We’ve been working with the design and editorial staff and Yankee Publishing in Dublin, New Hampshire for the past several years on this comprehensive guide to all things New England. Our first project involved the development of a search engine for lodging, restaurants and other activites. Since that beginning, we helped Yankee add features like Yankee Magazine’s Community Partners and the online swops search.
Almanac.com is another Yankee Publishing project with which we’ve been closely associated. We’ve developed features like the sunrise and sunset calculator, the long-range weather forecasts, online classified ads and the secure e-commerce infrastructure behind the The Online General Store.
As of May 21, 1999, the old Prince Edward Island-based Digital Island Inc. is now Reinvented Inc.. Best wishes to our [unrelated] Honolulu-based cousins at Digital Island Inc. as they complete their IPO.
In the summer of 1996 I presented a series on CBC Radio’s Island Morning program, produced by Ann Thurlow, called Consumed by Technology. I’ve managed to recover the audio of the episodes, along with the “show notes” and transcripts, from The Internet Archive and I’m posting each episode here for posterity.
This final, seventh, episode of Consumed by Technology focused on access to the Internet by students in public schools; it aired on August 20, 1996. Wayne Collins was the host.
With the growth of the Internet as an educational tool, the question of how to control what information students have access to has become a controversial issue. There have been several stories in the news recently about students gaining access to pornography, bomb making instructions and other “questionable” materials. The reaction from educators has ranged from the introduction of electronic monitoring to the insistence that students and their parents sign waivers before students are let loose on the ‘net.
Show Notes
- Bombs
- Porn
- Censorship Tools
- Counter-Censorship Tools
Transcript
INTRO: With the growth of the Internet as an educational tool, the question of how to control what information students have access to has become a controversial issue. There have been several stories in the news recently about students gaining access to pornography, bomb making instructions and other “questionable” materials. The reaction from educators has ranged from the introduction of electronic monitoring to the insistence that students and their parents sign waivers before students are let loose on the ‘net.
To talk about this issue, Peter Rukavina joins me now for another in the series “Consumed by Technology.”
QUESTION: What is it about the Internet that makes controlling access to certain types of information so difficult?
ANSWER: We’ve talked a lot in this series about digital information - information that’s not that different in substance from any other sort of information, but for the fact that it is very easy to move from place to place using computers.
It’s very easy and very cheap to take any sort of information - pictures, maps, magazines, TV programs, whatever - convert it into digital information and then use computers to make as many copies as you like and to send these copies wherever in the world you like.
Compared with the old ways of moving information around - using printing presses and trucks or radio studios and transmitter towers - spreading digital information from place to place is almost effortless.
It’s precisely because moving digital information is so easy and so cheap that we’ve seen the explosive growth of the Internet over the past several years: the Internet provides, quite literally, an “information highway” which can provide people around the world with access to vast amounts of digital information.
One of the other interesting things about digital information is that it’s invisible when it’s moving around. In its most primitive state, digital information is just a bunch of 1’s and 0’s - electrical impulses really - moving up and down wires at the speed of light.
If you were able to somehow magically zoom in on a little piece of the Internet, what you would see would simply be a stream of digital information bits zipping along. These information bits, once assembled at the receiving end by a computer, could just as well be the complete works of William Shakespeare as they could be an episode of Compass or information about crop rotation. While they’re out there on the Internet, though, they’re just bits of a vast digital information soup.
When you hook up to the Internet, you immediately gain access to all of the public information that’s available on Internet computers around the world: it’s like you’re connecting a big pipe to the entire information soup.
And when you do this, you’re not only gaining access to things like the complete works of William Shakespeare, and information on when to plant begonias, you’re also gaining access to the latest issue of Playboy magazine, to discussion groups about bomb making, to a myriad of radical political views… whatever information is out there on the Internet - and that probably includes any sort of information you can imagine and much you cannot - whatever information is out there is accessible to anyone who’s connected to the Internet.
QUESTION: And this is true whether we’re talking about my computer at home or the computers at my child’s school?
ANSWER: When you’re plugged into the Internet, you’re plugged into the Internet. It’s the same information soup no matter where and who you are.
And that’s precisely why we’ve seen some controversy in the past year as schools have become connected to the Internet and students have started to be able to browse around and see what’s available.
As you might imagine, they’re not always browsing around the lofty educational stuff.
QUESTION: Here on the Island and elsewhere, there’s been talk of installing special computer programs which will filter out objectionable material… does this sort of thing actually work?
ANSWER: It works… sort of.
There are three problems which arise when you try and filter digital information: first, the problem of deciding what to filter, second, the problem of how to filter it, and finally the problem of the students simply finding ways to work around the filters.
On the surface, the problem of deciding what to filter out appears pretty simple. If you were to put 5 or 10 average parents in a room and ask them to come up with a list of what they consider “objectionable” information, information that they don’t want their kids coming across, you’d probably have a pretty easy time of it… at least to begin.
I don’t thing there are many parents around who would want their kids having access to violent pictures, pornography, or information about how to make bombs, and you’d probably get pretty quick agreement on those.
But then what about pictures of the aftermath of Hiroshima: that’s a pretty gruesome - a pretty violent - sight, but it’s also a very powerful tool in teaching about war and peace… so maybe no violent pictures, except pictures of Hiroshima.
And then there’s information about sex. Pornography is out, but what’s pornography? Two people kissing? “How to” information about sex? What about information about birth control? Some people think that information about birth control is pornography.
What about this “bomb making information?” If you screen out everything with the word “bomb” in it, you’re going to leave out most of the history of World War II and a lot of the items in the news recently.
The issue of figuring out what’s “good information” and what’s “bad information” isn’t cut and dried; information isn’t black and white and while it might be possible to get people to agree in a very general way about what’s “good” and what’s “bad,” doing anything more is like trying to get agreement on anything controversial… next to impossible.
This sort of problem is no different than the classic problem of trying to figure out whether “Catcher in the Rye” should be in school libraries or not, except that the challenge is not about one book which you can pick up and read and argue about, it’s about trying to sort through an entire world of information, sometimes before it even exists, and coming up with very specific rules for what’s “in” and what’s “out”… for what’s “good” and what’s “bad” Information.
QUESTION: Assuming we could all, somehow, come to agreement over what information should be filtered out, how does the actual filtering process work?
ANSWER: Well remember that digital information is, essentially, invisible: when it’s moving around it’s just a generic soup of bits and bytes. The filtering programs that schools are looking at work by intercepting information in this raw state as it enters the computer.
A sort of “information robot” sits and watches for patterns in the incoming information. If it detects one of the patterns, it can take actions that range from shutting the computer down immediately, to denying access to that particular page or Internet site.
The patterns this robot is looking for are a pre-defined set of keywords that are associated with the kind of information that students are denied access to. In most cases, this set of keywords is something that can be added to or changed to suit the particular needs of the school or the age group in question.
So a student walks up to a computer, clicks on “Open” and types in an Internet address like “www.playboy.com” and, because the word “playboy” is one of the keywords in the “watch list,” a warning pops up on the screen telling them that they’ve tried to access a banned Internet site.
The problem here is that it’s next to impossible to come up with a set of keywords that will both screen out anything objectionable and let good, useful information through. There are simply too many possible combinations of words and phrases and content to cover off everything, and inevitably in the process of trying to screen out “bad” information you end up throwing the baby out with the bathwater and screening some out “good” information too.
Perhaps the best example of this sort of thing happened last year when America Online, a large U.S. computer network added the word “breast” to a list of banned words for their electronic discussion groups. They view themselves as a “family” network and, in their well intentioned way, were just trying to “clean things up.” Unfortunately in the process, they ended up censoring an electronic discussion group for breast cancer survivors.
Just like trying to define what information is “good” and what information is “bad,” trying to come up with a comprehensive set of watch-words that will cover off all situations without making the Internet all but useless just isn’t possible.
Another problem that crops up when you try to filter digital information is that it’s next to impossible to filter out pictures based on their contents. You can filter out pictures based on what computer filename they’ve got — “porn.gif” or “dirtypicture.bmp” - but that’s about it. It’s almost impossible for a computer, at least with the technology we have today, to figure out what a picture is actually of. And so, again, even if you could figure out what sort of pictures you wanted to screen out, there’s no effective way of actually doing it.
QUESTION: You mentioned the problem of students finding ways to work around the filters… is that really a problem?
ANSWER: The natural inclination of any teenager when prevented from doing something - and I speak from considerable personal experience here - is to immediately find a way around whatever roadblocks have been placed in their way. Consider the fact that it is illegal for teens to buy beer and cigarettes and yet, somehow, many teens are able to get beer and cigarettes whenever they like.
The situation with Internet filters is no different: there’s always a way to work around the system and the very fact that the system is there at all is extra incentive to work harder at getting around it.
To test this out, I downloaded a program from the Internet called “Net Nanny” and installed it on my computer. It’s a pretty standard Internet content filtering program.
I set the program up on my computer, gave it a list of watch words and then took it out for a spin. Sure enough, whenever I did something “bad” by trying to go to an Internet site that contained any of the words I’d set up as watch words, I was prevented from doing so.
When I set out to work around Net Nanny, it took me about 45 seconds to erase all traces of the program from my computer and to again get unlimited access to the Internet. If I wanted to cover my tracks, I could have just set the Net Nanny program aside for a while and then, when I was done browsing, I could have put it back and no one would have been the wiser.
It didn’t take any great knowledge of computers for me to do this, and it would be well within the capabilities of any high school student with a bit of computer savvy to do exactly the same thing.
The reason this is so easy to do isn’t really because the filtering programs themselves aren’t bullet-proof enough, it’s just that computers are, by their very nature, malleable, flexible things that are designed to be easily modified. These filter programs are like deadbolt locks installed in a door with a balsa wood frame: they do what they’re supposed to do until you decide to just bust through the door and ignore them.
So again, to answer your original question - “do these filter programs actually work?” - my answer is that even if we can somehow agree on what we’re going to censor and figure out list of words that will do the task - and both of those tasks are next to impossible - we’re still left with an imperfect solution that can be easily worked around.
QUESTION: If we can’t use computers to filter out information, what other options do we have if we want to continue to give students access to the Internet, but only to certain parts?
ANSWER: To be honest, there really aren’t any technology solutions to this problem and I doubt that there ever will be.
The problem we’re really facing here is that we’ve relied for generations on our ability to simply physically prevent our children from coming across information we don’t want them seeing. Dirty magazines are on the top shelf in the local cigar store, public libraries simply don’t buy really controversial books, we don’t let our kids watch TV programs we don’t like, and so on. It’s been relatively easy to hold back the tide of “bad” information by placing that information out of reach.
And now we can’t do that anymore.
Short of unplugging the Internet and calling it a day, there isn’t going to be a technology solution that’s going to keep our kids from coming across all sorts of information we don’t want them seeing. Kids are going to see violence. They are going to see graphic sex. They are going to see things that, probably, you and I have never seen.
The solution to this problem isn’t going to be a technical one, it’s going to be an educational one. And it’s not going to be a universal, complete, blanket solution, it’s going to be a fuzzy, inexact, incomplete, evolving solution.
Because we’ve dealt with objectionable material for so long simply by physically preventing access to it, we’ve gotten lazy… we’ve not had to think that hard about why some material is objectionable to us and other material isn’t. And we haven’t, by and large, had to talk to our kids about this, at least not in a pressing, practical way.
We’re going to have to start.
If we admit to ourselves that our kids are inevitably going to come across materials which will shock them, make them afraid, turn them on, confuse them, and confound them, then rather than trying to pretend that some technological magic bullet is going to come along and screen our the bad bits for us, we can get on with the job of giving our kids the skills they need to deal with all of this information.
I don’t think we even know what those skills are. But we’re going to have to figure them out.
There are, unfortunately, no easy answers to this problem and I imagine we’ve only begun to see the beginning of the controversy.
We’re facing yet another one of those situations where technology, in solving problems for us - in giving us more access to more information - also introduces a host of new challenges we never imagined and never prepared for.
EXTRO: Peter Rukavina operates Digital Island in Kingston, PEI… he’ll be back next week with another in the series “Consumed by Technology.”
In the summer of 1996 I presented a series on CBC Radio’s Island Morning program, produced by Ann Thurlow, called Consumed by Technology. I’ve managed to recover the audio of the episodes, along with the “show notes” and transcripts, from The Internet Archive and I’m posting each episode here for posterity.
This sixth episode of Consumed by Technology focused on computer bugs; it aired on August 13, 1996. Karen Mair was the host.
Late one August night in 1945, U.S. Navy Captain Grace Hopper and her co-workers were hard at work in their computer lab at Harvard University. They were frustrated. Their project, a pioneering computer called the “Mark One” wasn’t working. And after trying everything they could think of, they still couldn’t figure out why. Finally, someone located the trouble spot: using ordinary tweezers, they extracted a two-inch moth from the computer’s insides, a moth that was causing the computer to short-circuit. And so was born the world’s first “computer bug”.
Transcript
INTRO: Late one August night in 1945, U.S. Navy Captain Grace Hopper and her co-workers were hard at work in their computer lab at Harvard University. They were frustrated. Their project, a pioneering computer called the “Mark One” wasn’t working. And after trying everything they could think of, they still couldn’t figure out why.
Finally, someone located the trouble spot: using ordinary tweezers, they extracted a two-inch moth from the computer’s insides, a moth that was causing the computer to short-circuit.
And so was born the world’s first “computer bug”.
In another in the series “Consumed by Technology,” Peter Rukavina joins me now to talk about bugs, glitches and why you don’t always get what you pay for when you buy computer software.
QUESTION: That first “computer bug” wasn’t the last one, was it?
ANSWER: Not at all. Computer bugs or glitches or foul-ups or whatever you want to call them - Microsoft calls them “known issues” - they’ve been with us since we started using computers, and they’ll be with us for as long as we continue to use them.
QUESTION: Now it’s not actually two-inch moths that are causing these “bugs” anymore…
ANSWER: Well, you’d be surprised at what happens… there are probably still moths causing havoc out there somewhere. But “bug” has become a general term used to refer to anything that causes a computer program to break down and not do what it’s supposed to be doing.
On Sunday night, for example, I got a frantic call from my brother in Toronto. He had turned on his computer to look up a name in his electronic address book, only to find that all but the first four entries in it had somehow disappeared. He had no idea how this had happened, no idea how to get them back, and was afraid that he’d never be able to track down all of the 100 or so people he had on file.
He was but the most recent victim of the same thing that happened to Grace Hopper in 1945: a bug - in this case probably an error in the computer programming itself, not a moth or any other insect - had caused 96 of his addresses to be deleted, to just vanish into thin air.
This kind of thing probably sounds very familiar to a lot people listening.
It’s very rare that people who use computers at home or in their office haven’t had an essay disappear at the last minute, or their database get garbled beyond recognition, or had a strange message pop up while they’re working complaining of “General Protection Faults” or “Seek errors writing to Drive C”.
We almost take it for granted that, at some point, our computer is going to screw something up and we’re going to suffer for it. And we’re probably right.
QUESTION: Why do these bugs exist at all? Isn’t it possible for software companies to “stamp them all out?”
ANSWER: Unfortunately, it’s very difficult for that to happen.
Think of something simple: a shovel, for example. If you run a shovel making plant, you can make shovels and send them out to stores with a relatively high degree of certainty that you’ve produced a high quality product that’s going to dig dirt well for many years to come. The “quality control” checklist for shovels is pretty short: steel tempered correctly, handle on right, wood sanded well. Shovels are a pretty simple product to get right.
Software on the other hand is some of the most complex stuff around.
At its most basic, software is a long, long list of very, very simple instructions to a computer. Draw a line on the screen from here to there; put a letter “A” at the top of the red box; if the user presses the spacebar, print a space on screen. Absolutely everything that a computer program does has to be spelled out in intimate detail. And everything that we users could possibly do when using the program has to be taken into account - every key we could possibly press has to be recognised and acted on, things like saving files and erasing files and creating new files and changing old files, all has to be spelled out, simple instruction by simple instruction.
To have computer programs which do anything but the most simple of tasks requires literally thousands, and sometimes millions of lines of computer programming. And it’s very easy for a programmer to make a mistake in one of those lines… to put a comma in where a period was supposed to go, or to misspell “goto” as “growto”.
It’s also very difficult for a programmer to imagine every possibility that might crop up out there in the real world when people are using the program to do real things. It’s one thing to have a program work fine in the lab for computer programmers, quite another thing for it to work outside the lab with real everyday people.
QUESTION: It sounds like you’re speaking from personal experience here…?
ANSWER: You’re right. I’ve written a lot computer programs, and I’ve certainly been responsible for my share of bugs. It’s been my fault that books have been shipped to Timbuktu rather that Toronto, and that 20 kids showed up for canoe lessons when they were supposed to be learning macramé. Not nuclear meltdown stuff, but bugs nonetheless.
But I don’t want to make it sound as though having computer programs which break down is an inevitable fact of life, as though there’s nothing that can be done to make the situation better.
Imagine if you bought a new car and were driving along the highway and the engine fell out. You phone the dealer and they say, very off the cuff, “oh, that’s a known issue in the ‘96 models… if you return your car to the factory, we’ll install an upgrade for $2000.”
Most people I know wouldn’t stand for this sort of thing. And the car maker in question probably wouldn’t be around for very long.
But this is kind of thing that happens every day in the computer software industry. And anybody who’s ever tried to get their computer problems solves knows this very well.
Short of phoning me - which didn’t end up helping anyway - my brother’s only recourse in trying to figure out where all his addresses went would be to phone the place where he bought his computer; they would probably tell him to phone the software company; if he could find the software company, he’d probably end up waiting on hold for an hour before talking to someone who wouldn’t have the answer to his problem anyway. And so in the end, he’d be out half a day’s work and 96 addresses.
QUESTION: Have you got any advice for people who fall victim to computer bugs?
ANSWER: My best answer to that question is “don’t use computers.” And I’m only half joking.
But my first suggestion is not to blame yourself. It’s surprising how many people, when something goes wrong with their computer, think that it’s they who have done something wrong — pressed the wrong key or typed the wrong command or just did something wrong that caused the problems they’re having.
Nine times out of ten, this just isn’t true.
Quality control in the software industry is generally horrible. In many cases, the prevailing wisdom seems to be that consumers are the quality control people: version 1.0 of a product gets released, the bug reports roll in, version 2.0 gets released with those bugs fixed, more bug reports roll in, version 3.0 gets released. And so on.
It’s no coincidence that Microsoft Windows didn’t become widely used until version 3.1; versions 1 through 3 were simply unusable. Part of Microsoft’s rationale for changing the name of Windows 4.0 to Windows 95 was to avoid creating a situation where people would hold off for Windows 4.1 to get a reliable product.
In the same way that we don’t stand for cars with engines that fall out or lawnmowers with blades that going flinging off, we’re going to have to, as consumers, start demanding that quality control in the software industry simply gets better.
Now, unfortunately, this may be impossible. Software is getting so complex that adequate quality control - stamping out all of the bugs before the packages hit the shelves - is such a huge task, a task that would cost so much and take so long, that it wouldn’t be feasible; any company that tried it would fall behind in the marketplace.
Part of the solution to this problem is for consumers to demand simpler software. Look at program like WordPerfect, for example, a commonly used word processor. You can use WordPerfect to type essays and letters and reports, save them on a disk, print them out, make some changes, and so on. When you’re doing this, you’re using a very small proportion of WordPerfect’s capabilities. WordPerfect will also create an automatic table of contents, an automatic index, it will check your spelling and your grammar, let you merge addresses and form letters together. You can use it to mix pictures and graphics and tables and charts. The problem is that all of these “extras” require thousands of extra lines of computer programming, which increase the possibility that something is going to go wrong. This isn’t something unique to WordPerfect; it’s a problem that afflicts most computer software on the market today. The fact of the matter is, the more complex that software is, the more it’s going to break down.
If all you need is a simple computer program to type simple letters, then that’s all you need. And that’s all you should need to buy and use. It might not work perfectly, but the closer your program is to being a “shovel” of a computer program and the further it is from being, say, a “nuclear reactor,” of a computer program the better off you’ll be.
QUESTION: So consumers need to demand simpler software as well as more bug-free software.
ANSWER: Exactly.
Now that all said, the other thing you can do is to come to terms with the fact that things are probably never going to get any better. You will always lose important information to bugs. Your computer will always crash, eventually. You will always be frustrated by computer programs that don’t do what they’re supposed to do. Computer people will never learn to speak without the techno-babble.
You can do things to lessen the damage: save your work every 5 minutes, make backups of your disks every night and again every week, hire someone to translate what the computer people are saying. But that’s only making a bad situation slightly better. You’ll still be frustrated and bad things will still happen.
Once you’ve admitted this, though, you can look at the real costs of using computers to solve information problems and simply figure out whether it’s worth it or not.
There are a lot of everyday information tasks that have been “technologised” that worked quite well - much better, perhaps - in their “pre-technologised” state. In a mad rush to stay “modern” and to “keep up”, a lot of us have forgotten what a simple HB pencil and stack of index cards can do for an information problem. Index cards and other “low tech” solutions are not sexy, not wired, but they are often the cheapest, most effective, and most elegant solutions to many information problems.
It’s very rare that addresses disappear off the pages of a regular old address book.
Now I’m not suggesting that computers don’t have their place, that we should just throw them all out the window, no matter how much we might want to. Even with all of their foibles, computer actually do make a lot of tasks easier. In fact they make a lot of tasks possible for the first time.
But bugs and glitches and “known issues” will always be with us.
Perhaps the best that we can do is to steadily press software companies for programs with fewer bugs and at least a friendlier voice at the end of a phone to explain them to us. We can stop blaming ourselves for problems we didn’t cause. We can try and make computer people speak our language.
And, in the end, we can take steps to at least rescue ourselves when disaster does strike.
QUESTION: And watch our for those moths…
EXTRO: Peter Rukavina operates Digital Island in Kingston, PEI… he’ll be back next week with another in the series “Consumed by Technology.”
In the summer of 1996 I presented a series on CBC Radio’s Island Morning program, produced by Ann Thurlow, called Consumed by Technology. I’ve managed to recover the audio of the episodes, along with the “show notes” and transcripts, from The Internet Archive and I’m posting each episode here for posterity.
This first fifth of Consumed by Technology focused on information privacy and the use of unique ID numbers by companies to track consumers; it aired on August 6, 1996. Karen Mair was the host.
Have you ever had a day where you’ve felt more like a number than a real person? Telephone numbers, calling card numbers, bank account numbers, bank machine numbers, credit card numbers… sometimes it seems impossible to do anything these days without one number or another.
Transcript
INTRO: Have you ever had a day where you’ve felt more like a number than a real person? Telephone numbers, calling card numbers, bank account numbers, bank machine numbers, credit card numbers… sometimes it seems impossible to do anything these days without one number or another.
In another in the series “Consumed by Technology,” Peter Rukavina joins me now to talk about all of these numbers, what they’re used for, and why you might just want to think twice the next time you’re asked for one of them.
QUESTION: So what about all these numbers…?
ANSWER: Last week we talked about the kind of information that governments record about us and what they do with it. This week I’d like to concentrate on how businesses keep track of us… and that’s where all these numbers come into play.
As you suggested, these days it seems like you need a number to do most anything: to get money from a bank machine you need your bank card, to rent a video you need a video rental card, to go to the hospital you need your hospital card.
All of these cards have numbers on them, and often its these numbers that seem most important to businesses.
In a very real sense, to whatever business or organization is looking for whatever number they need, you are your number.
Try calling up the bank and saying “Hi, it’s Peter here… can you tell me my balance please?” What’s the first question they’ll ask…?
QUESTION: “What’s your account number?”
ANSWER: Exactly. Now of course the real reason for all of these numbers has nothing to do with people at all and an awful lot to do with computers.
If you’re writing a computer program to keep track of customers, you want to make sure that all the information that gets entered into the program gets “lined up” with the right person’s record. If I make a payment on my credit card, for example, it’s important that that payment gets subtracted from my balance, not from the balance of some other Peter Rukavina.
Using numbers as the “key” for a customer database - as the way to call up any person’s record - is an easy way for computers to make this happen.
Now if this doesn’t seem like a particularly new concept, you’re right… businesses and organizations have been using numbers to keep track of us since before there were computers to make the job easier.
But what is new and different in the 1990s is what businesses are doing with these numbers - and more importantly what they’re doing with the personal information about us that these numbers are tied to.
QUESTION: What are they doing with our information?
ANSWER: Businesses call what they’re doing by odd-sounding names like “establishing client intimacy,” “relationship marketing,” or “demographic profiling,” but what it all comes down to is that businesses are using the same ability of computers to record personal information about us that they’ve been using for years, but they’re starting to gather more and more information and to look at the patterns contained in that information to try and “figure us out” and, in the end, to sell us more stuff.
QUESTION: What do you mean by “figure us out?”
ANSWER: Let’s take an example: over the past couple of years, a lot of retail stores have launched some variation of the “customer loyalty card” - the Club Z Card, the Petro Points Card, whatever. Usually you sign up for a card and then every time you purchase something you get points which, after a while, you can redeem for “free stuff.”
Now on the surface, these cards are simply a way for these businesses to keep you coming back again and again to their store. And that’s a large part of what they’re good for: they do, indeed, help to build “customer loyalty.”
But remember that every time you use one of these cards, a record of it goes into the store’s computer. Buy ten rolls of toilet paper on July 13… it’s in there. Go back on July 17 and buy 20 feet of garden hose… it’s in there too. It’s no longer just a “what” that get recorded in the store’s computer, but a “who” as well.
Purchase by purchase, this information isn’t remarkable. But taken as a whole, over time, it can be very valuable to businesses.
QUESTION: What use do businesses make of this sort of information?
ANSWER: They can use it two ways.
Firstly, they can look at broad patterns of who’s buying what. Remember that before this sort of card came along, stores could tell what was selling well, but not who was buying it.
It used to be that if I came in on Monday and bought a some toilet paper and then came in Tuesday and bought some cat food, the store would never know that it was actually me making both of those purchases.
Now that they can tell that it’s me, they can answer all sorts of new questions.
It’s one thing to know that you’ve sold 20,000 rolls of toilet paper in July, another thing altogether to know that three quarters of the people who buy toilet paper at your store also buy their shampoo from you every week. And that half of those people prefer a certain brand of shampoo.
This kind of information, used properly, can be like gold to a retailer because it helps them know more about who their customers are and what they’re buying… it helps them “figure their customers out” as a broad group. And, in the end, to market more effectively… and to sell more stuff.
The second way that businesses can use the personal information they have about us is a little more ominous, and it surrounds using information about our buying habits to try and “figure us out” as individuals.
If you’ve ever subscribed to a magazine and then, a couple of months later, started to get flooded with junk mail, then you’ve seen a primitive version of this in action. Magazines sell their mailing lists to companies who think that there’s a good chance that people who subscribe to that magazine will buy their products. Subscribe to Harrowsmith, you might start to get L.L. Bean catalogues in the mail. Subscribe to the Financial Post and you start to get mutual find mail.
QUESTION: So we’re not as much a number to them as a “the type of person that reads Harrowsmith?”
ANSWER: Right. Now what’s starting to happen now is that this practise is becoming something of a science.
Businesses are realizing that it’s a lot more efficient to send out, say, 100 catalogues to people who they know are going to buy something from them, than to send out 100,000 catalogues to people who they have a hunch might buy something from them.
And it’s in this process of moving from a list of “hunch”-people to a list of “sure thing”-people that businesses can make use all of this information they have about us.
Let’s say you go grocery shopping every week at the same store and that store has some method for keeping track of who you are and what you’re buying.
Over the course of a year - in fact probably over the course of a couple of months - that store is going to have a pretty good idea of what sort of products you buy from them. They’ll know that you buy 3 pounds of apples ever second trip, that you don’t ever buy canned juice, that you only buy flour when you buy sugar, that you just started to buy diapers in July. And so on. In that small space of life that has to do with grocery buying, they’ll probably end up knowing more about you than you know yourself.
Now think about all of the other things you buy and imagine a similar situation is in place. Your video rental store keeps track of the movies you’re renting, your clothing store knows when you buy clothes, the gas station knows what grade of gas you buy and when, your car dealer keeps track of how often you get your car serviced… almost everything we do in the marketplace has the potential to leave an electronic trail behind.
Now again, any of this information taken alone - the fact that I bought a bag of apples on Monday, for example - isn’t very useful to anyone. But, just like the “One Big Government Database” that we talked about last week, the real potential power of this information for business lies in combining this information about us with other information about us from other businesses and then using powerful computer programs to help to slot us all into a very narrow “demographic profile” - a sort of map of our lives based on what we buy.
Businesses can then turn around and use this demographic profile to hit us with very, very targeted and specific marketing messages.
QUESTION: So it’s no longer just getting L.L. Bean catalogues in the mail because I subscribe to Harrowsmith…
ANSWER: …it’s getting personalised coupons for cloth diapers in the mail because of three visits to a maternity clothing store in the past month combined with the fact that we just purchased a new washing machine.
It’s having my cable company give me a free month of TSN because I rent sports videos a couple of times a month and subscribe to the Hockey News.
It’s getting email from a drywall contractor because I bought five home renovation books at the local bookstore over the last two weeks.
There are not a lot of businesses taking things to this extent yet, but to get some idea of what a seasoned professional in the direct marketing game looks like, you only need to look as far as Readers Digest. Most people probably think that Readers Digest is just a magazine. And it is. But more than that its a huge database of marketing opportunities. With 15 million subscribers, Readers Digest has one of the largest and finely developed databases in the world. As they use the list, they learn more and more about the people on it and they use that information to market to those people even more. What Readers Digest - and the Columbia Record and Tape Club and the Book-of-the-Month Club and other veterans in this game - having been doing for years now is something which will become more and more common in many, many other, smaller businesses in years to come.
Standards for recording and sharing personal commercial information are being developed. Computers are getting smaller, faster, cheaper, and networked together. More and more of commerce is moving to mail order and the Internet and other electronic systems where gathering information is so much easier and more invisible. After using bank machines for a decade, we’re all starting to use debit cards more and more; “smart cards” that actually carry money around are on the way soon.
Taken together, the signs all suggest that whatever you want to call this “customer intimacy building” is only going to become more and popular and common.
QUESTION: Should we as consumers be wary of this?
ANSWER: It all depends on how you feel about your personal information. If you like receiving things in the mail, if you don’t care who knows what about you, if you don’t mind being slotted into a very narrow demographic group for marketing purposes, then the world is going your way.
If, however, you value your privacy, if you’re the kind of person who blanches at junk mail and values the kind of personal service that comes from being known as an actual real live human being and not a number with a demographic, then you’ve got something to be worried about.
And I say that in all seriousness; although I’d tend to put myself in the later group, there are a lot of people who see this trend as being a positive thing, as a giant leap forward for the science of marketing. And many of these people are consumers themselves.
QUESTION: What about the issue of privacy? Do we actually have any control for how all this personal information about is used?
ANSWER: The short answer is no.
A lot of privacy issues we take for granted: I can’t call up a department store, for example, and ask them how much you charged to your account last year because in most if not all cases, they consider that information confidential.
But by and large our privacy is not protected by legislation, but by tradition.
Industries that have been around for a while often have a “privacy code of conduct.” Most credit agencies, for example, will only reveal information about you to people who have your consent and will always let you look at your own file and will let you request that changes be made if they are warranted.
But other businesses, which haven’t really seen themselves as being in the information business until recently may very well think that whatever information they have on you is their property to do with as they see fit. And a business that would never consider giving out your name and address to a third party might not think twice about selling information about what you buy from them and when.
The best advice I can given anyone who is concerned about the privacy of their commercial personal information is to simply be extremely vigilant. Whenever a business asks you for information which would identify you, ask them what they want it for, how they’re going to store it, whether they consider it confidential and whether or not they’ll sell information about you to anyone else.
If their answer doesn’t satisfy you, don’t give them any information.
Of course it’s hard to be vigilant when everyone is looking for one number or another, especially when you live in a small place like PEI where you might not have any choice as to where to shop.
But short of legislation which places limits on the use of commercial personal information it’s really the only option we have.
What bothers me about this trend is really not as much a privacy issue as the notion that we’re quickly moving from a world where personal relationships are the core of the marketplace to a world where demographics and buying patterns and databases are the core. I’m no longer a thinking breathing person with a set of shopkeepers who know me and my needs, I’m a number attached to a file attached to a profile which sits in a computer in some far off place owned by people who think that this tells them who I am.
And that… makes me sad.
EXTRO: Peter Rukavina operates Digital Island in Kingston, PEI… he’ll be back next week with another in the series “Consumed by Technology.”
In the summer of 1996 I presented a series on CBC Radio’s Island Morning program, produced by Ann Thurlow, called Consumed by Technology. I’ve managed to recover the audio of the episodes, along with the “show notes” and transcripts, from The Internet Archive and I’m posting each episode here for posterity.
This fourth episode of Consumed by Technology focused access to information; it aired on July 30, 1996. Karen Mair was the host.
It used to be that in rural communities on Prince Edward Island, the local telephone operator was the “central clearinghouse” for all types of information. If you wanted to know what the hymns were for church on Sunday, or whether Mrs. MacIsaac had given birth yet or what the price of apples at the general store was, you’d just pick up the phone and ask. The last rural telephone operator left service almost 20 years ago, but the idea of a “central clearinghouse” for information is still alive and well.
Show Notes
These are the original links that I released with the episode; each is a link to the Internet Archive’s cache of the site at the time.
- The Numbers
- Government and Privacy
- Information For Sale
Transcript
INTRO: It used to be that in rural communities on Prince Edward Island, the local telephone operator was the “central clearinghouse” for all types of information. If you wanted to know what the hymns were for church on Sunday, or whether Mrs. MacIsaac had given birth yet or what the price of apples at the general store was, you’d just pick up the phone and ask.
The last rural telephone operator left service almost 20 years ago, but the idea of a “central clearinghouse” for information is still alive and well.
For another in the series “Consumed by Technology,” Peter Rukavina joins me now to talk about this, and to tell us what he found out when he asked the question “What have they got on me?”
QUESTION: So the operators are all gone, but their spirit lives on?
ANSWER: Well, perhaps a vague shadow of their spirit, a distant cousin, you might say…
As you suggested, in days gone by, rural telephone operators played a central role in community life as the chief “keepers of information. “
After telephones came along, pretty well anything important that had to be communicated had to pass through the local telephone exchange. This meant that the operators had a pretty good handle on everyone’s life and goings on, and so if you wanted to know something, there was a good chance the local operator would either know themselves, or could tell you who did. In their own way, they were pretty powerful people in their communities.
Today, telephone operators are gone, but what has lived on is the notion that having a central clearinghouse for information makes you a pretty powerful person.
In this “wired world,” the place that information gets stored - the clearinghouse - is not in the minds of telephone operators, but in databases in computers. And so today, it’s really the person with the fastest computers and the best databases that holds the most power.
Now with all of that in mind, I decided to set out to answer the question “What have they got on me?” I was curious to know how much information about me and my everyday life is sitting out there in the computers of the world, what it’s used for, and who can get access to it.
QUESTION: Well… what did you find out?
ANSWER: I started by sitting down with a piece of paper and listing out all of the businesses and organizations and governments that I knew had a file on me. I started with things like my driver’s license, my bank accounts, my Social Insurance Number, the credit bureau and continued on to things like the local video store, my Internet provider, and all of the magazines that I subscribe to. And on and on.
Now I don’t tend to get surprised about much when it comes to information and technology, but I must say that I was overwhelmed by the size of this list when I was done… in 10 or 15 minutes I came up with almost 50 places that had some sort of information about me in their files. And those were just the places I knew about.
Once I had this long list in hand, I decided to zero in on a couple of the items, make some phone calls, and see what more I could find out about exactly how and what was being recorded about me.
I started with my driver’s license, which I figured was a good place to start because it has a reputation as being a sort of “universal card” - people ask for it when you want to rent cars or videos or sign up for a cheque cashing card at the grocery store.
I assumed that if someone had my driver’s license number they could just phone the driver’s license people in the government and find out where I lived and what kind of car I owned and whether I’d run over anybody lately.
QUESTION: And were you right?
Well, actually, no.
Much to my surprise, when I talked to the Highway Safety people in the Department of Transportation and Public Works I was told that driver’s license information is absolutely, positively confidential.
The only people who could get at it were them, me, and the police. I asked them why, if this was the case, people still asked for my driver’s license number when I signed up for things that had nothing to do with driving.
They had no idea. If it was useful to others, they said, it certainly wasn’t because of anything they were doing.
Now, as I said, this all came as something of a surprise to me; I’d always thought driver’s license information was public.
And then I found out why I’d always thought this.
Being an Ontario boy, I got on the phone to the Ontario Ministry of Transportation. I never actually did get to talk to a real live person, but I was told by the talking computer that answered the phone that if I sent them $12.00 and an Ontario driver’s license number, they would send me what they call a “Driver Record Search,” which lists the name and address and three years worth of accident and speeding ticket information for the person with that license.
And if I lived in Ontario, I could do the same thing simply by walking up to something called a “Service Ontario” machine where I could slip in my credit card, and get the goods on as many people as I could afford.
QUESTION: They’re obviously a little more liberal with their information in Ontario… what about closer to home in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia?
ANSWER: Again, it seems to depend on where you are.
The person I talked to at the Nova Scotia Department of Consumer Services gave me pretty much the same answer as I got from Prince Edward Island: driver’s license information is not public. They seemed shocked that I would even ask.
In New Brunswick, however, the Motor Vehicles Branch told me that if I sent $8.00 to their office in Fredericton, I could get the driver record of any New Brunswick driver and I wouldn’t even need their driver’s license number, just their name.
I was curious to see what the American take on driver’s license information was, so I headed out on the Internet so see what I could find out.
I did a search for the phrase “obtain driver’s license information” and, wouldn’t you know, that first thing that popped up was an business calling itself the “Internet Department of Motor Vehicles.”
Just by filling out a form right there online, giving them a state and a name, for some states a driver’s license number, and my credit card number, for $20.00 they would email or fax me back any driver record, for any driver, anywhere in the United States.
QUESTION: So it seems that we might be ahead of the pack here on the Island when it comes to protecting people’s privacy…
ANSWER: Well of course some people would suggest that we’re actually behind the pack… again, it depends on who you talk to.
In fact that brings up one of the Big Issues that surround keeping information about people on file, and that’s the question of who owns the information. Is, for example, my driver’s license file my property or the government’s?
Now you might think that someone having access to your driver’s license file isn’t such a big deal.
But what if that someone is an insurance company that turns you down because you got into an accident 5 years ago that wasn’t really your fault.
Or a local car dealer who just happens to have a deal on the latest model of the car you’re driving now - in your colour!
The point is that it’s hard to foresee what others might do with information about you.
The situation becomes somewhat more complicated if you start looking at the issue not just of one government database or another being public, but the potential power of several of those databases combined.
This is really where the telephone operators got their power: not from just knowing that Mr. Jones wasn’t at home on Sunday night because he wasn’t there to accept a long distance call, but also knowing that he used to be married to a mysterious woman from Toronto, a woman reported to be seen in Charlottetown on Sunday morning.
Computer people call this “the power of systems integration.”
QUESTION: So it’s not knowing all the little bits of information as much as having them all collected together…
ANSWER: Exactly.
Now if I continue down my list and just look at the branches of government who have files on me, I see Revenue Canada with a complete record of what I earn and what I spend in my business, the Passport Office with a record of my comings and goings in and out of the country, the Customs Office with information on what packages I’ve received from outside the country.
The Department of the Environment knows what size my septic tank is, the Land Office knows what my house is worth. If I owned a dog, I’d need a license and that a record of that license would be in somebody’s computer.
Now although I don’t really consider it anyone’s business but my own whether I own a dog or not, or what the size of my septic tank is, I’m not too concerned that information like that “gets out.”
Imagine, however, if all of these databases were, effectively, “One Big Database.” What if it was possible to go up to a machine in the mall, slip in a credit card, and for 10 or 15 bucks find out everything that government knows about any person: where they live, how long they’ve been there, what they earn, who they’re married to… whatever.
Now I should hasten to add that this is, in fact, not the case at least right now.
There isn’t, at least yet, “One Big Database” of government information and, in fact, government’s have been quite strict about how they share their information with other governments. But the potential is certainly there for this sharing to happen.
Take the example in Ontario where the provincial government is trying to get access to federal government files to help them track down people not making child support payments.
This is another one of those instances where the basic issues themselves aren’t really that new - governments have been keeping track of us for years - but the power that computers bring to the task of collating and sorting and distributing this information changes the dynamic of the issue so much that we all have be a little more vigilant about keeping an eye on what governments are doing with information about us because they can do so much more now than ever before.
QUESTION: Now that’s government information, what about information that businesses keep on file about us?
ANSWER: I’m reminded of a call that my friend Leslie Niblett got when she was living in El Paso, Texas for a time. A woman from Houston whose name was also Leslie Niblett phoned her up, out of the blue, one day in the midst of a hunt for the Leslie Niblett that was making her life hell.
It seems that some other n’er-do-well Leslie Niblett in Texas had skipped out on making their JC Penny Department Store card payments and that this fact had been incorrectly noted on the Houston Leslie Niblett’s credit file. She was now trying to buy a house, and was being turned down for a mortgage because of this. Her only solution was to call every Leslie Niblett in Texas until she found the one who was making her life so difficult. Lord knows if she ever did find her, and even if she did, what she could have said…
I’ll be back next week to talk about how this could have happened, how it could happen to you, and generally about how businesses can use the information they have about us to sell more stuff.
EXTRO: Peter Rukavina operates Digital Island in Kingston, PEI… he’ll be back next week with another in the series “Consumed by Technology.”
In the summer of 1996 I presented a series on CBC Radio’s Island Morning program, produced by Ann Thurlow, called Consumed by Technology. I’ve managed to recover the audio of the episodes, along with the “show notes” and transcripts, from The Internet Archive and I’m posting each episode here for posterity.
This third episode of Consumed by Technology focused on the rhythms of digital working; it aired on July 23, 1996. Karen Mair was the host.
Farmers live from season to season. Car makers live by the model year. Monks live a lifetime of coming to understand God. Politicians live by their terms. Every sort of work has its own rhythm, and these rhythms can profoundly affect people’s everyday lives.
Show Notes
These are the original links that I released with the episode; each is a link to the Internet Archive’s cache of the site at the time.
- Jazzed up
- Mad as Hell
Transcript
INTRO: Farmers live from season to season. Car makers live by the model year. Monks live a lifetime of coming to understand God. Politicians live by their terms. Every sort of work has its own rhythm, and these rhythms can profoundly affect people’s everyday lives.
In another in the series “Consumed by Technology,” Peter Rukavina joins me now to talk about the rhythms of the “digital worker” and what he calls “the death of time.”
QUESTION: What exactly is a “digital worker?”
ANSWER: Well, the easiest answer to that question is that I’m pretty sure that I’m a “digital worker.” Being a digital worker means that the “stuff” of my job is digital information; what I do all day is move it around.
I’ve had a lot of jobs in my life - I’ve sold car parts at Canadian Tire; I’ve sorted turtle bones in a museum; I’ve taught 7 year olds how to canoe; I’ve pasted up the sports section a daily newspaper every day.
All of these jobs, in one way or another, have dealt with “real stuff” - car parts, turtles, kids and canoes, newspapers - and they’ve all been the sort of work that gets “finished” at some point - the part gets sold, the bones get sorted, the kids know how to canoe, the newspaper gets printed.
But now that I have a job as a “digital worker,” the days of having “real stuff” to deal with and jobs that have a beginning, a middle and an end seem to be gone.
What I do all day is sit in front of a computer screen moving around bits of digital space: words, graphics, pictures. The different thing about moving around bits of digital information as opposed to, say, moving around bits of turtles, is that digital information is a very “elastic” thing - it’s extremely easy to change - and that elasticity makes for a very different work life than what I’ve been used to.
Think about the difference between typing something on a manual typewriter versus typing it on a word processor. If you get 7 pages into it on a typewriter and decide that you want to add a new paragraph somewhere on page 3, it’s out with the exacto knife and the rubber cement and 15 or 20 minutes of fiddling around. On a word processor, all you need to do is to pop up to page 3, hit insert and start typing.
The simplest way to understand what being a digital worker is like is to take that example - typewriters versus word processors - and extend it to almost all aspects of a work life.
For me, going to work means logging on to the ‘net. The tools I use are text editors and electronic paint programs and modems. And the work I do is like being a construction worker in cyberspace: I arrange bits of information so that people can find them and make sense of them. I don’t move around bales of hay or pizzas, I move around ferry schedules, soil test results and electronic pictures of horses. My job is to maintain a constantly evolving pool of information in good order
QUESTION: That sort of work sounds very familiar… how is being a “digital worker” different from what we do here on the radio every day? We’re both in the “information moving business,” aren’t we?
ANSWER: Well yes, we’re both in the information moving business. The important difference, though, is that come 9 o’clock this morning, today’s “Island Morning” is done; you can’t go back and change something that happened at 7:15, because it’s already out there in people’s radios… it’s done. Making radio - and, for that matter, making television or newspapers, or magazines — is a lot like using a manual typewriter. The rhythm of these media is hourly or daily or weekly or monthly. They start. They end. They’re done.
Working with digital information, though, is a different story. If I take a piece of information, let’s say it’s a map of Charlottetown, and put it on the Internet. In the “old print world,” my job would now be done.
But remember, digital information is very easy to change. Let’s say that in two weeks, a new road gets constructed in East Royalty, or a street downtown gets changed to one-way, or new park gets created. Because the map is on the Internet, because it’s a digital map, I can simply go and make these changes. As soon as I make them, the original map is gone and is replaced by a new, more up-to-date map.
To do the same thing in the “old print world,” would mean printing and distributing a whole new map, something you wouldn’t tend to do very often because of the cost of paper and ink and distribution.
Now this might seem like a pretty simple concept: digital information is easier to change.
But the important thing here is not one example or another, but an entire work day, or work week, or work year, spent working in a world where everything can be changed, updated, redesigned - easily - all the time.
That’s what being a digital worker is like.
QUESTION: Now you call this the “death of time?”
Well, I’ll admit that “the death of time” might be blowing things a little out of proportion, but let me explain why it feels like that’s exactly what it is…
I don’t think anyone would disagree that the job you have, and how time factors into it, can really affect the rest of your life. If you work the night shift, for example, you’re awake when everyone else is asleep. If you’re a teacher, you get a two month vacation in the middle of the summer. If you farm potatoes, there’s not a lot to do in the fields in January. If you host Island Morning, you’ve got to get up before almost everyone else.
Now, as you suggested earlier, time also factors into jobs in another way: every occupation has its own rhythm, or “life cycle” associated with it. This isn’t necessarily a day to day thing that has to do with when you have to get up in the morning, it’s more about the natural cycle of whatever it is you work at.
If you’re a farmer, you plant a crop every season. Spring comes, you plow, fertilize, sow, roll, till, spray… harvest. Winter comes. And then you do it all again. When farmers talk about how things are going in their lives, usually it has something to do with how the crop is going. You’ve had a good year if you’ve had a good crop. You’ve had a bad year if you’ve had a bad crop. The rhythm of the farm is the season.
If you work in a hospital emergency room, each “project” you take on is one case coming in the door. They’re hurt, you treat them, they go away. Total time, anywhere from a few minutes to a couple of hours. Then it’s on to the next patient. The rhythm of the emergency room is the coming and going of the patients.
Again, these rhythms can have a profound affect on how people live their lives, not just in a practical way, but in a way which affects how they feel and think and relate to the rest of the world.
Imagine then what it’s like to work in a job where the work is, quite literally, never done, where the “stuff” that you’re working on is constantly evolving, where everything is in a constant state of flux, where projects start, but never really finish, because they can always be changed, updated, made better, clearer, easier to understand.
The rhythm of this sort of job - the rhythm of “digital work” - is very, very different than the rhythm of any other sort of work. It’s either so long that it’s endless, or so short that it’s invisible.
For all practical purposes, though, it’s as if there’s no rhythm at all.
And in a way, that means that there’s no time at all. Or at the very least it means that how people and work and time all relate is very different from what we’re used to.
So that’s why it call it “the death of time.”
QUESTION: What are the practical implications of this? What have you noticed about your life as a “digital worker?”
ANSWER: One significant thing is that getting satisfaction from my job is difficult, or at least different. It’s not like there’s a pile of something getting smaller as I work, or a last nail to drive in to finish, or a published book to put up on the shelf. I have to get my satisfaction from the process of working rather than from the finished product because, really, the product is never finished.
My day to day work life is different too.
Because there’s no beginning, middle or end to the projects I work on, and because the tasks involved in digital work tend to be shorter rather than longer, I tend to be working on 25 or 30 little things all at the same time. And which 25 or 30 things I’m working on changes from day to day, from hour to hour. I might spend five minutes adding a bit to an Internet page I’m working on here on the Island, 10 minutes fixing up a database on a computer in Boston, another five minutes answering some email and so on, hour after hour. It makes it difficult to go home at 5 o’clock because there’s really no logical place to end the work day… there’s always something else to evolve a little bit before I call it a day, and sometimes I end up evolving until 9 or 10 at night.
QUESTION: So computers have changed our whole idea of what is work time and what is home time?
ANSWER: Well, certainly for me they have, and that too can be something of a challenge. Because digital work can be done from anywhere - including from home - it just makes the dividing line between work and home all that fuzzier.
Perhaps most importantly, though, is the challenge of doing digital work in what is still largely an analog world.
It tends to be the places where “old analog” meets “new digital” that are the most challenging. This is true in work - how do you set up electronic hotel reservations at hotels with no computers - but I tend to notice it more in just regular day-to-day life.
I’ve started to notice, for example, that in my personal life, I don’t tend to think ahead very much; it’s hard to shift from a minute-by-minute digital way of thinking to a “where should we go on vacation this fall?” or a “when do you think the broccoli will be up?” way of thinking. It’s hard to move from a digital world where everything is malleable and elastic and easily changed to a concrete “real” world where pipes burst and ceilings fall in and cars run out of gas.
Now I don’t want to make it sound as though I’ve morphed into some sort of digital cyberguy or even as though my life is any different, worse or better than anyone else’s. My mortgage still comes due at the end of every month and I still brush my teeth twice a day.
But I do notice a difference in my life as a digital worker as opposed to my life as, say, a canoe instructor.
And I do think it’s important to look carefully at the long-term social consequences of this transition to an “information economy” — with all the digital workers it will require — that we seem to be in the middle of. In the end, I think the real effects of digital work on society won’t be felt, or at least understood, for 5 or 10 years and it may be too late by then to have any control over them.
QUESTION: In some ways, it sounds like it may be too late now…
ANSWER: It’s very hard to say: the changes we’re talking about are so small and so subtle, and the nature digital work itself changes so much, that actually putting your finger on something and saying “no, this is something we don’t want to happen” or “hey, isn’t that a nice new thing to have happened” seems almost impossible.
In any case, I certainly know that there are some days that I’d relish another go at the turtle bone pile or the chance to sell someone a muffler for a ‘75 Dodge Dart…
EXTRO: Peter Rukavina operates Digital Island in Kingston, PEI… he’ll be back next week with another in the series “Consumed by Technology.”
In the summer of 1996 I presented a series on CBC Radio’s Island Morning program, produced by Ann Thurlow, called Consumed by Technology. I’ve managed to recover the audio of the episodes, along with the “show notes” and transcripts, from The Internet Archive and I’m posting each episode here for posterity.
This second episode of Consumed by Technology focused on the economics of moving around information on the Internet; it aired on July 16, 1996. Karen Mair was the host.
In 1837, a retired school teacher named Rowland Hill wrote an essay which shook the world of “moving information from place to place,” an essay which is perhaps even more relevant today than it was when he wrote it.
Show Notes
These are the original links that I released with the episode; each is a link to the Internet Archive’s cache of the site at the time.
- About Rowland Hill and the Mail
- The Post Office
- The Phone Company
- Paying for the Internet
- Basic accounts fees at PEINet, Sympatico, Atlantic Connect (all here on Prince Edward Island) and AT&T WorldNet, Mindspring, The Well (all bigger U.S. Internet providers)
- How big is this?
Transcript
INTRO: In 1837, a retired school teacher named Rowland Hill wrote an essay which shook the world of “moving information from place to place,” an essay which is perhaps even more relevant today than it was when he wrote it.
To talk about this retired school teacher and about “moving information around from place to place,” Peter Rukavina joins me now in another in the series “Consumed by Technology.”
QUESTION: What exactly was in this essay that shook up the world?
ANSWER: Well, in 1837, Rowland Hill was living in England after retiring from a career as a teacher and administrator. He was quite an eclectic man; he was know for his somewhat innovative teaching methods and his interests in printing, astronomy, mathematics, and transportation.
And in that year, 1837, he produced a pamphlet called “Post Office Reform: Its Importance and Practicability”. And, quite simply, the theories he forwarded in this pamphlet revolutionised the postal system, not only in England, but around the world. And not only in 1837, but in ways which live on today.
You see up until that time, the cost of sending a letter was based on a rather complex set of factors like the distance the letter was to travel and the number sheets of paper you sent and so on. And in fact the cost was usually charged to the person receiving a letter, not the person sending it.
This all resulted in the need for something of an overwhelming postal bureaucracy: not only did the people delivering the mail have to charge for every letter they delivered, but they had to charge a different amount for each one. And that amount had to be figured out.
The system required large number of people, cost so much that is was hard for the common person to use it, and was just generally inefficient.
And then Rowland Hill can along with three relatively simple suggestions:
- Postal rates should be lower.
- The cost of sending a letter should be the same, regardless of distance.
- Costs should be paid by the sender, not the recipient
Although Hill faced some political challenges getting his ideas across, in the end, nothing could stop common sense and by 1840 uniform postal rates, and postage stamps purchased by the sender, were in place across England. Within 25 years his ideas had spread around the world.
What we end up with, 159 years later, is a system here in Canada where you can send a standard letter to any of 12 million addresses in the country, for just 45 cents.
QUESTION: So Rowland Hill gave us a world with cheap, universal postal rates?
ANSWER: Exactly. And not only that, but his ideas changed the model for the way that information was moved from to place to place.
Now that we live in an “information economy” where we’re moving around more and more information and less and less tractors and sheet metal and rolls of carpet, how we pay to send and receive information becomes only more important.
Imagine, for example, a world where it cost $73 to send a letter to Toronto. Or what if international telephone calls were free? Or we had to pay for Island Morning by the minute? What if it cost five dollars to run a TV commercial during Compass?
In a world where money is so important to us, how we pay to move information dramatically affects how we deal with that information. Generally, the cheaper it is, the more we use it.
Now, in addition to the sort of “all you can eat” way we pay for postal service - one fee, as much information as you can stuff in an envelope - there are generally three factors used to charge for moving information from place to place: how much, how far, and how long. Which of these is in place for a particular “information moving device” tends to determine how we use that device in our daily lives.
QUESTION: Well what about telephone service as an example?
Telephone service is an interesting case because the way we pay for it changes depending on where we’re calling. Local calls are “all you can eat” and long distance calls are charged using a combination of time and distance - not unlike postal service before 1837.
Now think of the difference in the way we make local phone calls versus the way we make long distance calls. In any given day, I might make 20 or 30 local phone calls. Because I don’t have to pay for each one, I don’t even think about picking up the phone at the drop of a hat to make a local call.
Long distance calls, however, are a different matter. Because I have to pay for each one, even thinking about making a long distance call is a different kind of thing altogether from making a local call, to say nothing of the experience of actually making a long distance call with the clock silently ticking all the time in the background.
Not it sort of seems a little silly to be describing all of this is such intimate detail; it seems like such a natural part of our lives that we just take it for granted that to call across the street is free and to call Halifax costs. But sometimes it’s useful to step back for a minute and realize that all of these distinctions are ones we’ve allowed to be put in place; take these arbitrary distinctions as to where is “near” and where is “far” and multiply their effect over millions of phone calls over the years, and you’re talking about a pretty major issue. And an issue which not only affects the size of our phone bills at the end of the month but which can determine how communities relate to each other.
Take North and South Granville, for example, close to Hunter River in the middle of the Island.
South Granville is in the Hunter River “964” telephone exchange and North Granville, just over the hill, really, is in the New London “886” exchange. Now I’ve been told that the natural inclination of people in South Granville is towards Hunter River and Charlottetown, both local calls, whereas the natural inclination of people in North Granville is towards Kensington and Summerside, again, both local calls. As a result, the natural inclination of North and South Granville is not towards each other. It seems like such a simple and insignificant thing on one level, but when you start to think about all of the friendships and marriages and business arrangements that have been subtly affected by this over the years, it looms pretty large in the grander scheme of things.
And again, it’s really all about how we charge for moving information from place to place.
QUESTION: You mentioned the “information economy”… how do things like the Internet fit into all of this?
ANSWER: Well, although the Internet has been around, in one form or another, for over 20 years, it’s only in the last couple that people like you and me have started to use it. And so how we pay for using it - what “information moving” model will apply is only in the process of being figured out.
By far the dominant model right now is something which shares something in common with long distance phone service and something in common with the revolutionary postal system of Rowland Hill. In most cases when you sign up for an Internet account you pay a certain fixed monthly fee which allows you to spend a certain number of hours connected to the Internet… $30 for 30 hours, for example. Any time that you spend online over that fixed monthly amount is billed by the hour.
QUESTION: So the clock is always ticking?
ANSWER: Yes indeed, and, as you might imagine, that affects the way that people use their time online.
The Internet is often compared to the public library; they’re both places where lots of information is stored and organized.
Think of the feeling you get from wandering around a public library: you might wander over to the magazine section and read the latest issue of the New Yorker, browse though the Irish travel book section for a while, maybe try and find the latest John Grisham novel. Because using public libraries is free, and because you can take as much time as you want to find what you need, there’s a certain kind of freedom that libraries bring to gathering information.
On the “billed by the hour” Internet, however, that freedom is gone. Although you can wander around the Internet in much the same way you can wander around a library, and although you’re not paying for the actual information you’re browsing, there’s always that feeling that the clock is ticking. It’s not unlike the feeling that you get making a long distance telephone call.
One of the reasons I know this is true is because I’ve experienced another way of using the Internet, a model which is gradually becoming more common, and that is paying a fixed monthly fee for unlimited Internet use. This is a model very similar to the way we pay for cable television; in essence, “all you can eat.” Without that invisible clock ticking in the background, “surfing the net” is an entirely different experience.
QUESTION: Do you expect that this “all you can eat” approach is going to be the way of the future?
Well, it’s certainly preferable from a consumer’s point of view, but it also makes it hard for someone in the Internet business to make any money.
The third possible model for paying for the Internet, and the one which perhaps makes the most amount of sense for someone in the Internet business and the least amount of sense for consumers, is the “pay by the byte” model. This is similar to the way we pay for telegrams: by the word.
In essence, we would pay for the actual amount of information we browsed on the Internet, no matter how long it took. If we look up two books in the Library of Congress online catalogue, it might cost us 5 cents. I we look up ten books, it might cost us 25 cents.
Just to give you some idea of the relative size of pieces of information: the book Anne of Green Gables weighs in at just under half a million bytes - one byte equals one letter or space in the book. The entire Canadian Constitution is about 100,000 bytes long while the American Declaration of Independence is about 7,000 bytes long. The Encyclopaedia Britannica article on dandelions is 508 bytes long.
Now remember, in this “pay by the byte” model, the clock isn’t ticking, but the “information meter” is. It’s more the bookstore way of doing things than the public library way of doing things.
The “pay by the byte” way of charging for Internet use isn’t really common for consumers yet, but it’s becoming an increasingly common model for charging businesses for Internet access.
QUESTION: So the Internet will be “pay by the minute,” “all you can eat,” or “pay by the byte?”
ANSWER: In the end it will probably be some combination of the three. No matter what the final model is, however, its going to have a dramatic affect on the role that the Internet plays in our life.
Just to introduce one final wrench in the works: there’s a lot of talk now about “convergence” - about telephone and television and radio and the Internet all merging into one sort of “digital appliance.” When you hear people talking about a “set top box” this is what they’re talking about.
Things start to get really weird when you start thinking about telephone service - the new “digital appliance” telephone service - being billed not by the minute or by distance like we’re used to, but by the amount of information that is communicated.
“Hello mother, I’m doing well” might cost you a tenth of a cent, “Hi Mom, all okay!” might cost you half as much. We could end up with a whole generation of people talking in a weird abbreviated code.
QUESTION: We’d have old Rowland Hill rolling over in his grave…
ANSWER: Indeed. Just remember, the next time that you pick up the phone or send a letter or pick up the newspaper, or watch TV, you’re helping to move information from place to place. And how you’re paying for it probably has a lot more to do with how you’re doing it than you realize.
EXTRO: Peter Rukavina operates Digital Island in Kingston. He’ll be back next week for another in the series “Consumed by Technology.”
About This Blog
I am Peter Rukavina and this is my blog. I am a writer, letterpress printer, and a curious person.
To learn more about me, read my /now, look at my bio, read presentations and speeches I’ve written, or get in touch (peter@rukavina.net is the quickest way). You can subscribe to an RSS feed of posts, an RSS feed of comments, or receive a daily digests of posts by email.