Dearly beloved, people of the information age. We’re gathered here today to lay to rest the fat-cat government bureaucrat, the grizzled newspaper hack, the stock broker, the TV news anchor, the local chamber of commerce president and the crusty tenured professor.
These dinosaurs of the old world order have ruled the earth for too long. It’s time to usher in the era of the individual, free at last of big companies, big government and all other cumbersome, clunky institutions. From now on, we’ll each chart our own course, liberated from bothersome intermediaries, free to master information ourselves.
Yes, the future is near, but for some, alas, that means the end is nigh.
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Futurists take on the role of overeager obituary-writers, just as often as they do the job of optimistic prognosticators. The way they tell it, you would think you have to kill off the past to boldly usher in what’s next. But while predictions of doom make for good sound bites — and large consulting fees — the bodies so often refuse to stay buried.
“The Social Life of Information” Dumpster-dives into the muck of failed predictions to show why the future isn’t so likely to just let go of the past. In a measured series of eight essays, authors John Seely Brown, Xerox’s chief scientist and director of the company’s legendary research facility Xerox PARC, and Paul Duguid, a historian and social theorist at the University of California at Berkeley, gently deflate the most extreme claims of “the blinkered euphoria of the infoenthusiasts,” as they term technology boosters.
Their none-too-radical conclusion, which could only threaten to sound radical in the current environment of hyper-hype, is that technology is more likely to mutate and shape the present than truly revolutionize or overthrow it.
The authors make the case that reducing libraries to “information warehouses,” universities to “information providers” and office work to “information handling” makes it easy to vastly overstate the impact that digital technology will have on society.
(Don’t think that their measured view of technology’s impact means that they just don’t get it: Seely Brown
and Duguid put themselves — or at least a lunch with them at Xerox PARC — up for bid on eBay this week.)
At the center of their argument is the observation that popular thinking about technology today is ruled by a kind of relentless “endism,” which forecasts the death of everything from mass media to the nation-state, government to politics, universities to regions, even distance itself. It’s the end of the world as we know it, and the techno-pundits feel fine.
But what interests Seely Brown and Duguid in these delightful doom scenarios is the causal assumptions underpinning them. They criticize the futurists’ conviction that information technology unleashes forces which will necessarily bring about “demassification, decentralization, denationalization, despacilization, disintermediation, disaggregation,” what the authors awkwardly term “6-D vision.”
Put on 6-D glasses and you’ll see a neatly packaged vision of the future that the authors argue is too extreme: “The D’s too easily suggest a linear direction to society — parallel movements from complex to simple, from group to individual, from personal knowledge to ubiquitous information …”
So many workers use computers, but despite the predictions, we haven’t all gone home to become consultants to each other. Big companies haven’t disappeared; instead, through mergers, they’ve gotten even bigger.
Societal change doesn’t happen nearly so linearly, nor so definitively, Seely Brown and Duguid argue. It’s a form of tunnel vision to edit out the social factors that shape how and why new innovations actually are or aren’t adopted. “The way forward is paradoxically to look not ahead, but to look around,” they write.
It’s from this point that the book analyzes the wealth of predictions that went nowhere, speculating about the social factors that had a hand in why they failed. Take Business Week’s 1975 prediction that the “paperless office” was just around the corner. Some 25 years later, offices now consume an annual 100 pounds more paper per person than they did then. In just the past decade, paper consumption has grown from 87 million to 99 million tons a year; computers and the Net have apparently accelerated the use of paper, not diminished it.
The mistake that the seers at Business Week made was to consider paper as simply a medium for delivering information. Their excitement about technology replacing paper blinded them to the possibility that people would still need paper — more readable printed pages, official documents bearing signatures, even sticky notes used to get a co-worker’s attention in the sea of voice mails and e-mails.
Seely-Brown and Duguid point out the unseen value in many of the “artifacts” that infoenthusiasts have assumed technology would do away with. Despite all the hype about the home office, for example, big city downtowns haven’t become ghost towns. What those predictions ignored were the distribution of work that takes place in an office — you don’t have to be your own tech-support staff, for example — and the knowledge you pick up being around people doing the same type of work.
“The Social Life of Information” is curiously bloodless for a work that’s trying to bring the messiness of real life and human behavior back into the conversation about technological innovation. The book is littered with neologisms, like “endism,” that rival those of the loopy futurists it often critiques. In the end, though, its quiet tone of reflection is probably for the best, since it manages to puncture much of the hype around where technology is taking us, without making any bold pronouncements about the death of punditry.
But it’s too bad that “The Social Life of Information” isn’t written in a style more accessible to a popular audience. It’s hard to imagine that the book’s important arguments will succeed in wresting the headlines from the kind of rude, general claims — the Internet Changes Everything! — that the relentless promoters of technology so skillfully propagate.
There will be no pasty-white swimsuit competition. And the earnest contestants aren’t expected to muse about their dreams of world peace or ending hunger. But the first Sexiest Geek Alive pageant, to be held next week as a part of the South by Southwest conference in Austin, Texas, has spawned its own breed of pageant puffery.
Mainstream media outlets from “Good Morning America” to the Montel Williams show have piled onto the event, which began as a charity fund-raiser designed to let geeks strut their knowledge of operating systems and “Star Trek” in front of their peers. It’s become an opportunity for TV viewers to gawk at those brainiacs who actually know what ASCII stand for: “Hey come here honey, it’s those guys who play Quake instead of having sex.”
“It’s a unisex brains pageant, not a beauty pageant,” says the creator of the event, Steven Phenix, public relations director for ClubCastLive, which will be webcasting the fanfare March 14.
The 12 finalists, who have been chosen from more than 18,000 applicants, will be evaluated on their brains, personality and technical creds. “The judges will be instructed that looks are not a part of this,” says Phenix, adding “the biggest, most attractive sexual organ is definitely the brain.” Anyone can vote for their favorite brain on the pageant’s Web site.
The pageant joins a crowd of other recent efforts to ferret out sex appeal in the Net economy. But unlike, for instance, Women.com’s recent Valentine’s list of Silicon Valley’s most eligible bachelors — which sought out hunky, stock-option holders — this pageant encourages the thinking that geekiness equals sexiness.
Finalist Tod Beardsley of Pittsburgh got the Microsoft Windows logo tattooed on his leg just to up his candidacy. “I’m out of shape, but I’m not a bad-looking guy,” boasts another finalist, Tony Northrup of Watertown, Mass., an engineer at GTE Internetworking, in his online application.
But will recasting “geeky” as “sexy” play not just at an industry conference but in the rest of the country? The networks apparently think so. “Good Morning America” last week flew 11 of the finalists and Phenix to New York, after spotting a story about the event in USA Today. Co-host Charles Gibson was scratching his head in gee-whiz amazement as he quizzed the geeks about some of the questions they’d answered to make it to the finals: “What does PCMCIA stand for? Whoa!” he gushed. “And what is a meta tag? Anybody know what a meta tag is?” The geeks gamely ponied up the answers, no doubt to the amazement of viewers at home. Tune in next week when the sexiest veterinarians alive show off their canonical knowledge of basset hound ailments!
Phenix, ever the promoter, didn’t miss the opportunity to shamelessly plug his company, appearing on the popular morning show wearing a T-shirt with ClubCastLive’s URL emblazoned on the front. He says that one of the show’s producers worried about the free advertisement and asked him to change his shirt, but relented and later decided that the URL on the TV just looked, well, geeky.
“Good Morning America” will film the pageant in Austin and conduct a live satellite interview the following morning with the winner, who takes home nothing but bragging rights — and a lot of free press. Meanwhile, Montel Williams will have a number of the finalists on his show to do a “mentoring session” to reach out to high school geeks, and show them that they’re not alone. And that’s not all: “Regis and Kathie Lee are interested,” Phenix gloats.
Geeks, it seems, will inherit, if not the earth, the tube, because what could be “sexier” than a contestant who reveals that he was the first person hired (wink, wink) by Broadcast.com, which he reminds us merged with Yahoo in a $5.4 billion deal last year. And what could be an easier way into the “human story” behind the Net than a gaggle of techies on parade?
But the irony is that the stereotypical geek — the very archetype that the media wants to put on display — is more comfortable behind a screen than on a stage. In fact, Lisa Harvey, a database administrator who started programming in BASIC when she was 6, was so nervous about the “Good Morning America” appearance that she had to bring her mom with her for moral support. Of course, for some geekophiles, that might be sexy.
“You could spend your whole life trying to change the world.” The ponderous message looms above hordes of commuters descending into San Francisco’s Embarcadero station. As the escalator coasts towards the train platform below, an overhead banner hung from cement rafters continues the barrage: “No, seriously. You could.”
By now, as the branded color scheme surrounds you, you have to wonder: How? The Answer scrolls into view in the form of a giant blue rectangle on the floor below. Would-be riders can barely avoid stepping on it to get inside the trains: “MICROSOFT. Where do you want to go today?”
Booming from the floors, the walls, the staircases, the very rafters, is the message: Come work for Microsoft. Reading between the steps, as it were, it’s hard not to also get the message: the software superpower in Redmond, Wash., is in desperate need of help to expand its 34,000-person company.
Mark Spain, a human resources director at Microsoft, says the immersive recruiting environment is just business as usual: “It’s an extension of our existing campaign,” which runs in airports and airline magazines. He wouldn’t say how many new hires Microsoft is after, only that Microsoft is trying to drive “passive” job seekers to the jobs section of its Web site — which lists primarily technical jobs.
In the San Francisco metro station, the steps between levels have been branded in Microsoft’s chosen colors — green, blue, yellow; every third step reminds you of the essential URL: “Microsoft.com/jobs.” Microsoft. It’s not just a career path. It’s a carpet.
For tens of thousands of Bay Area commuters, the scene is surreal. Imagine waking one morning to discover that the Department of Justice had chucked its antitrust case, leaving one and only one company to make software, to work for, to exist. It’s an incredibly unsettling feeling to be in a public space — one which you may have no choice about passing through on your way to work — in which every available surface is dominated by one company: Microsoft.
“Station domination,” incredibly enough, is the term for the massive ad buy that has converted the Embarcadero station into Microsoft-land for the month of March. “It’s the visual equivalent of surround-sound,” says Brigg Hyland, a vice president of TDI Worldwide, a division of CBS that manages outdoor and transit ad space, including the Bay Area Rapid Transit stations. TDI does similar all-encompassing ad blankets in 18 subway stations around the country, but the Microsoft blowout is happening only in San Francisco.
Incredibly, an entire train station can be had for a mere $150,000 a month. (Maybe someone should mention that to those dot-com companies that spent well over $1 million for their forgettable 30-second Super Bowl ads.) For the $150,000 fee, Microsoft, or any other company, can take over not only the traditional advertising slots, but unusual spots as well, like the floor, the rafters and even the staircases.
“You basically have control of the station for a month,” says Mike Healy, the public affairs director for BART. But he’s never seen a company turn the space into a 3-D classified ad: “They must need the help,” he mused.
Old Navy blanketed a San Francisco station to promote the opening of its flagship store in the fall; and right now Bridge Information Systems, a financial information services company, has wallpapered another station. Still, Microsoft’s “station domination” comes with particularly ominous overtones, since its primary message is not “buy our product” but “become one of us and change the world.”
“It’s the little things that count, like making a difference. To a few billion people,” reads one repeating sign.
“Your family still won’t know what you do for a living. At least they’ll know where,” winks another, in an undisguised attempt to tarnish the start-up allure.
More than anything else the “station domination” campaign may be a testament to just how hard it is to get the attention of technical talent. Most tech companies are having a hard time filling their open slots, and are turning to advertising, professional recruiters and big finders fees to bring in new hires. Microsoft faces the same talent shortage — plus it’s vying for geek power with a slew of early start-ups still handing out VP titles.
“At Microsoft, we encourage you to direct your own career path. And on the weekends, to blaze your own trail,” it promises — as if to contrast with the start-up lore of pulling all-nighters and crashing in your cube. But seriously, does the most highly valued company on Earth expect us to believe it got where it is by taking weekends off?
But it’s not the message or even the sheer ubiquity and dominance of the campaign that’s odd, we’d expect ubiquity and domination from Microsoft, it’s the odd target of the ads. After all, how many of those train passengers are software engineers, the primary jobs listed on Microsoft’s site? Spain says that Microsoft wants to appeal not just to technical geniuses, but to anyone interested in one of “the different job sets potentially available in the company.”
Still, BART reports that 33,750 people exit San Francisco’s Embarcadero station on an average weekday; and those numbers don’t reflect people traveling one way or transferring from other stations. But of those 33,750, how many, even in San Francisco, can be expected to respond to a solicitation that says “You’ll be working on products that affect end-users in Bangladesh. Not bad for a first day.” Are we all in the business of pleasing “end-users” now?
Microsoft’s campaign suggests the technology industry has finally swallowed its own message, and the only viable way to “change the world” is to write code or product manage a Web site. “You could be working on something better,” warns another ad. “Tick. Tock.”
If any company understands the power of a juicy David vs. Goliath story it’s Amazon.com. So when a feminist bookstore in Minneapolis brought a trademark suit last April against the dot-com giant, you might have anticipated that Amazon.com would rush to settle the case, quickly and quietly.
Instead we’ve been treated to the bizarre spectacle of Amazon.com seeking to turn the dispute from Amazon vs. Amazon into Amazon vs. the lesbians. (Salon.com has a bookselling partnership with Amazon.com rival Barnesandnoble.com.)
The crux of the suit: For 30 years there’s been a feminist bookstore in Minneapolis named Amazon Bookstore. Jeff Bezos was probably just starting to read under the covers with a flashlight when the Minneapolis women began selling books as a nonprofit under the name Amazon in 1970. The bookstore, now a for-profit collective, sued Amazon.com earlier this year for trademark infringement. The bookstore claimed to have lost money and staff time dealing with a growing stream of customers and suppliers who had mistaken it for the Web retailer. And, by the way, the store wanted its name back.
The case is a big company spin-meister’s worst nightmare: a classic underdog, the embattled, independent, female-owned bookseller whose long-standing local business is trampled by the heartless dot-com with the multibillion-dollar market capitalization. Amazon Bookstore even put a link on its own Web site asking for contributions to help finance its legal case against the mammoth e-tailer.
But Amazon.com, apparently still unused to its new role as Goliath, played it to the hilt, in a way so embarrassingly sensationalistic that no screenwriter, not even Nora Ephron herself, could have credibly concocted it. In pre-trial depositions, quoted last week in Holt Uncensored, a book-industry column, Amazon.com lawyers interrogated one of the co-owners of the store under oath about her own sexual orientation and that of the staff.
Choice excerpts: “Have you had any interest in promoting lesbian ideals in the community?” and “I’ll ask you this, are you gay?” The lawyer himself even seemed embarrassed by his own line of questioning, apologizing while asking: “Are any of the employees of the bookstore gay, and forgive me for asking this question.” (Amazon Bookstore’s lawyer objected and filed a motion for a protective order against such questions. The judge is scheduled to rule on the motion next week.)
Was Amazon.com’s strategy a cynical lesbian smear campaign designed to intimidate the witnesses or play to a future jury’s presumed homophobia? Or, was it a clueless inability to understand the distinction between “lesbian” and “feminist”? If the latter is the case, there are a few dozen books for sale on Amazon.com’s own Web site that I suggest it take the time to read.
Amazon.com, naturally, denies both interpretations. Bill Curry, an Amazon.com spokesman, says that all its lawyers were trying to do was establish that they’re not in the same business as Amazon Bookstore in Minneapolis. The two Amazons are like Acme Hardware and Acme Dry Cleaners, Curry says, companies that can amicably share the same name because “they’re in different businesses.”
According to Amazon.com, Jeff Bezos and company are in the business of catering to a “general interest” audience, while Amazon Bookstore Collective is “lesbian-owned and operated, catering to the lesbian community.” Curry says the fact that Amazon Bookstore describes itself as a “full-service feminist bookstore for all girls, women and their friends” and not as an exclusively lesbian bookstore is just a recent tactic: “They’re trying to be more like us for the sake of their legal case,” he says.
Never mind the fact that both Amazons sell books, or even that almost any book that you can buy at the Minneapolis bookstore is also for sale on the Amazon.com Web site. Amazon.com insists that the business you’re in is determined by who you are and who you serve, not what you sell. But by this contorted logic, if a 12-year-old opened a bookstore catering to other kids on the Net, under the name Amazonkids.com, Amazon.com would have no grounds for a lawsuit.
(Note: no questions about the sexual orientation of anyone at Amazon.com were raised in the reporting of this story.)
The lawsuit has turned out to be a public relations debacle — Amazon.com’s own customers are sending outraged e-mails to the company demanding answers. The idea that Amazon.com would focus on sexual orientation in a trademark lawsuit apparently does not sit well with Amazon.com’s own “general interest” audience.
The Amazon.com response to customer complaints has been an e-mail attempting to justify the company’s legal strategy and to tout its progressive values. “We are, as a company and as individuals, sensitive to matters of personal privacy, and our commitment to diversity extends to our employment practices which forbid discrimination based on sexual orientation” the e-mail mewls.
Maybe in the future it will pursue a legal strategy as sensitive as it claims to be as a corporation. Because no matter which role you play, David or Goliath, sexual McCarthyism isn’t very flattering.
