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The
Next Great American Newspaper ROUGHLY SIX YEARS AGO I gave
a talk at a D.C. think tank complaining that it was
outrageous for the conservative community (that
vigorous, virile young beast) to allow New York
City to subsist on the thin gruel of the New York
Times Book Review and the New York Review of Books,
both left of center. Don't books matter? Doesn't
critical opinion at the center of the publishing
(not to say the cultural) world count? The Times
Book Review feels its responsibility and tries to
be fair--I don't know whether a conservative weekly
would try as hard--but it is what it is. The fault
lies not in the Times but in ourselves. If
conservative thinkers and tycoons cared a tenth as
much about culture as they do about politics, the
situation would have been Righted decades ago.
Response to my talk was reassuring: Good idea,
important! But relax, everything is under control.
The problem was gone into years ago by experts and
found to be insoluble. Times have changed. For a
generation this country has needed a whole new set
of institutions, and today they are finally (albeit
obliquely) arriving and taxiing in. Talk radio has
been solid for years. Fox News (which has ties to
this magazine too numerous to disclose) assaulted
dug-in cultural positions from an unexpected
direction--and suddenly a New Generation of
Americans (my own boys, for example) were watching
TV news. I'd thought TV news was dead. And a few
weeks ago, THE WEEKLY STANDARD itself addressed
ground zero of American culture by <a
href="http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/002/685ikxze.asp"
target=_blank>calling for</a> a new daily
newspaper in this country. "We need, and deserve, a
great daily newspaper. . . . Careful and truthful,
lively and unpompous, confident and not smug--and,
of course, fair, balanced, and unafraid. Who will
found it?" It can happen and is bound
to. The conservative editorial page of the Wall
Street Journal is a vital asset, but Manhattan was
always intended for a Times a Herald Tribune--one
Democratic Alpha Male newspaper and one Republican.
(There is also the new and first-rate Sun; more
below.) But the Herald Tribune died nearly 40 years
ago--of labor trouble, not lack of readers. That it
has never been replaced is one of the strangest,
saddest anomalies of modern cultural history. (And
yet not <I>that</I> strange; rather all
too typical of the Establishment's favorite
response to the challenges of the 1960s--roll over
and die.) America's next great
newspaper is a wonderful idea--but it will have to
be published on the web and not on paper, and as a
new style web newspaper, not one of today's
conventional web-based losers. It is coming--and
(in the nature of things) it will redefine the news
story <I>and</I> the
newspaper. Why on the web and not on
newsprint? It's much cheaper to produce and
distribute that way, and your distribution network
puts you, automatically, in homes all over the
world. The web is a medium young readers can
manage. Young people don't read newspapers; chances
are they don't even know how. But they know how to
play with computers. (Possibly this is the only
thing they <I>do</I> know. Or almost
the only.) And, most important: A newspaper sells
timeliness if it sells anything. The idea that
newspapers can no longer compete in the "fresh
news" market because of all-news cable channels is
silly; radio has been delivering bulletins for
eighty years, but people continued to read
newspapers anyway, for as long as they were worth
reading. Because a web-paper is a "virtual" object
made of software, capable of changing by the
microsecond, lodged inside a computer where fresh
data pour in constantly at fantastic rates, a
web-paper can be the timeliest of them all--and it
can be a <I>great</I> paper if it plays
to its natural advantages and delivers timeliness
with style. Why a "new style" web
newspaper and not today's style? Because today's
web-papers are wedge-ins, stop-gaps, crack fillers,
with all the character of putty in a plastic
spritz-tube; people read them not for pleasure and
illumination but to extract a necessary fact or
kill time when they are stuck at their desks. Their
builders don't seem to have grasped what makes the
newsprint newspaper one of design history's
greatest achievements. (Do they ever
<I>read</I> a newspaper?) No web
newspaper will match all of newsprint's best
qualities, but web designers should
<I>understand</I> those qualities so
they can concoct new ones that are (in their ways)
equally attractive. The mere timid transfer of
newsprint-style newspapers to the web--standard
operating procedure today--is bound to yield
failure, just as primitive movies
<I>had</I> to be boring so long as
directors merely pointed their cameras at a stage
and slurped up Broadway plays. Movies needed their
own, new ways to tell a story. Web newspapers do
too. The average web newspaper's
biggest problem nowadays is the problem of nearly
all websites: They are boring, as vastly useful and
dull as the computer itself. If "America's next
great newspaper" is a web-paper, it must
(nonetheless) draw your fascinated attention; make
you itch to tune in. It must be interesting to
<I>watch</I>--not a pint-sized bulletin
board like today's websites, where (occasionally)
someone tacks up something new, with dancing
cartoon-ads thrown in to drive you crazy; instead
like a porthole you look <I>through</I>
to an intriguing, ever-changing scene on the far
side. It should work equally well as a newspaper or
as news radio that reads itself aloud, following
your simple voice commands. It should be capable of
slipping smoothly and naturally off the screen into
something more comfortable, the printed
page. In technology terms, it is
all surprisingly easy. Nothing on this wish list
detracts from the brand new, newsprint New York
Sun--long may it prosper. For all I know,
"America's next great newspaper"
<I>is</I> the Sun--but on the web.
(It's on the web today, of course--but in
conventional antique style.) SPACE is newsprint's domain;
time is the web's. As an ordinary thing-in-space,
the newsprint newspaper will always be the better,
more convenient object; the web-paper is a mere
slippery goldfish behind the glass of your computer
screen--you can peer at it, and handle it by remote
control. (Study a menu, inch the cursor around,
press a numb-feeling mouse-button. Computers are
obnoxiously fussy.) As an
object-in-<I>time</I> the web-paper
will be king, if we let it be--but what kind of
object is that? If a still photo is an object in
space, a parade seen from a fixed location is an
object in time--its grand marshal two hours in the
past, its rear end 20 minutes into the future. And
(it just so happens) the news <I>is</I>
a parade, it is a March of Time (Time-Life's famous
newsreel series), a sequence of events--and thus
perfect for a (new style) web newspaper. How can
history's parade (or <I>any</I> parade)
not be interesting? A proper web-paper will be a
parade of reports, each materializing in the
present and marching off into the past. A new sprint paper is a slab of
space (even a closed tabloid is larger than most
computer screens) that is
<I>browsable</I> and
<I>transparent</I>. Browsability is
what a newspaper is for: to offer readers a
smorgasbord of stories, pictures, ads and let them
choose what looks good. "Transparent" means you can
always tell from a distance what you're getting
into (Are there lots of pages here or not many?
Important news today or nothing much?)--and you
always know (as you read) where you are, how far
you've come, and how much is left. The newsprint
paper is an easy, comfortable, unfussy object. You
can turn to the editorials, flip to the back page,
or pull out the sports section without thinking.
It's light and simple and cheap: Spread it on the
breakfast table and spill coffee on it, read it
standing in a subway or flat on your back on sofa
or lawn, on the beach or in bed. You can write on
it, cut it up, pull it apart, fold it open to an
interesting story, and stick it (folded) in your
pocket to show to someone later. These small
details add up to brilliant design. <p>A web-paper could
be a first-rate "object in time"--but today's are
cut-rate conventional papers instead, imitation
newsprint. Today's typical web-paper is like a
newsprint paper where you can only see one
midget-sized page at a time, and can never touch
it--someone holds it in front of your face. You
have no idea how many more pages there are, or how
the pages are arranged. Since you can never
<I>touch</I> the thing, you are
constantly issuing finicky little orders: Turn the
page, show me the arts section, make that damned ad
stop blinking. <p>Today's web-papers
offer one main advantage over newsprint: They let
you search. But how often do newsprint readers
<I>want</I> to search, or need to? They
know where to find what they want; anyway, they
mainly browse. They want to be distracted,
enlightened, entertained. First law of information:
<I>browsing trumps searching</I>. But
(second law)--effective browsing is
<I>visual</I> browsing, what you do
when you pick two interesting magazines out of
thousands at a newsstand; or read a newsprint paper
and let a photo, headline, ad, or cartoon catch
your eye. <p>The web-papers of
tomorrow should be "objects in time," and here is
the picture. Imagine a parade of jumbo index cards
standing like set-up dominoes. On your computer
display, the parade of index cards stretches into
the simulated depths of your screen, from the
middle-bottom (where the front-most card stands,
looking big) to the farthest-away card in the upper
left corner (looking small). Now, something
happens: Tony Blair makes a speech. A new card
materializes in front (a report on the speech) and
everyone else takes a step back--and the
farthest-away card falls off the screen and
(temporarily) disappears. So the parade is in
constant motion. New stories keep popping up in
front, and the parade streams backwards to the
rear. Each card is a "news
item"--text or photo, or (sometimes) audio or
video. "Text" could mean an entire conventional
news story or speech or interview. But the pressure
in this medium is away from the long set-piece
story, towards the continuing series of lapidary
paragraphs. There's room on a "news card" for a
headline, a paragraph and a small photo. (If the
news item is a long story or transcript, only the
opening fits on the card--but you can read the
whole thing if you want to, by clicking the proper
mouse-buttons.) So: a moving parade (or
flowing stream) of news items--new ones constantly
arriving in front, older ones moving back.
(Actually it's one long parade reaching back to the
newspaper's founding; you can rewind it like
videotape.) You can only see one full card at a
time; the others are partially hidden by cards in
front. But you can guess what's on the partially
hidden cards, because you can see their top edges
and left margins. And when you touch a card with
the cursor, a complete version pops up
instantaneously. The news stream uses
foreshortening to make the most of screen space:
One glance encompasses the most recent 20 or 30
postings, the latest quarter-hour to several hours
of news, depending on the world's pulse at the
moment and your preferences. Everything on every card is
indexed, everything is searchable should you care
to search--the news parade is (equivalently) an
"information beam" you can focus as precisely as
you like. Type "Tony Blair" and you get a Tony
beam--still a moving stream edging backwards into
the sunset, but all Tony, all the time. >MOST IMPORTANT, the news
story itself is redefined. Today's standard news
story is a monolithic slab of text, updated a few
times perhaps and then plopped into the
archives. It is an odd bastard at
best, a triumph of efficiency and marketing over
literary logic. It is radically front-loaded; it
starts with its most interesting sentence and then
tapers (line by line) to a sharp point of boredom,
losing momentum with every paragraph--thus a
spike-shaped monstrosity perfectly formed for its
mission, to be pounded like a piton into the rock
wall of a reader's indifference. The new style news story is
a string of short pieces interspersed with photos,
transcripts, statements, and whatnot as they
emerge: It is an evolving chain; you can pick it up
anywhere and follow it back into the past as far as
you like. Instead of writing one
longish piece, reporters will write (say) five
short ones--will belt out little stories all the
time, as things happen. They will shape their news
stories to the shape of the news, of experience, of
time. The string of aphorisms--prose in stanzas--is
a perfect form for fresh and timely news. Perfect
also for a nation where concentration spans seem to
halve every year. Yet (on the other hand) it is no
accident that two of the three greatest writers of
modern times should have loved writing aphorisms.
(Freud didn't, but Nietzsche and Wittgenstein did.)
Not a bad way to write, not by any
means. YOU CAN READ this news
stream, or switch it to auto-pilot and (following
your simple commands, if you're driving a car, say,
or lying around) it will read to
<I>you</I>. Eventually the web paper
will migrate from the web server to your own
computer. The main office e-mails you each new
"card"; software on your computer receives each new
arrival, indexes it, adds it to the moving parade.
Now (by the way) you can read many newspapers
simultaneously; each sends you its own stream of
cards, and your local software shuffles them
together in time-order. (Yes, you can already
arrange to receive news updates by e-mail--but
without the right kind of display, you have
nothing. Third law of information: The interface
the application. The right picture is
everything.) Takes up lots of space on
your computer, right? All those "news cards"?
Requires lots of computing power to operate this
fancy display? Absolutely. But the high expense
(and good performance) of the eventual
on-your-desktop version is a feature, not a bug.
The industry (after all) has a problem: Each new PC
generation arrives on your desktop equipped with
vaster and vaster, emptier and emptier closets for
information you don't own and couldn't locate if
you did; the per-bit cost of storing data is near
zero already, and the question is what to
<I>do</I> with all that storage space.
<I>And</I> each new PC generation
arrives with faster and faster processor chips,
which spend more and more of their time doing
nothing. Eventually people are likely to notice,
and start asking questions. "Why do I need a new
computer? What's wrong with the old one? What
important thing will the new one do that the old
one can't do just as well?" At which point the
computer industry as we know it will start falling
apart. The tycoon who founds America's next great
newspaper will help save the computer industry
too. And it would be so damned
<I>easy</I> to found, it's almost
painful. I LIVE NORTH of New Haven in
the middle of the Great Suburb (a global feature,
like the Amazon or Sahara) that covers the
northeast and plays a big role in setting the
nation's cultural mood. Around here we set out food
for the birds, and the New York Times sets out
information for us. People nibble at it without
enjoying themselves or pondering over much. Mostly
it never occurs to them that the Times is slanted,
because the Times is the rock-solid floor of their
world, it defines horizontal. (Thus Dan Rather's
celebrated observation--which must have cracked up
Sulzberger and his editors--that the Wall Street
Journal is right-wing but the Times is
middle-of-the-road.) Of course the Times is, in
reality, too big and varied to be condemned as just
"slanted," period--there are plenty of Times
reporters whose integrity is absolute--but its
national and world news coverage is slanted and
getting slantier. Yet here in the Great Suburb, no
one will give up the Times until an attractive
alternative presents itself. I do hear more
disapproving murmurs than I used to--but only
because of the newspaper's ever more blatant
anti-Israel tone--which, however, people take for
mere bigotry; they've seen it all before. They
rarely ask themselves whether such bigotry might
not be part of a larger infection incubated on the
editorial page and now spreading up and down the
narrow airless news columns, making the whole paper
mildly feverish today--and delirious
tomorrow. Yet things could change for
the Times as fast as they did for the networks once
cable TV started to grab. One day CBS was on top of
the world, next day it was muttering darkly about
strategies for survival. Things happen. <p by David
Gelernter 06/23/2003, Volume 008,
Issue 40 ROUGHLY SIX YEARS AGO I gave
a talk at a D.C. think tank complaining that it was
outrageous for the conservative community (that
vigorous, virile young beast) to allow New York
City to subsist on the thin gruel of the New York
Times Book Review and the New York Review of Books,
both left of center. Don't books matter?
Doesn't critical opinion at the
center of the publishing (not to say the cultural)
world count? The Times Book Review feels its responsibility and tries
to be fair--I don't know whether a conservative
weekly would try as hard--but it is what
it is. The fault lies not in
the Times but in ourselves. If conservative
thinkers and tycoons cared a tenth as
much about culture as they do
about politics, the situation would have been
Righted decades ago. Response to my talk was reassuring: Good idea,
important! But relax, everything is under control.
The problem was gone into years ago by experts and found to
be insoluble. Times have changed. For a
generation this country has needed a whole new set
of institutions, and today they are finally (albeit obliquely)
arriving and taxiing in. Talk radio has been solid
for years. Fox News (which has ties to
this magazine too numerous to
disclose) assaulted dug-in cultural positions from
an unexpected direction--and suddenly a New Generation of
Americans (my own boys, for example) were watching
TV news. I'd thought TV news was dead. And a few
weeks ago, THE WEEKLY STANDARD itself addressed
ground zero of American culture by calling for a new
daily newspaper in this country. "We need, and
deserve, a great daily newspaper. . . . Careful and truthful, lively
and unpompous, confident and not smug--and, of
course, fair, balanced, and unafraid. Who will found
it?" It can happen and is bound
to. The conservative editorial page of the Wall
Street Journal is a vital asset, but Manhattan was always
intended for a Times and a Herald Tribune--one
Democratic Alpha Male newspaper and one Republican. (There is
also the new and first-rate Sun; more below.) But
the Herald Tribune died nearly 40 years ago--of labor trouble,
not lack of readers. That it has never been
replaced is one of the strangest,
saddest anomalies of modern cultural
history. (And yet not that strange; rather all too
typical of the Establishment's favorite response to the challenges
of the 1960s--roll over and die.) America's next great
newspaper is a wonderful idea--but it will have to
be published on the web and not on
paper, and as a new style web
newspaper, not one of today's conventional
web-based losers. It is coming--and (in
the nature of things) it will
redefine the news story and the
newspaper. Why on the web and not on
newsprint? It's much cheaper to produce and
distribute that way, and your
distribution network puts you,
automatically, in homes all over the world. The web
is a medium young readers can manage. Young people don't read
newspapers; chances are they don't even know how.
But they know how to play with computers. (Possibly this is
the only thing they do know. Or almost the only.)
And, most important: A newspaper sells timeliness if it sells
anything. The idea that newspapers can no longer
compete in the "fresh news" market because of all-news cable
channels is silly; radio has been delivering
bulletins for eighty years, but people continued to read newspapers
anyway, for as long as they were worth reading.
Because a web-paper is a "virtual" object made of software,
capable of changing by the microsecond, lodged
inside a computer where fresh data pour in constantly at
fantastic rates, a web-paper can be the timeliest
of them all--and it can be a great paper if
it plays to its natural
advantages and delivers timeliness with
style. Why a "new style" web
newspaper and not today's style? Because today's
web-papers are wedge-ins, stop-gaps, crack fillers, with all the
character of putty in a plastic spritz-tube; people
read them not for pleasure and illumination but to extract
a necessary fact or kill time when they are stuck
at their desks. Their builders don't
seem to have grasped what makes
the newsprint newspaper one of design history's
greatest achievements. (Do they ever read a newspaper?) No
web newspaper will match all of newsprint's best
qualities, but web designers should understand those
qualities so they can concoct new ones that are (in
their ways) equally attractive. The mere timid transfer of
newsprint-style newspapers to the web--standard
operating procedure today--is bound to yield failure, just as
primitive movies had to be boring so long as
directors merely pointed their cameras at
a stage and slurped up
Broadway plays. Movies needed their own, new ways
to tell a story. Web newspapers do too. The average web newspaper's
biggest problem nowadays is the problem of nearly
all websites: They are boring, as vastly useful and dull as
the computer itself. If "America's next great
newspaper" is a web-paper, it must (nonetheless) draw your
fascinated attention; make you itch to tune in. It
must be interesting to watch--not a pint-sized bulletin board
like today's websites, where (occasionally) someone
tacks up something new, with dancing cartoon-ads thrown
in to drive you crazy; instead like a porthole you
look through to an intriguing, ever-changing scene on the
far side. It should work equally well as a
newspaper or as news radio that reads
itself aloud, following your simple
voice commands. It should be capable of slipping
smoothly and naturally off the screen into something more
comfortable, the printed page. In technology terms, it is
all surprisingly easy. Nothing on this wish list
detracts from the brand new, newsprint New York
Sun--long may it prosper. For all I know, "America's next great
newspaper" is the Sun--but on the web. (It's on the
web today, of course--but in conventional antique
style.) SPACE is newsprint's domain;
time is the web's. As an ordinary thing-in-space,
the newsprint newspaper will always be the better, more
convenient object; the web-paper is a mere slippery
goldfish behind the glass of your computer screen--you can
peer at it, and handle it by remote control. (Study
a menu, inch the cursor around, press a numb-feeling mouse-button.
Computers are obnoxiously fussy.) As an object-in-time the
web-paper will be king, if we let it be--but what
kind of object is that? If a still photo is
an object in space, a parade
seen from a fixed location is an object in
time--its grand marshal two hours in the
past, its rear end 20 minutes into
the future. And (it just so happens) the news is a
parade, it is a March of Time (Time-Life's famous newsreel
series), a sequence of events--and thus perfect for
a (new style) web newspaper. How can history's parade (or
any parade) not be interesting? A proper web-paper
will be a parade of reports, each materializing in the
present and marching off into the past. A newsprint paper is a slab
of space (even a closed tabloid is larger than most
computer screens) that is browsable and transparent.
Browsability is what a newspaper is for: to offer
readers a smorgasbord of stories, pictures, ads and let them
choose what looks good. "Transparent" means you can
always tell from a distance what you're getting into
(Are there lots of pages here or not many?
Important news today or nothing
much?)--and you always know (as you
read) where you are, how far you've come, and how
much is left. The newsprint paper is an easy, comfortable,
unfussy object. You can turn to the editorials,
flip to the back page, or pull out the
sports section without thinking.
It's light and simple and cheap: Spread it on the
breakfast table and spill coffee on it,
read it standing in a subway or
flat on your back on sofa or lawn, on the beach or
in bed. You can write on it, cut it up, pull it apart, fold it open
to an interesting story, and stick it (folded) in
your pocket to show to someone later.
These small details add up to
brilliant design. A web-paper could be a
first-rate "object in time"--but today's are
cut-rate conventional papers instead,
imitation newsprint. Today's typical
web-paper is like a newsprint paper where you can
only see one midget-sized page at a time, and can never touch
it--someone holds it in front of your face. You
have no idea how many more pages there are, or how the pages
are arranged. Since you can never touch the thing,
you are constantly issuing finicky little orders: Turn the
page, show me the arts section, make that damned ad
stop blinking. Today's web-papers offer one
main advantage over newsprint: They let you search.
But how often do newsprint readers want to search, or
need to? They know where to find what they want;
anyway, they mainly browse. They want to be distracted,
enlightened, entertained. First law of information:
browsing trumps searching. But (second law)--effective browsing is
visual browsing, what you do when you pick two
interesting magazines out of thousands at a newsstand; or
read a newsprint paper and let a photo, headline,
ad, or cartoon catch your eye. The web-papers of tomorrow
should be "objects in time," and here is the
picture. Imagine a parade of jumbo index cards standing like
set-up dominoes. On your computer display, the
parade of index cards stretches into the simulated depths of your
screen, from the middle-bottom (where the
front-most card stands, looking big) to
the farthest-away card in the
upper left corner (looking small). Now, something
happens: Tony Blair makes a speech. A new card materializes in
front (a report on the speech) and everyone else
takes a step back--and the farthest-away card falls off
the screen and (temporarily) disappears. So the
parade is in constant motion. New stories keep popping up in
front, and the parade streams backwards to the
rear. Each card is a "news
item"--text or photo, or (sometimes) audio or
video. "Text" could mean an entire
conventional news story or speech or
interview. But the pressure in this medium is away
from the long set-piece story, towards the continuing series of
lapidary paragraphs. There's room on a "news card"
for a headline, a paragraph and a small photo. (If the news
item is a long story or transcript, only the
opening fits on the card--but you can read
the whole thing if you want to,
by clicking the proper mouse-buttons.) So: a moving parade (or
flowing stream) of news items--new ones constantly
arriving in front, older ones moving back. (Actually it's one
long parade reaching back to the newspaper's
founding; you can rewind it like
videotape.) You can only see one full
card at a time; the others are partially hidden by
cards in front. But you can guess what's on the partially hidden
cards, because you can see their top edges and left
margins. And when you touch a card with the cursor, a complete
version pops up instantaneously. The news stream
uses foreshortening to make the most of screen space: One
glance encompasses the most recent 20 or 30
postings, the latest quarter-hour to several hours of news,
depending on the world's pulse at the moment and
your preferences. Everything on every card is
indexed, everything is searchable should you care
to search--the news parade is (equivalently) an
"information beam" you can focus as precisely as
you like. Type "Tony Blair" and you get a
Tony beam--still a moving stream
edging backwards into the sunset, but all Tony, all
the time.* MOST IMPORTANT, the news
story itself is redefined. Today's standard news
story is a monolithic slab of text, updated a few times perhaps
and then plopped into the archives. It is an odd bastard at
best, a triumph of efficiency and marketing over
literary logic. It is radically front-loaded;
it starts with its most
interesting sentence and then tapers (line by line)
to a sharp point of boredom, losing momentum with every
paragraph--thus a spike-shaped monstrosity
perfectly formed for its mission, to be pounded like a piton into
the rock wall of a reader's
indifference. The new style news story is
a string of short pieces interspersed with photos,
transcripts, statements, and whatnot as they emerge: It
is an evolving chain; you can pick it up anywhere
and follow it back into the past as far as you like. Instead of writing one
longish piece, reporters will write (say) five
short ones--will belt out little stories all the
time, as things happen. They will
shape their news stories to the shape of the news,
of experience, of time. The string of aphorisms--prose in
stanzas--is a perfect form for fresh and timely
news. Perfect also for a nation where concentration spans seem to
halve every year. Yet (on the other hand) it is no
accident that two of the three greatest writers of modern
times should have loved writing aphorisms. (Freud
didn't, but Nietzsche and Wittgenstein did.) Not a bad
way to write, not by any means. YOU CAN READ this news
stream, or switch it to auto-pilot and (following
your simple commands, if you're driving a car, say, or lying around)
it will read to you. Eventually the web paper will
migrate from the web server to your own computer. The main
office e-mails you each new "card"; software on
your computer receives each new arrival, indexes it, adds it
to the moving parade. Now (by the way) you can read
many newspapers simultaneously; each sends you its own
stream of cards, and your local software shuffles
them together in time-order. (Yes, you can already arrange to
receive news updates by e-mail--but without the
right kind of display, you have nothing. Third law of information:
The interface is the application. The right picture
is everything.) Takes up lots of space on
your computer, right? All those "news cards"?
Requires lots of computing power to operate this fancy display?
Absolutely. But the high expense (and good
performance) of the eventual on-your-desktop version is a
feature, not a bug. The industry (after all) has a
problem: Each new PC generation arrives on your desktop
equipped with vaster and vaster, emptier and
emptier closets for information you
don't own and couldn't locate if
you did; the per-bit cost of storing data is near
zero already, and the question is what
to do with all that storage
space. And each new PC generation arrives with
faster and faster processor chips, which spend more and more of their
time doing nothing. Eventually people are likely to
notice, and start asking questions. "Why do I need a
new computer? What's wrong with the old one? What
important thing will the new one do that the old one can't do
just as well?" At which point the computer industry
as we know it will start falling apart. The tycoon who founds
America's next great newspaper will help save the
computer industry too. And it would be so damned
easy to found, it's almost painful. I LIVE NORTH of New Haven in
the middle of the Great Suburb (a global feature,
like the Amazon or Sahara) that covers the northeast and
plays a big role in setting the nation's cultural
mood. Around here we set out food for
the birds, and the New York
Times sets out information for us. People nibble at
it without enjoying themselves or pondering over much. Mostly
it never occurs to them that the Times is slanted,
because the Times is the rock-solid floor of their
world, it defines horizontal. (Thus Dan Rather's
celebrated observation--which must have cracked up Sulzberger and
his editors--that the Wall Street Journal is
right-wing but the Times is middle-of-the-road.) Of
course the Times is, in reality, too big and varied
to be condemned as just "slanted," period--there are plenty of
Times reporters whose integrity is absolute--but
its national and world news coverage is slanted and getting
slantier. Yet here in the Great Suburb, no one will
give up the Times until an attractive alternative presents itself.
I do hear more disapproving murmurs than I used
to--but only because of the newspaper's ever more
blatant anti-Israel tone--which, however, people
take for mere bigotry; they've seen it
all before. They rarely ask
themselves whether such bigotry might not be part
of a larger infection incubated on the editorial page and now
spreading up and down the narrow airless news
columns, making the whole paper mildly feverish today--and
delirious tomorrow. Yet things could change for
the Times as fast as they did for the networks once
cable TV started to grab. One day CBS was on top of the world,
next day it was muttering darkly about strategies
for survival. Things happen. David Gelernter is a
contributing editor to The Weekly Standard and
professor of computer science at Yale. According to Reuters, his
book "Mirror Worlds" (1991) "foresaw" the World
Wide Web. *You can see (sort of) what
this looks like at a website where commercial
software I helped build for a somewhat different purpose is on
display (scopeware.com). But my point is the
principle, not the product. |
