Today, we ask who is waging the information
revolution. The University of Houston's College of
Engineering presents this series about the machines
that make our civilization run, and the people
whose ingenuity created them.
Last week I popped in,
unannounced, on two units of a great eastern
university. First, the rare book room, with its
holdings under lock and key. Next, its famed Media
Lab, devoted to using the new electronic
communications. I went from the quiet world of
early printed books to the electronics that promise
to change civilization just as surely as those old
books once did.
The rare book people gladly showed me all I cared
to see. In the front office of the Media Lab, with
its bright displays, the secretary asked if I had
an appointment. I said, "No, I just want to see
what you're doing." She sent me to an
administrator, who said I could schedule a meeting
with someone later in the week.
"I only want a quick overview," I told her. "I'm
sorry," she said, "The person who gives overviews
isn't in today." "Okay, why don't you tell me about
the Lab -- what do you do here?" "I'm sorry," she
sighed, "I'm not authorized to talk about that."
The next day I stopped in the humanities library
looking for a computer link to a bibliographic
source. A reference librarian went to work. His
computer screen danced with ideas as he poured his
energies into my question and adopted it as his
own.
These are two characteristic faces of the
information revolution: For librarians, keepers of
the both the old paper books and the new electronic
media, information flow is a first principle. But
the new Media Lab, would-be center of the
electronic revolution, had already mired into the
old corporate office protocols. Its polite
stonewalling wasn't done out of rudeness. It simply
reflected the old and dying idea that knowledge is
private property.
I finally suggested that they might remember that
the medium really is the message. If the study of
communication doesn't look and taste like
communication, then it probably isn't communication
after all. That idea drew only a puzzled smile.
Meanwhile, it is you and I, with our hands on the
keyboards, who shape the information revolution; it
is librarians for whom information takes many
forms, all of them public; engineers, teachers, and
paramedics who use the new media; teenagers who
talk on the networks and their grandmother who buys
a modem so she can talk with them. Technological
change is always shaped by the childlike curiosity
and mental hunger of real people.
Others lurk, waiting to put the new media under
front-office control, just as people have tried to
do with every other communications medium. And we'd
better remember the hard-learned lesson of the
printed word: Knowledge is much, much more than
power. Knowledge is pleasure. It is freedom. And it
is ours.
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds
work.
(Theme music)
