Live free or die? Death, life, survival, and sobriety on the information superhighway

Within five years of Alexander Graham Bell’s first display of his telephone at the 1876 Centennial Exposition, Scientific American promised that the new device would bring a greater “kinship of humanity” and “nothing less than a new organization of society.” Others were less sanguine, worrying that telephones would spread germs through the wires, destroy local accents, and give authoritarian governments a listening box in the homes of their subjects. The Knights of Columbus fretted that phones might wreck home life, stop people from visiting friends, and create a nation of slugs who would not stir from their desks. ¹

Extravagant predictions of utopia or doom have accompanied most new communications technologies, and the same rhetoric of celebration and denunciation has enveloped the Internet. For Wired magazine publisher Louis Rossetto, the digital revolution promises “social changes so profound that their only parallel is probably the discovery of fire.” According to Iraq’s official government newspaper, Al-Jumhuriya, the Internet spells “the end of civilizations, cultures, interests, and ethics.” ²

The four books reviewed here partake of this same bifurcated tendency toward visions of utopia and dystopia—even if none is quite as hyperbolic as the respective mouthpieces of the “digital revolution” and Saddam Hussein. These accounts provide important insights into the current state of the information superhighway, but they are most revealing as cultural documents in their own right that tell us something about the United States at the end of the century. New technologies may be socially neutral but the responses to them are deeply embedded in the culture and politics of the moment. And because these particular accounts come largely from computer industry insiders, they are especially informative about the ideology and politics of that industry and its associated pundits. As we move toward the end of the millennium, the Internet itself begins to look much less distinctive and much more typical of current society—offering a similar mix of shopping and social activism, of mindless entertainment and mind-challenging ideas. But the world of cybercommentary and computer industry ideology retains a more distinctive spin—featuring hyperbolic celebrations and critiques as well as a decided preference for libertarian positions on how society should respond to new technology.

Frances Cairncross’s The Death of Distance: How the Communications Revolution Will Change Our Lives is a typical work of cyberenthusiasm. “The death of distance as a determinant of the cost of communicating,” she announces on page one, “will probably be the single most important force shaping society in the first half of the century.” It will “revolutionize the way people live” and “alter . . . decisions about where people work and what kind of work they do, concepts of national sovereignty, and patterns of international trade.” Cairncross does not hesitate to make remarkably banal predictions, promising that “the death of distance” will lead to “The Proliferation of Ideas,” “A New Trust,” “Redistribution of Wages,” the “Rebirth of Cities,” “Improved Writing and Reading Skills,” the “Rebalance of Political Power,” and—even—“Global Peace.”

If you can get past the inflated rhetoric, Cairncross usefully summarizes some important changes in communications technology and practice. In 1956, for example, the transatlantic telephone cable only permitted eighty-nine simultaneous telephone conversations between the United States and Europe. By 2000, a few strands of fiber optic cable will carry more than three million conversations across the ocean. A three minute call to London that cost about $50 (in current dollars) in the mid-1950s can be made for $.30 today. Such changes have brought a new mental...