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Mary Jo Langhorne: I'm delighted that Nicholas Johnson agreed to join us. I think someone in our group suggested very early in the year that we might like to have Mr. Johnson come. He's done some work with the Iowa Library Association. He's done a lot of writing and talking about technology and its impact on our lives in many different ways. I thought, "Nicholas Johnson is never going to come to talk to us." But I ran into a gentleman named Mike Brau, who works for you, and he said he thought you might do it. I called him and I'm delighted you agreed to come share some thoughts with us about technology, libraries, reading, and the future. I'll let it go at that. We'll keep it kind of informal.
Nicholas Johnson: Thank you Mary Jo. I'm happy to meet with you and learn from you. The most interesting part of this morning for me will be our discussion, because at least I have some idea of what I'm going to say now. I'm not totally clear as to what that's going to be, but it probably won't come as too much of a surprise to me. [laughter] How long do you have set aside for this, since I normally speak in semester units?
MJL: We need to be wrapped up by 11:15. A few people may stay a little longer.
NJ: That shouldn't be a problem. As I say, the most useful part of this will be the discussion as I hear from you what some of your frustrations and problems are, your challenges, the questions you have, and where you'd like to see this thing go.
If you are looking for someone to come in here and be anti-book, or predict the end of the book, I think you've got the wrong guy. After all, I am now in my sixties, as hard as it is for me to believe that. I grew up with books. My parents read books to me. I had wonderful school librarians who introduced me to books and told me how to handle them and so forth. [laughter] Oh, yes, we had instruction on how you were to open a new book. I've been asking librarians for help all my life and I still do to this day.
Moreover, as you probably know, educators are a little slow to adapt to new technology. It took us sixty years to get the overhead projector out of the bowling alley and into the classroom. [laughter] I'm pleased to see one here this morning. But after all, this is the technological elite of the Iowa City School District.
Obviously, I think reading, and the writing that is enhanced as a result of reading skills, are essential to virtually any job today. Normally I teach in law schools, but when I first came back to Iowa City they asked me to teach over at the Department of Communications Studies as well. I was counseling students there and asked a young fellow why he decided to specialize in this field, and he said he didn't like to read or write so he thought he'd go into television. I asked him if he thought those people on television were just speaking extemporaneously, and explained to him that someone wrote all that copy which they needed to read. That came to him as quite a shock. I think there are very few fields or jobs that you can go into that don't require some reading ability.
During one period in my life I was invited to Japan from time to time as what they then called a "futurologist." I wrote a paper called "Communications and in the Year 2000," which I published in 1970, and has been pretty much on track. Normally, I try not predict more than twenty years into the future, because if you do more than that people want to institutionalize you. [laughter]
With this group of tolerant souls I will go even fifty and one hundred years into the future and predict that books are still going to be with us at that time. A book is just much easier to hold on the beach or in the bathtub, I think, than the computers I've seen so far.
While I always have a notebook computer with me when I travel on planes I very quickly discovered, since I also have a lot of reading to do, it's really easier to read when two burly folks are sitting on either side of me. It's not easy to get out my notebook computer and try to make it work with that tray table coming down on top of the screen and so forth. Although I do have a colleague who uploads books to his notebook and reads from his computer on airplanes. I'm sure there are others who do that.
I think that books are going to continue to be the most useful means of access in areas that don't have Internet connections. That is, today they don't have Internet connections. Not long from now everywhere on planet Earth there will be an Internet connection, but they'll be very expensive from some places.
In the 1960s, when I was on the Federal Communications Commission, the president of one of the major commercial networks explained to me that he discovered that they had accidently erased Kennedy's inaugural address off the video tape. At that time I came to the realization that we, in the early 1970s, had a better record of the 1860's than we did of the 1960's. The 1960s were recorded on video tape; the 1860s were recorded in print.
There are already census records which we cannot get access to because they must be read by computers which no longer exist. If any of you have been buying and playing with computers for the last twenty years or so, as I have, you probably have around your house as well a half a dozen or more different formats of floppy disks that you're quite mystified as to how now to translate into anything useful. So I think that's going to continue to be a problem.
I suppose we always need to be on guard against the book burners, but I think the risks of electronic terrorism run much higher these days. Gradually our Defense Department and CIA, NSA, and other folks who concern themselves with such things, are coming to listen to us when we talk about that. That is most likely going to be the terrorism of the future. It wouldn't take much of an atomic explosion over Iowa City, for example, to wipe out all the records in the hospital, the schools, the University, the banks, the power company -- the whole works. And there are easier ways than using atomic energy, obviously, as any fourteen-year-old could explain to you if you don't understand how to do it.
Moreover, I think that what we observe with regard to media of all kinds is more in the nature of an evolution than a revolution. There are some exceptions to that. I met a guy on an airplane once who had been in the slide rule business and wanted to know if I wanted some pearl-inlaid slide rules that he had. [laughter] I learned to operate a slide rule as a youth, but so far as I know sales have really dropped off in recent years. [laughter] So there are some exceptions.
You know the newspapers were really frightened about what the impact of radio news was going to be on them. They engaged in something between antitrust violations and criminal violations to keep the radio stations from carrying any news. Well, the radio stations did not drive the newspapers out of business. Nor did television drive radio or the movie theaters out of business. Nor have video tape rentals driven the movie theaters out of business.
What tends to happen is there's a shuffle, there's a change, but these things stay.
In fact, as I discovered as an author, a mere mention of a book on a popular television program can do more to enhance the sales than almost anything else you can do. I once figured out that in order to reach the same number of people I reached with a single appearance on, say, "The Dick Cavett Show," I would need to lecture to a room full of 300 people, every hour on the hour, eight hours a day, five days a week, fifty weeks a year, for three hundred years! So actually, television has helped book sales. Certainly Larry King did a lot for book sales when he had his radio program at night.
In fairness, we ought to acknowledge that the book itself has gone through a lot of evolution over the years. It started out as clay tablets, and I imagine that the people who made clay tablets were really upset, and predicted the downfall of the human species as a result of going to papyrus. [laughter] Those who were terribly fond of rolls probably thought that putting books in a flat form instead of in the rolls was somehow deprecating the aesthetic value of the roll. I have no doubt that the coming of the printing press was a matter of great concern, as well it should of been, because it brought something of a revolution that changed not only the format of the book, but the number of books, ultimately the price of books, and then the reduction in size. Books no longer needed to be chained to the shelves, but could actually be carried out through the theft detector at the doors of the library.
And then came the paperback. Those of you who know some of that history may know that the paperback was certainly challenged as something that was going to destroy the morality of the people. [laughter] And it was rather successful in doing that. [laughter]
Comic books, when I was a boy, provoked a great debate. Some said, "At least they're reading something." Others responded, "Well, they shouldn't be reading comic books." Then someone asked, "What about 'Classic Comics'?" But the purists said, "Well, it would be better if they were reading a book." We've gone round and round about that for a long time.
Even with regard to books we have different kinds of media for storing them, such as microfilm. I suspect most of us would concede it is probably an improvement over having to devote a building this size to a collection of old New York Times newspapers. So we've put "print" on microfilm, microfiche, and now CD-ROMs. And there are a lot of other things on CDs, obviously. So there has been a lot of change.
There is also change in terms of the role of books -- and of other media. That's something that you all are addressing with regard to informational books as distinguished from literary books.
Look at the impact of CNN on newspapers, magazines, radio and television. At a time when the only TV news was the commercial networks' evening news those programs played a much different role than they play today. If you want to watch the news, at any time of the day or night, you can just turn to CNN. By the time the evening news rolls around it's kind of a game with me to see if there's anything that appears on the evening news that I don't already know. Not only can you know what the story will be, and what the text of their presentation will be, but you can guess the order in which the stories will be presented. It's a little game I play. You can do that if you follow the news throughout the day. CNN has had an impact on all of that.
You're looking at these evolutions in terms of libraries' informational materials.
I'm putting together a memorial Web page for my father, Wendell Johnson, for whom the Wendell Johnson Speech and Hearing Center here is named. In doing that, because he wrote for the Encyclopedia Britannica, I wanted to check and see what mentions of his name might be in the Encyclopedia Britannica. Well, it's just so easy to go to the Encyclopedia Britannica online, put in "Wendell Johnson," and back it comes. (It turns out there's one that mentions him in terms of general semantics.) This is so much easier than it would be using the hard copy edition. Besides, I don't have an updated Encyclopedia Britannica within arm's reach at my law school office or at home. I'd have to schlep off to a library somewhere. This way, either from home or from my law school office, there it is. That's very convenient. There's a lot of informational material that you can get to faster, finding more, in a better format, that you can search in ways you couldn't search in hard copy. So we'll have to make the same type of adaptation to that that CNN has required the networks to make with regard to news.
How many of you are using "Pointcast" as your own personal news service? Pointcast is available free off the Internet. I'm not going to talk about all of the 10,000 things you would find useful on the Internet, this is simply a tip about one of them.
Audience member: I think it was only available for IBM computers the last time I looked.
NJ: Well, what can I say? There are some retrogrades around. [laughter] Old technology that's on its way out from this near-bankrupt firm, but I can't be responsible for that. [laughter]
Anyhow, Pointcast enables you to select from a number of newspapers, so you're not just reading the New York Times. It enables you to pick the subjects that you are interested in, so you'll be sure to get in-depth stuff on that, and it also gives you weather and all kinds stock market and sports news. (I don't get that.)
I once had a wonderful experience on an airplane. I was reading the paper, came to the sports section and, as I usually do, flipped the whole thing over, and then felt a tap on my shoulder. The lady sitting next to me said, "Would you marry me?" [laughter] I said, "Excuse me? What is this about?" She said, "All my life I've been looking for a man who doesn't read the sports pages."
With Pointcast you don't have to read the sports pages. You pick the newspapers you want. You can pick the weather from the cities you're interested in. You don't have to sit there and find out that actually Waterloo was one degree colder than Cedar Rapids yesterday. The advantage is that you get all these headlines you can see in a minute that are shorter and faster than the headlines in the paper.
If you want to read the whole story you click on the headline and immediately the whole story is there because it's on your hard drive, you're not getting it online. It downloads from the Internet onto your hard drive automatically. If you were connected to the Internet Pointcast could be downloading every five or ten minutes if you wanted. Anyway, when you get it you're getting it off your hard drive. If you're connected to the Net, at the end of the story are links to get even more information about the story. So Pointcast provides you both less and more than what a newspaper would provide, especially since it's more than one newspaper. So there's a service that is very useful. I find this very useful. It saves me time. It gives me more information. It brings me information I might have not otherwise have found on the subjects that I want to find.
We talk about "information overload." I think it's a misnomer.
I think that if there is anybody in America who is looking for a job and hasn't found the job opportunity that is available, the just right position for them, which they would love, that would be available to them if only they knew where to look for it, they do not have a problem with information overload.
If you're looking for a product and you haven't found the product review that will tell you why you want this car, or that TV, or VCR, you don't have information overload.
What we have is a scanning overload.
You want more information than what you have, because you don't have the information you need. The single most important newspaper story to any of us here, or on the University faculty down the street, may very well be something in today's New Delhi Times or the Bangkok Post -- which is actually an excellent paper. For the most part we don't see those papers. They may have a really important story which affects your life. It might cause you to take a semester in Thailand or something, and you didn't know about it. You don't have information overload. What you have is a scanning and forwarding overload problem.
Take the matter of this Web page <http://soli.inav.net/~njohnson> . I thought it would be nice to set up a memorial Web page for my father. So I have pictures, and links to chapters out of each of his books, memorial pieces written by other people. Very little of it has been written by me. It's mostly links off to other pages. What is that? What is a Web page like that? The closest word we have for it is "publishing." But it's really both more and less than publishing.
We have a need to use words that we're familiar with, words which represent concepts we're familiar with. So, for example, when the automobile came along it was called a "horseless carriage," because of what we knew of horses and carriages. Here was a carriage that didn't have a horse. So we defined the automobile in terms of the absence of the horse.
When we send messages around electronically we call it "electronic mail," a reference to the postal service; "e-mail."
When we have meetings by computer we call it "computer conferencing," because we're used to conferences. So we come up with some sort of vocabulary that makes it sound like you're doing something like you're doing now, which kind of you are, but kind of you're not.
The same thing's true of Web pages. The time I'm putting in has virtually nothing to do with knowing how to create a Web page. The problem comes in pulling the material together. That, as far as I can see, is not very much different from publishing a book like an anthology. You have to find the material. You have to read through it. You have to edit it. You have to format it. You have to do all the things you have to do if you are making a book, except it ends up electronically on a computer screen. Of course, it doesn't end up where people see it unless they click on it and link to it. It's different from publishing. It's better, it's more, it's less. It's certainly not a hardback book. But it is words. It does require reading, even though you're reading off of a screen.
So much for my testimonial on behalf of books. I think it was probably unnecessary for this crowd, so let me shift a little bit to technology.
As I mentioned earlier, I was on the FCC in the 1960s and 1970s and came off of that into media reform organizations that I chaired, including the National Citizens Committee for Broadcasting, wrote a book called How to Talk Back to Your Television Set, and focused my attention on how to reform television.
Then in the 1970s President Carter appointed me a Presidential Advisor to help put on a White House Conference on Libraries and Information Services. It was just at the beginning of a lot of this online activity. Lexis and Nexis were up and running. There were government materials available. There was some library material available. Dialog was up and running. ARLN and OCLC were up and running.
At that point this just totally captured my imagination and fascination. I was convinced that, certainly by 1980, ninety percent of the people in America would be communicating only by e-mail. The telephone was out. Nobody would call anybody any more. There would be no more letters. We're still not anywhere close to that.
Since then that's a lot of what I've done -- focusing on electronic communication rather than just trying to reform television programming.
I had a network show on PBS called "New Tech Times" that I hosted for couple seasons. I wrote a column that started out in the Iowa City Press-Citizen and soon was nationally syndicated called "Communications Watch." I got my amateur radio license, so I play with radios as well as with computers. What I teach in the law school is Law of Electronic Media and, this semester, a Cyberspace Law Seminar. This is the stuff I think about: the legal and public policy issues, as well as media issues.
Although I'm interested in new technologies, I do try to draw distinctions. As a hobbyist I want to have one of everything. I want to play with all the stuff and see what it does. But even in my own life I make a distinction between those things that are toys and those things that are tools. The things that I actually work with during the day are often a generation or two prior to whatever is the latest hardware or software -- which I also want to have to play with at night. When I have a job to do I'm not going to take that time to learn some new software program. I think the same thing goes for the majority of the population.
I think that a lot of our problems, certainly a problem for a lot of corporations that are dumping millions and often hundreds of millions of dollars into projects that go belly-up, is that they have someone like me who goes running into the CEO and says, "Wow, guess what we can do. You can get a global positioning satellite receiver and know your exact latitude and longitude and altitude at all times." The CEO is a little put off because he doesn't know what the hell this person is talking about, but he doesn't want to appear ignorant. So he says, "Well, you seem very excited about this." "Yea, I really think we ought to get into this business." "Well, how much will it take?" "For $50 million I think we can set it up." "Well, OK, go ahead."
They do this and it turns out that little Nicky Johnson is the only person in Iowa City who wants to know his exact latitude, longitude and altitude at all times [laughter] and there are very few practical applications of this. My friends come to me and say, "If you don't know where you are why don't you ask?" I say, "What the hell, I'm a guy." They say, "Why don't you look up at the street sign or get a map?" I say, "You just don't understand how wonderful it is to know your exact latitude and longitude and altitude."
There are a lot of things out there like this. You've probably heard of ISDN which they like to believe stands for "integrated switched digital network." Other people say it stands for "innovations subscribers don't need." [laughter]
Interactive television; they spent billions of dollars on that. I advised Bell Atlantic not to put twelve billion dollars into it. They asked why. I said, "If you observe you will discover that Americans don't really want interactive television. They don't want active television. They want passive television. They want a remote, a couch and a TV set. I don't think this is going to go." And it hasn't. Executives continue to set up pilot projects to test it, and they continue to demonstrate that nobody wants to do it. The mere fact that we can do it is not alone enough to do it.
A lot of this is done for competitive reasons. I remember talking to a senior member of a law firm and asking him if he had Westlaw and Nexis. "Well, we've got that stuff." I said, "What, don't you find it useful?" He said, "Hell, I never use it." I said, "Why did you get it?" "Well," he replied, "all these damn kids you turn out of law school, they come out here and they say if they're going to work for our law firm that's one of the things they want to know: do we have Westlaw and Nexis? I told the office manager to go ahead get it. I don't give a damn what it is. I'll give them a Mercedes if they want a Mercedes. We just have to have those kids working for us here." So there's that. If UPS can track your package and tell you if you dot your i's then FedEx is going to have to be able to do that too, right?
Audience member: FedEx did it first.
NJ: I don't care who did it first. The point is, whoever did it second did it because somebody else did it first, not because it really needed to be done. There's a lot of stuff like that out there.
There's considerable evidence that the introduction of computers into institutions has actually brought about a decline in productivity rather than an improvement in productivity, as many of you can attest when you upgrade or improve the network or add new software. In fact, many corporations find that the cost of every work station, per year, is equivalent to what the original equipment cost. The equipment cost is essentially coffee money that gets lost in the noise. The cost is the maintenance, the upgrades, the training, the repair, the replacement. That's where the cost is, not that initial $2500 computer.
Along that line, I've been talking with some of you about what has happened to your job in the past few years. My son, Gregory, started doing some networking installation and management for the law school, was then hired away by the University, and now has set up his own business and operates as PC DOC, the personal computer doctor, out of North Liberty, serving both Cedar Rapids and Iowa City. He was working at the law school as the only person responsible for the network, helping people with all their problems, helping them recover their lost files, all those things.
I was kind of curious as to how many people you really need to do a job like this. He was carrying a cell phone and a pager. He was trying to get to everybody all the time and working during the night hours, during day hours. I started inquiring around among the generals I knew in the military, the corporate CEOs I knew in the Fortune 500 corporations, and university presidents when I was travelling around. It turned out, as I would tell them about how many computers and people we had, that the range of computer support staff would be, depending in part on how flush the institution was, somewhere between five and fifteen people. That's what most institutions would have to service the number of people and the number of computers we had at the law school. We were trying to do it with one part time guy who was working forty hours a week and getting paid twenty.
If it holds out any hope for you, we now do have five people at the law school doing the job that he used to try to do in twenty hours a week.
I think one of my responses to one of you this morning was, "What? Don't you have a union?" It seems to me that you all are doing four times what you used to have to do and obviously you can't do all of that well. The school system really does need to address this issue. I'm a great believer in providing adequate support for what you're doing, and making a go/no-go decision up front.
You can decide that you're not going to have computers at all. I don't think the kids would necessarily be incapable of living in the modern world. I think they learn a lot of what they need to know about computers on their own. But if you're going to have them then you have to support them. It's stupid to have computers that are four generations old. It's stupid to have computers if there is no one there to explain how to use them. It's stupid to have computers if they're broken. It's stupid to network them if the network is down. You guys know that more than I do. I think that case really needs to be made and very forcefully to the school board. Either support them or take them out. Either is fine. They'll survive. But if you're going to have them I think you have to do it right.
We want to do a little projection about the future. If you've already seen this, which you probably have because you're a sharp bunch of folks, you have to promise to be quiet because this is a test for the other people. This is the old nine-dot puzzle. You get four straight lines to connect all the dots. How many people have seen this and know the answer? Try it on your scrap paper there: four straight lines to go through all the dots.
What you do is go outside the box. What this is designed to illustrate is what is called "thinking outside the box." It makes the point that most of us, most of the time, do our thinking "inside the box." We think in terms of what we're used to. We think in terms of the problems we're used to addressing, the solutions we're used to bringing to those problems, the institutions we're used to working in, the interpersonal relationships we're used to, the institutions with which we interact outside of our own institutions, in the way in which we thought about it in the past.
So what might be fun for us during the remainder of our time is to do a little thinking outside the box with regard to the functions that you all are providing in Iowa City's schools. We also have representatives here from the University of Iowa College of Education, the Iowa City Public Library, and teachers. We have a broad spectrum here.
What does the second "T" in AT&T stand for?
Audience member: "Telegraph."
NJ: "Telegraph," that's right. It's still in their name: American Telephone and Telegraph.
The telegraph portion that we were used to when I was a boy was called Western Union.
(Actually, Western Union was offered the opportunity to buy AT&T for $100,000 and turned it down as something that was going nowhere. That was Marconi's fate in Italy as well. Radio was also going nowhere. Kodak perhaps has the best record in this regard, having been offered and turned down the opportunity to develop the Polaroid process, the Xerox process and video tape.)
Anyhow, when I was a boy we literally had a Western Union office and a guy who worked there who had a black bicycle and a little cap and uniform. There was one place in Iowa City where telegrams went out of and telegrams came into -- not unlike a number of villages around the world still today where there is one telephone. If you want to make a telephone call you go to that telephone.
Audience member: We have one phone in our school.
NJ: That's a very relevant point to make. We have the one hundred million-dollar Iowa Communications Network sunk in the ground, and the question is: once it gets to the schoolhouse, what next? If you don't even have a telephone in your classroom you really are a third world school system. You have one phone. You have to go to that phone. How do you hook up to the Internet?
Anyhow, there was this Western Union office sort of where Bremers is. Now today, what do you do if you want to send the equivalent of a telegram? What would you call it? How would you do it?
Audience member: E-mail.
NJ: E-mail, right. What have we done? We now have the equivalent of taking an industry, the telegraph company, and putting it in your house, on your desk. You've taken an industrial item, an industrial firm, a multi-million-dollar firm, and you have the capacity to operate that on your desk instead of one place downtown.
When we first had television sets in Iowa City there was one television set at Iowa-Illinois Gas and Electric down by the Englert Theater. If we wanted to watch television we went down and stood on the sidewalk and watched television through the window. Now you have television sets out in people's homes.
Consider the voice phone. When I was a boy, if you wanted to make a long distance call you had to go through an operator who punched a plug into a jack. What are you doing when you make a long distance call from home, a direct dial call? You can call any country in the world, any of one hundred eighty countries in the world. That touch tone phone is a computer terminal. It is connecting you to the world's largest computer. You are performing a function formerly performed by an employee of AT&T. You are manipulating the world's largest computer. You are making the connection, opening the circuits, testing the circuit, operating the billing system. You're doing all that from home with this little touch tone phone.
Some people say, "I don't want a computer." Let me tell you, friend, you have one whether you want one or not. You're operating it and doing just fine with it. It's a very simple terminal, but that's what it's doing.
Other examples. When I was on the FCC we had one satellite and three dishes. They cost three million dollars a piece. That was it for communications satellites. The first video cassette recorder was Bing Crosby's invention. Not many of you are old enough to remember Bing Crosby either. He didn't want to have to do his television program twice. He made them invent this thing called the video tape recorder so he could do it once, and they would record it and then broadcast it the second time for the other time zones. The first one cost two hundred thousand dollars easy. Computers cost a couple million dollars initially, taking up something the size of this room.
What has happened in all these instances -- with the telegraph, the phones, the satellites, computers, the VCRs -- is what I call the 99.9%-off sale. We've just been through the January sales in Iowa City. You are familiar with sales offering you 10%, 20%, 30%, sometimes even 50% off. Sometimes they've marked down the tag twice. But 99.9% off is something we're just not used to thinking in terms of -- its impact on us, on our budget, on our community, on our society, on our school system.
What does 99.9% off mean? It means that the telegraph company is now sitting on our desk. It means that the satellite dish that was three million dollars is now three thousand. It went from three million to three hundred thousand, at which point ATT and those big companies could afford it. Then it dropped to thirty thousand dollars -- the 99%-off sale. I remember that year. In the Nieman Marcus Christmas catalog they always have some high priced item up front. This year it was a submarine. I remember the year it was his and her satellite dishes at thirty thousand apiece for wealthy Texans. Then they dropped another order of magnitude to three thousand dollars. This is what we're talking about, orders of magnitude. From 100% to 10% to 1% to 1/10th of 1% -- those are order of magnitude drops. And when the cost of a satellite dish dropped from thirty thousand to three thousand dollars they weren't just for wealthy Texans any more. They started popping up like mushrooms in farmers' yards all across Iowa. That's a big difference. Something that was formerly a mega-industrial item became something an Iowa farmer can own and install and use.
The same thing is true of the VCR. When it dropped in price from two hundred thousand dollars to twenty thousand television stations could afford one. It next dropped to two thousand, those big Sony decks that some of you may remember that were three-fourths inch. Then the price dropped from two thousand dollars to two hundred, and the little half-inch video tape, and now they're in homes all around Iowa City. Many people even have more than one VCR. That has had a radical impact, and it's the kind of impact that requires thinking outside the box.
You can start playing this 99.9%-off game with yourself. What if the grocery bill were 1/10 of 1% of what it is now? What if you could get a Roll Royce and instead of paying two hundred thousand you only had to pay two hundred dollars? I'd keep one up at the Cedar Rapids airport. I'd just use it on the rare occasions when I'm up there.
What if a school building cost one tenth of one per cent of what a new school building now costs? What if a book cost one tenth of one per cent? What if you could buy a book for three cents instead of thirty-five dollars? How would that affect the book buying business?
You have to start thinking in these terms. Sometimes these changes come about and they're relatively unnoticed.
I've tried to make presentations to the Iowa City Chamber of Commerce. They have no interest whatsoever. What I'm trying to explain to them are the changes that have come about since the time when I was a boy growing up here in Johnson County and these local merchants had relative monopolies. If you wanted hardware there was Lenoch and Cilek -- and that was it unless you wanted to get your horse and carriage and go Des Moines. Today with the coming -- gradually, unnoticed and unheralded, and with no headlines in the newspapers -- the coming of the 800 number, and the credit card, and the UPS and FedEx, I suspect every one of us around this table has ordered something from outside Iowa City through those technologies that formerly we would have purchased in Iowa City or not purchased at all. How many millions of dollars, or billions of dollars, are flowing out of Iowa to what, not incidently, we still call "mail order," with all this electronic technology?
Next phase: How many people in those mail order firms in Miami and Austin and San Diego and Seattle and New York and Brooklyn, how many of them are thinking about what it's going to do to their business when we get the global 800 numbers that are now being installed? If you can order the computer directly from Taiwan or Malaysia why order it from Austin, Texas, and pay the mark-up -- any more than why order from Iowa City and pay the mark-up? So those mail order firms may get another wave of this as technology changes.
A lot of that stuff happens kind of gradually. I was talking with a colleague yesterday. I teach a Cyberspace Law Seminar, he teaches copyright law. We were talking about the fact that there are now a number of very valuable Web pages that professors have put up that are the equivalent of creating, writing, editing and publishing a casebook -- and then giving it away for free. It's a syllabus, but it's a syllabus with links out to the material that the students need. I have my Cyberspace Law Seminar online with its own Web page. If somebody uses my references, or I use their references, well, I guess that's OK. It's kind of interesting.
But what if we start talking to each other. What if this professor in Berkeley, where I used to teach, Samuelson, she says, "Look, on this particular material I'd like you to use Nick Johnson's reading list." Then she sends me an e-mail, "Nick, would you mind looking over this student's paper, that section of the paper that has to do with a subject where your expertise is greater than mine?" I say, "Sure, that's fine." I know at some point there's going to be a dean somewhere, or one of these bean-counting vice presidents, who's going to say, "I've heard you're giving time to these students out in Berkeley. We need to get tuition from them."
What we are creating, in fact, is kind of a global school. There's more and more distance education, schools without walls, a 99.9%-off sale, globalization, instantaneous access. Some of that will happen, some of it won't.
I agree with Neil Postman. Suddenly every little high school student is going to have access to the experts of the world? Or telemedicine?
Law students aren't interested in public interest work like they were in the 1960s and 1970s. They just want to get rich. I say, "OK, play them where they lay, take them where you find them. Your assignment is to go out and invent a billion-dollar-a-year industry. There's one of them every week in the newspapers if you read them carefully. All you have to do is plug the stereo components together. You can do it."
So one student is putting together a telemedicine proposal for Viet Nam. But what has always amazed me about such proposals is that if you can't get the doctor on the phone now, why are you going to be able to get her into the video conference in the future?
How many of these Nobel Prize winners are actually going to be dutifully attending to the high school students who want their advice on research papers? I think some of that certainly does happen.
What does the 99.9% percent off sale mean to the library? The three-cent book we've already mentioned; but what happens when we take an industry and put it on your desk?
As you zap around from link to link on the Web it doesn't make a lot of difference whether you're going from a computer in Iowa City to one in Cedar Rapids or one in Bangkok. It may take a little more time at some times of the day, and so forth, but for the most part it looks to you as if it's part of one thing, and it is part of one thing. The way I describe it, it is the equivalent of taking fourteen billion pages of material and putting it on your hard drive. You get access to it the same way you get access to a file on your hard drive. You click on it and there it is. It may be something on your hard drive or maybe it's something that's on a computer in Moscow, Paris, Rome, or wherever.
What happens if you can suddenly take the equivalent of a hundred-thousand-volume library, a million-volume library (the Library of Congress, as you know, is in the process of putting one-to-two million documents a year up on the Internet), what happens when you have that library on your desk at home? Are you going to go downtown to use the Western Union office when you can send an e-mail? Are you going to go to the library when you've got the library on your home computer?
It's not that simple. We all know that, and I've already done my commercial for the book.
I think there will continue to be a role for books, and a role for libraries. The role of the Iowa City Press-Citizen has had to change with the coming of radio and television and now CNN. So now we have more feature pieces. Last Saturday their big take-out was on cloning. Just as the role of the paper is going to have to change, I think the role of the librarian is going to have to change. I don't think librarians are going to be out of work. I think they're going to have more work to do. But I think it's going to be a different kind of work, in the same way that the Press-Citizen still has work to do but it's a different kind of work.
In summary, I think schools and libraries, public education, universities, whatever, no less than any other institutions in our society, need to be doing a lot of thinking outside the box, thinking about what the future could bring depending on how these developments evolve.
With that, let's devote what remaining time we have to my getting more information than what I came with.
Audience member: You said that you've asked librarians for help all your life and still are. You're saying the role of librarians is changing. Could you explain how you use librarians differently now than forty years ago doing research?
NJ: It's interesting that you should ask. Early on I came upon the concept of the observing participant, as distinguished from the participant observer. I like to watch myself from afar and see what I'm doing, because I've found that, more often than not, it ends up being something that in a few years a lot of people are doing. One of the things that is sort of pre-Internet that I found myself doing is whenever I was working on any problem one of the first things I did was call the Iowa City library and talk to people at the reference desk. For years they had a 100% batting average. They never failed to come up with what it was I was looking for regardless of how obscure or bizarre.
Audience member: And given the amount of time, I wonder if it used to take longer than today.
NJ: That could be. Every once in a while I would forget, because my long- term memory has now declined to roughly 30 seconds. [laughter] I would get into a project ten or twenty minutes and I'd be frustrated, and then I'd remember to call the library and get back on track. Now what I find myself doing more and more is that I just go immediately to the Internet. I go to a search engine and I throw in the terms.
Audience member: Our junior high kids are doing the same thing. They're running into a road block and they're not as sophisticated a user as you are, they don't have the skills to do it, but do you still rely on librarians sometimes after you reach a dead end on the Internet?
NJ: Absolutely.
Audience member: So then the librarian still takes over with something that you don't know how to do to get the information.
NJ: The function to be performed -- and I don't know whether it's the librarians' function or not, but I don't know why it can't be, it's out there for somebody to grab -- and that is preparing more useful Web pages and search engines. One of the things I talked to my colleague about yesterday was that maybe it would be worthwhile for us to put together our own Web page for cyberspace law material that links to all the cyberspace law resources out there. There would be one place that I can go. I don't care if anyone else wants to go there.
That's another wonderful thing about the Internet, that you do all this for free. Books that formally would sell with royalties are now just put there and given away to anyone who wants to download them. I went into an interview with a reporter from Santiago, Chile last month or the month before, and he came in with a big stack of papers. I said,"Gee, what's that?" "That's How to Talk Back to Your Television Set. I downloaded it from your Web page. I've been reading it." It's a different world out there.
There are some wonderful resources out there for Iowa City, as you probably know, Web pages that connect you to all kinds of information about Iowa City.
I think that would be a function that a library could perform in much the same way that our public library used to have on index cards -- they may now have them computerized -- all the local organizations' address, phone numbers, officers and information like that. I think a librarian could put together a Web page about the community and resources about the community and upload as much as could be uploaded. Librarians could help people find useful Web sites in the same way that kids come to the information desk and want help with their research paper, and somebody explains to them that there is the Encyclopedia Britannica. They could come in and be directed to useful Web sites.
I haven't worked out all the answers. I may not work out all the questions either, but that seems to me one of the questions.
Audience member: Wouldn't it be better to have hard back books than texts on the Internet?
NJ: Why couldn't we possibly have both?
One of the non-profit boards I sit on is Volunteers in Technical Assistance, VITA, out of Washington We're putting up low orbit satellites to provide communication, as we say, beyond the last telephone pole. An enormous proportion of the Earth's land area and population live without access to telephones or the Internet or anything like that. Using amateur radio technology we can put a station in, say, a remote hospital in Africa somewhere for fifteen hundred or two thousand dollars. That's a satellite earth station and computer and e-mail capability. They can at least send and receive e-mail there, which would include some documents in that way.
They don't have the option of a book.
My house is filled with books, in the living room, upstairs, the attic, in boxes. I have books at the office. If I'm going to read something I'd much rather reach for the shelf and get a book than to read that same book off a screen.
But what if you don't have the book?
My book, sadly, due to the shortsightedness of Santiago, Chile, librarians [laughter] is not available in Santiago. The only way that Santiago reporter could get that book was to get it off my Web page on the Internet. Given the choice between nothing and something, and given the ability to search and find it in a way that otherwise would not have been possible, or to wait six weeks for an inter-library loan . . .
Audience member: How should we allocate money between books and technology?
NJ: I think you're the one making those decisions rather than me.
I would assume, if it were my budget, and I was allocating it, and it was finite, that if the mathematical formula is such that I can get one hundred times more stuff in electronic form on CD-ROM or microfiche or microfilm or the Internet, or whatever, that would influence my decision.
At the law school we have chosen to cut back on the budget for periodicals that are timely and lose their appeal over time.
I'd be tempted to do the same thing in your libraries; put proportionally less money into time-sensitive material, and proportionally more money into the reference database of the back issues. You have to do a benefit-cost analysis and consider your opportunity costs.
Audience member: There are lots of people out there doing Web pages. While, certainly, yours is of value to an audience and has a lot of validity and you have authority as the creator of that page, there are a lot of people out there who are just creating web pages and putting stuff up there that is of questionable value. Kids, and some adults, aren't able to discriminate what really is information there and what is not.
NJ: That's an important point.
You may have noticed in the news recently, maybe it was on "60 Minutes," the fellow, I think it was in Nevada, who has set up a Web page about conspiracies. He just asserted that the TWA plane was shot down by a missile. They asked him if it bothered him that he didn't have any evidence of this. He responded, "Well, no. I just thought it was a good story so I put it up there."
I know Pierre Salinger. I haven't talked to him about this. He came out with a statement that the plane was shot down by a missile. Apparently his source had something to do with that Internet site. He's a pretty sophisticated guy. The fact that he smokes big, long cigars shouldn't be held against him. If he is unable to use his capacity for sifting through all the crap he's sifted through in his lifetime to find the little gem that's worth reporting, we really have some serious problems out there. I'd like to talk to him. I can't believe that he did that if he actually relied on what is essentially a kind of half joke, half militia paranoid theory.
"I'm annoyed, you're annoyed, we're a paranoid." [laughter] That's the Capitol Steps. I believe in giving credit.
Maybe that is another major function for librarians, which is not unrelated to the subject of general semantics that runs throughout much of my dad's writing. I'm in the process of editing and formatting for his memorial Web page a wonderful piece called "You Can't Write Writing," which is something every English teacher still ought to read.
Maybe one of the major functions for you all now, or your colleagues somewhere in the school system, is to do precisely this.
If I'm not on the computer then I listen to late night radio between two and five a.m. just to see what the right wing is up to, and it's pretty scary, let me tell you. My sense is that there is much less concern and capacity for figuring out what is truth and what is not than what my sense is we had when I was a kid. Maybe not. But the craziest stuff gets asserted and repeated. There seems to be no sense of empirical data, of checking sources, of asking the general semanticist's basic questions: "What do you mean?" and "How do you know?" Share an assertion and there it is.
Someone has pointed out at one of these round table talks about this, a journalist said, "You really ought to be reading newspapers and magazines that we write and edit because that's the truth, and that's what people need to know. The Internet is unreliable, you don't know where it came from."
Some magazines are not reliable either. After all, the Weekly World News is a hard copy publication. You don't read that, do you? It's a great supermarket tabloid. It's kind of the ultimate of the undocumented wonderful stories and headlines: "Woman eats dirt for twenty-five years and turns to stone." The cow that had a baby -- or was it the alien who had a cow? The man who commutes two hundred miles each day to his work. You miss all those stories if you don't read the Weekly World News. You can't get the Weekly World News at Econofoods anymore. I don't know what's happened. Somebody is applying some editorial standards to what they're willing to sell.
We've reached the hour of 11:15. I'm happy to stay longer. And anybody who wants to look at my Web page, or an early version of what will be my dad's, I'm happy to show that. But I'm also not offended if you decide to devote the rest of your life to something other than continuing to listen to Nicholas Johnson.
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