GUEST SHOT

An Essay
by William D. Sheldon

Closing The Window On Curiosity

"The information highway will not make you search for the information." -- The Road Ahead by Bill Gates (p. 81)

I HAVE CONSIDERED PUTTING TOGETHER my own art gallery by collecting digital versions of all the works I want to see, think about, write about. The Internet allows me to do something along those lines, of course. On the web I've found some nice reproductions of art I'm not likely to see in person in my lifetime.

That is part of the magnificence of this new "information" age: it doesn't matter where I am or how meager my finances. So long as I am capable of reading and have access to a computer that's connected, I can explore thousands of subjects at literally millions of locations without leaving my home. But, of course, that's not the whole story. There is more to any painting than can be seen in the best photograph of it.

Van Gogh's superb brush strokes are lost in translation. Will those brush strokes be unknown to future generations of art students? Will those students be so used to looking at pictures in digital form that they won't have the incentive or the curiosity to see the original, to be moved by the third dimension, by colors that are more subtle and complex than the digital version can contain, by the intensity and immediacy of the work at firsthand?

I've been reading Bill Gates' The Road Ahead and thinking about the future. Gates is reported to have a spectacular art collection and to have purchased the "digital rights" to many more pieces. This may be true or apocryphal, I don't yet know. I do know that his vision of the future is both very exciting and very annoying. Let me explain.

When I was in high school, we were required to write several research papers in our junior and senior years. These papers included discussion of a primary source (a novel or a play, for example) and secondary sources (critical articles, chapters from other books, etc.), together with our own thesis and supporting argument. Footnotes or endnotes were required.

In college I was taught to take paper-writing to a higher level, both in terms of the arguments I constructed and the research necessary to explore and support my arguments. Watching my stepchildren and their friends I am learning that either my high school and college had very high standards or education has changed. Kids no longer have to know how to use the library by the time they are out of high school. Even in college the expectation of freshmen is merely that they learn what a footnote is and, largely, that there is a library.

I hope I'm wrong, that this is only true of some colleges and that the majority still have higher academic standards.

Why this barrage of self-righteousness? Mr. Gates -- with all his (incredible) insight into what it takes to (1) make computers more accessible to the average user and (2) how to license his product to the big computer manufacturers rather than selling his software packages primarily on the shelf (you know, competing) -- plans to make a world where no one ever has to use the library. In his discussion of "information overload" the following paragraph has unintended weaknesses:

"Information overload is not unique to the highway, and it needn't be a problem. We already cope with astonishing amounts of information by relying on an extensive infrastructure that has evolved to help us be selective -- everything from library catalogs to movie reviews to Yellow Pages to recommendations from friends. When people worry about the information-overload problem, ask them to consider how they choose what to read. When we visit a bookstore or a library we don't worry about reading every volume. We get by without reading everything because there are navigational aids that point to information of interest and help us find the print material we want. These pointers include the corner newsstand, the Dewey decimal system in libraries, and book reviews in the local paper."

I remember the Dewey Decimal System. We had it in my high school library in the late '60s and early '70s. By the time I started using a college library, however, the dominant organizational system was that employed by the Library of Congress. That tells me either that Mr. Gates hasn't been in a real library in many years or he never learned the name of the system currently used to catalog a library's collections.

Of course, why would you use a library when you can get everything you need from the television, a few technical manuals, popular magazines and, ultimately, the information highway? The current generation has formed the belief that if you want to know about something, you go to a computer, type in a word or two and the answer is given to you. There is no sense of the importance of careful research, only frustration if the system is slow that day and the answer doesn't immediately pop up.

In Gates' vision, our home television sets will function like a much improved combination of the best "cable" t.v. imaginable with a souped up version of the Internet. If you want to know more about something you're watching, just point and click. A world-class collection of "information" will be at your fingertips.

Electronic appliances have two purposes. One is to make large sums of money for the people who patent, manufacture and distribute them. The other is to make the lives of consumers easier. Neither purpose is evil. But aren't there some things that should not be made easier, skills that can only be gained with effort and persistence? Using sports as an analogy, what would be the value of a Michael Jordan if it only took a few minutes to master his skill on the court?

That kind of skill takes years of disciplined work, together with talent. No intellectual should ever disparage it. But how do you explain the importance of library skills to someone who has gathered most or all of his information at the touch of a few buttons? The very notion of attribution and authority is foreign to a generation to whom all opinions (informed or not) are equal. Have we lost the distinction between information and knowledge?

The notion that working thousands of math problems to develop an intuitive grasp of problem-solving and the intellectual framework to enjoy physics may be all but a wistful memory. An education that includes art, music (other than pop), math, science, literature and philosophy may have lost its attraction. And why not? Michael Jordan may never have gotten to calculus and may not know or care to know any Shakespeare. Bill Gates, the richest man in the world, still thinks libraries are organized in Dewey Decimal. His notion of "art collecting" is to turn the great paintings into electronic facsimiles.

Without intellectual disciplines and a serious notion of authority that goes beyond mere "information," how will the increasingly consumer-oriented world know the difference between fact and fiction, between history and revision. The vision of a world of E-Z Form, point-and-click information carries terrifying possibilities.

I fear that one day, decades from now, I'll log on and ask the computer to tell me about the Nazi concentration camps only to receive the answer that they were a "hoax," that there was no holocaust, and that all the "information" about them has been reclassified as propaganda.

Or if I do a search on René Magritte, I'll find that he has been revised and is now viewed as a commercial artist whose major contribution was the CBS Eye. I am more than a little disconcerted that we may enter an age where all "facts" are equal, and the only version considered authoritative is whatever is found on a given day in an Internet search.

Won't a generation raised on the information highway be likely to have an even more slothful and undisciplined, incurious, self-centered approach to the important questions of life? The answer to my question is yes and no and maybe.

There will likely always be people driven to know more, to think for themselves, to ask difficult questions and to challenge the authority of sources -- even Internet sources. Just as my generation was taught to question what was printed in the newspaper and to doubt entirely what was broadcast as news, the new generation can and will (I hope) learn skepticism and persistence.

Bill Sheldon is a lawyer, a skeptic, an avid reader and a writer. He makes his home in Flagstaff, Arizona.

Buy The Book @ A Discount:

The Road Ahead
by Bill Gates, Nathan Myhrvold & Peter Rinearson

Paper, 332 pages + CD ROM; revised edition published by Penguin USA in November 1996.
Availability: This title usually ships within 24 hours.
List Price: $15.95; Our Price: $12.76; You Save: $3.19 (20%).

Send a little piece of Mr. Bill's collection to a friend: Corbis Corporation, a commercial image vendor founded by Gates in 1989, offers a very nice selection of free digital post cards featuring images drawn from the company's stock.

Elsewhere on the web: Steven Johnson, writing in FEED, brings to light the perhaps revolutionary implications of Alexa, web search software that styles itself a "surf engine" and sticks with you -- and learns from you and other Alexa users -- as you explore cyberspace.

The Guest Shot Archive:

Jack Moore on Saul Bellow's The Actual
Jack Moore on Keith Windschuttle's The Killing of History

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