From: kamorgan@athena.mit.edu (Keith Morgan)
Subject: Re: Computers not a substitute for books
Organization: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Date: Wed, 6 Jan 1993 18:13:39 GMT

Mike Godwin writes:

	Keith Morgan writes:

		Amy does have a point that this "egalitarian media" would now
	have a middleman. I can give you a book and you can read it. I can
	give you a digital text and you will need *something* to read it with.
	Unless technology expands its largesse and efficiency enough to
	virtualy give digital text readers away with the text, then there
	will be information poor and information rich.

Hmmm. Does the fact that one requires *something* to listen to a record,
tape, or CD mean that our culture is divided into the music poor and the
music rich?

	Yes.

My Sony Walkman cost me less than $25, yet with it I can listen to the
same tapes as my roommate, with his multi-thousand-dollar system.
While this is no consolation to the person who can't even afford a
Walkman, it does suggest the potential for economies of scale to put
whatever reading technology is developed into the hands of the great
majority of citizens.

	Well, I granted the possibility that the expansion of
	technology could create economies of scale that made digital text
	readers similar in price to your Walkman. There's an
	interesting question here concerning both the possibility and
	the actuality of this expansion. There's the question of
	markets, of the recouping of r&d costs, before a trickle down
	to the people will occur. Still, what concerned me in Amy's
	post wasn't whether the book would disappear and only people with
	digital readers would have access to books, but that *some*,
	not all, forms of information would be electronic only. I
	guess I'm making that distinction between information and
	knowledge. I still believe that the book will be with us for a
	long time to come. (And I know that this is just an aesthetic
	consideration but your Walkman delivers music at the lowest
	common denominator, while your roommate's expensive stereo
	delivers something else). 

I speak to a lot of librarian groups, by the way, and I often encounter
the specter of the "information rich and poor"--yet what I know of the
decline in costs and rise in availability of sophisticated information
technologies suggests to me that this specter is a will-o'-the-wisp.

	I speak to a lot of librarian groups as well, and I think that
	the idea of the information poor/rich division is often badly
	presented. This is not to say that it doesn't exist, it's just
	not always at the level of the homeless man trying to find the
	law or poor little Annie pining for a copy of Tom Sawyer. An
	example: as the recession hit many local Cambridge hightech
	firms, one of the first cost-cutting measures was to close the
	corporate library - after all there's lots of libraries around
	aren't there? - so the researchers and the junior executives
	start pining for information and head over to MIT or Harvard,
	but what do they find? Closed doors/closed stacks/closed
	reference. The conceptual distinction between a public and
	private library is an alien notion. But, they get straightened
	out and head downtown to the Boston Public Library after it's
	pointed out that BPL is also a research library. The problem
	is that they find that good as BPL is, it's understaffed and has less
	of the deluxe information services they were used to in the
	corporate library. Consequently, research suffers, business
	competitiveness suffers, and the economy suffers. 

	This is a long-winded response to something I'm not
	particularly quarrelsome about. I've read de Sola Pool and
	I've observed the populist aspects of technology, I just think
	that there might be periods of "information poverty" for many
	people until things shake out some more.


	Keith

--

Keith Morgan kamorgan@athena.mit.edu
In the end nothing could be said of his work except that it was
preposterous and true and totally unacceptable. Edward Whittemore
Newsgroups: rec.arts.books,talk.philosophy.misc