Living at Light Speed

The positive side, we already know. Rapid communication, world-wide coverage, Web sites galore, information to the point of overload. But Goodman is excellent at separating the advantages from the downside of it all. How do we cope with all the information, for instance? The popular current answer is 'intelligent agents'. These are programs which 'learn' from the way we behave whilst on line, and they get to know our preferences and interests. [Nicholas Negroponte is very strong in his belief in agent technology - so you can bet that the Media Lab at MIT will be investing heavily.] But Goodman will keep seeing the emperor without any clothes. He argues that such agents may in fact narrow the focus of our interests by redirecting us in areas we already know, and by default thereby shielding us from the possibility of serendipitous encounters with new material.

There are some rather laboured passages in which the Superhighway metaphor is compared with US interstate motorways in remorseless detail. I learned more about American transport policy than I did about the differences between fibre optics and ISDN. But he's very good at comparing the claims of futurologists with the actuality of current technology - pointing out for instance that in order to make anything work we currently need to be sitting in front of a VDU with both hands free to input data.

He is also one of the few writers I have come across who owns up to the difficulty of using the Net, and the horrendous levels of stress and messy technology involved in comms software. As he points out:

'If you have a personal computer at home and use it actively, you know that there is nothing else in the home that comes close to causing the amount of palm-sweating, tweaking, frustration and fear induced by the PC.'

At the end of his survey he offers a set of guidelines for making well-informed choices about what is on offer. Don't be bamboozled by the hype and 'launch' of new software just because it claims to supersede all else. Demand intuitive access. Be prepared for change, and accept it when it comes. Beware of service providers who do not give full access to the Internet. Ask the manufacturers questions about their latest gizmo. [The problem with this of course is that newcomers probably don't know what questions to ask.]