There have long been speculations about how the electronic
shadows made possible by the computer and telecommunications revolutions
will acquire the intensity of effect, the immediacy, the complexity
and the depth to become--in a certain sense--real. That afternoon
in the Valley Life Sciences Building was the first time in my
life that I had compared a place in the real world, the UCMP,
to its virtual electronic image in cyberspace--and found the real
world lacking, found that the real world experience lacked, compared
to its virtual electronic image, the intensity of effect, the
immediacy, the complexity, and the depth necessary for reality.
Thinking back, I realized that the electronic world behind the
computer screen has been slowly acquiring reality--and the real
world losing it--for some years. I check the card catalog for
something or other every week; but it has been four years since
I saw a wooden or metal drawer with 3 by 5 cards in it. If I say
"it's on my desktop," I almost surely mean that a pointer
to the computer file exists at the "root" level directory
of my notebook computer. As far as desktops and card catalogs
are concerned, the "virtual" images have so swamped
the "real" objects as to make them vanish from my consciousness.
My cousin Tom Kalil tells
me that cyberspace has obtained "liftoff": traffic on
the NSFNET electronic network backbone was up from 3.6 billion
bytes in March 1993 to 4.8 trillion bytes in March 1995. WebCrawler
and Yahoo now index over 4
million electronic documents, and receive more than 9.4 million
hits per week.
Some are oblivious to this transformation: I think of a respected
academic elder who claimed that all physical discoveries since
1930 (including our current computer and communications technologies)
were less significant than the past generation's "discoveries"
in literary criticism--and who had the lack of perception to make
this claim in an email message!
For two generations people have been talking about how computers
will have an extraordinary impact on human society and human knowledge.
Our children will think as differently from us as we think differently
from pre-Gutenberg monks, who would spend ten years copying and
writing a commentary on one single illuminated manuscript. Our
children will find our doctrines and beliefs as quaint as we find
Socrates' distrust of the written word as an unsuitable tool for
education.
The evening after returning from our expedition to the Valley
Life Sciences Building I went upstairs to put the five-year-old
to bed. He was talking--but not to himself.
"If you want to read books," he said, "click on
the bookcase. If you want to play with dinosaur toys, click over
here." He was pretending to be a Help System.
"To play with Lion King toys, click on the bottom of the
bed."
I have pretended to be many things at play and work--as a child
a space explorer and a wise king; as an adult a Deputy Assistant
Secretary of the Treasury and a Berkeley professor. But I never
pretended to be a help system.
"If you need help, click on my picture on top of the dresser.
I'll be there in a flash..."
Not only is the virtual world behind the computer screen acquiring
reality, but the real world is acquiring aspects of virtuality
as well...
Brad DeLong
I posted this to the apple-internet-users mailing list. A version
(well-edited by Adam Engst)
appeared in TidBITS #291 (21-Aug-95):
http://www.dartmouth.edu/pages/TidBITS/TidBITS.html
It has also been electronically published by HotWired (in
their NetSoup section), and by the Utne Lens.
It is forthcoming in print in Wired, a small chunk of it
has appeared in Harpers under the title A
Wired Child, and it has been re-printed in American Art.
Of all the e-mail I have gotten in response, the two most interesting
items have been, first, a pointer to Dr. Bombay's Village Voice
article about the crime and punishment of Mr. Bungle for virtual
rape on LambdaMoo:
ftp://ftp.lambda.moo.mud.org/pub/MOO/papers/VillageVoice.txt
It isn't Crime and Punishment, but it comes closer to Dostoyevsky
than it has any right to do.
And, second, a pointer to Lenny Foner's sociological analysis
of the impact of the MOO-based "chatterbot" named Julia:
http://foner.www.media.mit.edu/people/foner/Julia/
The analogies, however, are not exact. In text-based MUD- and
MOO-environments, the suspension of disbelief in the "reality"
of the virtual environment is not only willing but willed
and even forced. While my suspension of disbelief was
not only unwilled, but involuntary...
An excellent article on submarine cables by science fiction writer Neal Stephenson. From Wired.
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