What have they got on me?

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.

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.”

The Death of Time

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.

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.”

Sale on words… 50 cents a pound

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.

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:

  1. Postal rates should be lower.
  2. The cost of sending a letter should be the same, regardless of distance.
  3. 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.”

Four inches of metal strapping for 37 cents

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 Wayback Machine and I’m posting each episode here for posterity.

This first episode of Consumed by Technology focused on the coming of the commercial realm to the Internet; it aired on July 9, 1996. Wayne Collins was the host.

It’s hard to believe that only two years ago we were talking about the Internet as a lofty academic sort of place where you could do things like search the Library of Congress catalogue and read research papers on fruit fly migration patterns. The business world has now discovered the Internet and it’s as if a giant shopping mall has suddenly moved in next door to the old “Internet public library.”

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.

Transcript

INTRO: It’s hard to believe that only two years ago we were talking about the Internet as a lofty academic sort of place where you could do things like search the Library of Congress catalogue and read research papers on fruit fly migration patterns.

The business world has now discovered the Internet and it’s as if a giant shopping mall has suddenly moved in next door to the old “Internet public library.”

In the first of a new series we call “Consumed by Technology,” Peter Rukavina joins me now to talk about “going shopping in cyberspace.”

QUESTION: So business has jumped online…?

ANSWER: Yes, in a very, very big way. As you suggested, it’s hard to believe that just a couple of years ago there was still raging debate about whether even mentioning something vaguely commercial-sounding on the Internet was acceptable. Many long-time Internet users - people in universities and colleges and governments - were convinced that if the Internet “sold out” to business, it would loose the sort of fuzzy, anarchic “information sharing” feeling that had developed over 20 years of being something of a “secret nerds-only club.”

Now, all that’s changed and you’d be hard pressed to find a business, small or large, that isn’t on the Internet right now or in the processing of getting there.

QUESTION: Now when you say that a business is “on the Internet,” what does that mean?

ANSWER: That can mean many things. What it usually boils down to is something called a “home page” which is really just a starting place, a “page one” for a business’ electronic presence.

Some businesses just have a very simple home page: they list their address and telephone number, have a paragraph about what it is they do, maybe a picture or two of their building or their products and that’s it.

Other businesses dive in with both feet and have thousands of pages of product information, online order forms, lifestyle magazines, contests and whatever else they can dream up to get people to come to their Internet site and hang around for a while.

No matter how extensive their Internet presence is, most businesses are trying to do two things online: first, to generally build their “brand identity” and second to “sell stuff.”

QUESTION: By “selling stuff” do you mean something along the lines of “electronic catalogue shopping?”

ANSWER: I can answer that best with a couple of examples. I must admit to being something of an “home shopping” cynic. I’ve never been one to order things from the “Home Shopping Channel” and I’m not really a catalogue shopper. But recently I’ve become something of an bona fide “online shopper” so I can tell you some real life “stories from the field” to give you some idea what it’s actually like.

For me, online shopping really works for three things: buying CDs and tapes, buying books, and buying computer software. Lately I’ve found myself doing each of these at least a couple of times a month.

QUESTION: When you talk, for example, about buying a book online, explain to me how the process actually works.

ANSWER: Well, typically I’ll have a specific book in mind. I’ve not really found the Internet a very good place to browse around for books - it lacks the “feel” of a genuine good bookstore.

So with my specific book in mind, I’ll dial up the Internet, go to a online bookstore’s “home page” and select the option to search their catalogue of books. I can enter a title, or an author, or a subject and get a list on my screen of all the books in their store that fit the bill.

One example: a couple of months ago I rented the movie “Speechless”, which is about a man and woman set inside the centre of a U.S. federal election. She manages the Republican campaign, he manages the Democrat campaign… somehow they meet and fall in love and get married.

Now I knew this was all based on a true story and I’d read somewhere that the two “real people” had written a book about it. But I had no idea who they were. To find the answer to that question, I relied on a low-tech solution and phoned my brother Steve. When he heard what I was looking for, he immediately said “oh, you mean the book by James Carville and Mary Matalin…”.

So I had my answer.

Now, being the home shopping cynic that I am, the first thing I did was phone my local bookstore. No sense in buying something online if I can just go down the block. I told them I was looking for a book by James Carville and Mary Matalin that has something to do with the U.S. election.

They searched in their computer and nothing came up.

They looked on their microfiche and there was nothing there.

They suggested, perhaps, that no such book existed.

They sort of sounded like maybe I was bothering them and I should leave.

So I did. And I went home and sat down at my computer and decided it was time to give online shopping a whirl.

I ended up at a bookstore called “amazon.com” (which, I later found out, is somewhere in Seattle).

From their “home page”, I clicked on “search our catalogue, ” entered “Carville, James” in the blank, clicked on “Search Now,” and, a couple of seconds later, the titles of seven books were listed on my screen, including three different versions of why I came to know was called “All’s Fair: Love, War and Running for President” - paperback, hardcover, and audio cassette.

I clicked on “Audio Cassette” and then “Buy Items Now”, entered my name, mailing address, and credit card number, told them how I wanted the book shipped and that was it. A week later the book was waiting for me at the post office.

Sub’ in CDs and tapes for books, and the process works much the same way.

QUESTION: When I hear you talk about giving your credit card number out over the Internet, alarm bells go off in my head… is that something that’s safe and secure?

ANSWER: It depends on who you talk to. And it all depends on who you give it out to. Nothing that passes through the Internet is ever 100% secure. There will always be someone, somewhere, trying to get at that information and use it for evil purposes. Just as there will always be people breaking into houses and people stealing cars.

But just as you can put a deadbolt on your front door, you can be careful about how you give out “secret” information — like your credit card number — online. Most Internet stores operate something called a “secure server.” This means, in essence, that when any information you send form your computer to their computer over the Internet, it’s encrypted so that, even it is intercepted somewhere along the line, it will be useless gibberish.

Now encryption has been around for a long, long time. But encrypting credit card numbers and the like on the Internet has only been around for a little more than a year, so it’s not exactly what you would call a “mature” technology. That said, there are thousands of people now buying thousands of things every day online and it’s rare if ever that you hear of a major security problem. Pretty soon places like Mastercard and Visa and the major banks will be getting into the game themselves and, presumably, things will only get more secure.

But there will always be a risk. I feel about as comfortable in typing my credit card number over the Internet as I do in giving it to some anonymous order clerk at a toll-free catalogue order desk; I know there’s some risk, but I’m willing to take the small risk for the convenience it offers.

QUESTION: You mentioned buying computer software over the Internet - is that any different that buying books or CDs?

ANSWER: The real difference is not in the actual ordering - that works pretty much the same - the real difference comes in the delivery. Whereas a book or a CD is sitting in some large warehouse somewhere in Seattle and has to be physically shipped from there to here, computer software is, quite literally, invisible. Software is digital information, and the Internet moves digital information, so the neat thing about buying software online is that you can get it delivered right over the Internet.

Enter your name and credit card number and the software you order gets automatically transferred to your computer where you can set it up and use it right away. This is true whether it’s a word processor or a spreadsheet or the latest video game.

QUESTION: Instant delivery, in other words…?

ANSWER: Not exactly instant. If you’ve ever bought a piece of software from a store, you know that often it comes on upwards of 10 or 20 floppy disks, each which holds quite a lot of information. To squeeze that amount of information over the Internet takes a bit of time. I recently ordered a scheduling program over the Internet, for example, and it took about 45 minutes to transfer from the store’s computer to mine. So it’s not quite instant, but it’s a lot easier than getting in my car and driving to Seattle.

QUESTION: Should Island retailers fear this losing business to these new “cyberstores?”

Yes and no. I think retailers in general, no matter where they are located, are going to have to start looking at their competition not as the guy down the street but the guy - or the thousands of guys - all around the world.

As much as I’d like to be able to buy locally, why should I order a book or a CD or a piece of software from someone down the street with a poor selection, grumpy staff and high prices when I can get great selection, responsive staff and decent prices online?

There are obviously some businesses that have to worry more than others. I don’t think buying furniture or tractors or heads of lettuce online is going to take off anytime soon - there are certain things that people are, I think, always going to want to pick up or kick the tires of. But if you’re selling something which is pretty generic - books and CDs and software yes, but also everything from jeans to modems to tea towels - being quick and lean and very customer friendly is going to become more and more important or you’re going to find your customers “going to Seattle.”

Or to a new upstart just around the corner with a low-rent warehouse, a big computer and zero overhead.

What the Internet cannot offer, and what I don’t think it will ever be able to offer, is the feeling that comes from truly amazing customer service be real friendly local people.

Perhaps the best example of the this for me came up last summer. It was Saturday night at 7:30 and we were in the middle of renovating our bathroom and we needed 4 inches of metal strapping before we could continue. I got in my car a drove up to Bobby Clow’s store in Hampshire before he closed at 8 o’clock and, sure enough, he had metal strapping. Now a whole roll was about 100 feet or 1000 feet and cost about 12 or 15 dollars. I only needed 4 inches. No matter. Bobby snipped off 4 inches and charged me 37 cents and I was on my way.

I don’t think I’m in any hurry to look for 4 inches of metal strapping for 37 cents on the Internet.

EXTRO: Peter Rukavina operates Digital Island in Kingston. He’ll be back next week for another in the series “Consumed by Technology.”

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Photo of Peter RukavinaI am . I am a writer, letterpress printer, and a curious person.

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