eight hours a week, are pretty normal. People spending large amounts of time on-line (40 hours a week or more) can be living in a world that isn't entirely real. What you will find is that people who spend a lot of time on-line are probably more susceptible to deviant behaviour. Things like pornography and gambling permeate the Internet, making more money than any other areas. The porn market is nowhere near as big in the real world."

Prof. Rosenberg comments, "I would argue that although there are lots of benefits to interaction on-line, the exclusion of [other aspects of daily life] is dangerous for some people. Nothing comes as an unmixed blessing. Only certain parts of the human need for interaction can be satisfied on-line."

Education
Prognosticators are split on how the new media will affect education. "For academics, it is sheerest heaven," says Prof. McCormick. "I bounce ideas off fellow 'court watchers' in this and other countries, although I have never met or spoken to them." On the other hand, futurologist Frank Ogden, AKA Dr. Tomorrow, calls the computer revolution "the Dawn of End of the Age of Credentialism." "Academic culture is an endangered species," he argues. "We are moving from a teaching environment to a learning environment. When that occurs you don't need teachers, you need Knowledge Navigators, i.e., eight-year olds. To be relevant today one must get information from the cutting edge, not through a middleperson. Can a teacher handle 1% of that? And if they could, by the time they manage to learn the material, it is obsolete."

"Power is shifting away from formal institutions to the consuming public," Mr. Morrisette agrees. "The consumer is gaining equal footing. You see this in kids who are 15 who have never known a time without computers. Adults see life as split up into separate areas—work, home, etc.—with the Internet sitting on top. For kids, the Internet is part of everything."

According to Prof. Geist, "The Internet is going to change the way we teach things; we'll see greater interaction through the written word." Mr. Rheingold counters that "Schools and academia are conservative institutions that have serious problems technology is not going to solve. Internet learning is not going to substitute for a good teacher, but it could substitute for a bad teacher."

"All these tools are useless, if you have no way to use them, if you don't have critical thinking skills or can't read and write," Prof. Rosenberg stresses. "There is enormous pressure to put educational resources—not additional resources—into technology. But it was never proposed to be an answer to problems like literacy."

Politics
The pundits all agree the Internet has changed politics forever. "I'm not saying it will create a Utopian democracy, just that there's an incredible potential there," says Mr. Rheingold. Prof. Geist sees "opportunities for voting via the Internet, town halls and more open government." He explains, "The Internet can directly access people in a way the telephone can't because there's an intimidation factor that goes along with the telephone that doesn't exist with e-mail."

"The communities of identity that are created over the Internet may be fragmented and territorially dispersed," says Prof. McCormick, "but they can be mobilized faster and more efficiently than any neighbourhood responding to plans to put a halfway house in the middle of the block. That mobilization will mean that governments will spend a lot more time dealing with 'single issue' causes and a lot less time with grand overarching schemes." He warns, however, "If we gain new freedoms it will be at the cost of old comforts."

Government
What is usually grandly called 'the crisis of the nation state' is really a grab-phrase that grumbles about the fact that things aren't going to keep on the way they have for the last few decades, and this change and uncertainty is always unnerving," Prof. McCormick argues. "The major thing about the nation-state was that it was a territorial entity, emphasizing a common identity, and functioning through a coercive process—police and taxes and courts and the whole thing." In the future, government "will have to do so with less money and therefore a smaller bureaucratic structure and will have to deal with people who can move more of their activities out of the reach of regulation if they really want to."

Frank Ogden predicts this trend will lead to privatization of many government agencies. "Privatized they provide some money immediately from their sale but the main feat is that the process has created entities that will pay taxes forever," he says. "Think of all the revenue that we will create now that governments can't go to huge companies (all downsized eventually) and get lots of tax money on one return."

"There is debate going on now about Internet taxation," Prof. Rosenberg reports. He thinks sales taxes for goods purchased over the Internet may have to be treated in the same manner as international postage revenues. "No matter where you buy," he cautions, "someone's going to get the tax."

Crime and Terrorism
Tax revenues are not the only concern governments have with computer technology. Hacker chic and the vulnerability of computer systems raise the issue of cyber-terrorism. "Any nation that relies on computer systems is vulnerable," says Daniel Vigeant, public liaison officer for the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS). "In Canada, this includes defence, telecommunications, energy, air traffic and banking systems. There is no evidence of any planned major attack on infrastructure in Canada. However, there have been a number of minor incidents." He calls cyber-terrorism an "emerging threat" for all computerized nations but concludes, "It's difficult to say what might happen because we're getting into the area of classified information."

For some observers, the real fear is not terrorist groups trying to further political objectives but the possible impact of Y2K. "The Y2K problem is a psychological problem as well as a technological problem," explains David Kessler of the Centre for Millennial Studies at Boston University (www.mille.org). He says psychological uncertainty about a breakdown of the computer-dependent components of society's infrastructure could be distressing even if all the world's computers do click over to 01-01-(20)00 without incident.

While many now (and many more soon) fear Y2K, computer-phobes look forward to it gleefully. To these modern-day Luddites, Y2K is the last chance to destroy high technology before it strips man of the last vestiges of his humanity. Their fervent hope is that anger at chaos caused by the millennium bug could lead to revulsion powerful enough to prevent the digital ascendancy. Mr. Kessler believes it is too late for that. "I don't think fatalistic scenarios are going to halt the computer age," he says. "Computers will prove far too valuable a tool for us to turn our backs on. They are not about to be forsaken because they give us problems. Even if the Y2K problems come to pass, once past the transition, computers will continue to function. They'll go on from 00. Computers are with us for good." BCR

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