Contents | Book Of Values | Next
The Telenet
The Telenet is the 'wiring' of 'wired city.' The heart of the system, from the user's point of view is his television terminal. This new TV set will not be a passive recipient of broadcasts, but will be a miniature TV transmitter, printer and computer terminal as well. The user's terminal would resemble a TV with a keyboard, with a role of paper feeding through the back, and a tiny video camera mounted above the screen.
The user would have his choice of indefinite numbers of channels, some of them almost free, some of them relatively expensive. He would be able to connect with any other TV set or any other mini-network of such sets (video-phoning). Likewise, he could order up anything on video or audio record, which would include all the classic movies and television shows. He could order up any book in existence and have it 'printed' by his own solid state printer. He could access a computer, and talk to it with his keyboard, or with his voice, or with his video camera, or with whatever is on his TV screen, and the computer talk back in a similar variety of ways. He could make use of computer programs on disc or paper tape, including ones which control video, audio, or book records (such computer programs would be used by educators).
Anyone could use the learning center, either as consumer or as publisher. Anyone could publish a book, a movie, a musical performance, their own video show, or their own computer program.
The learning center will make large cities, large corporations, and large universities or schools quite obsolete. It will drastically change postal service, publishing and the business of transferring funds.
A person could live anywhere and see anything, be it Broadway or London Stage productions, Harvard or Sorbonne lectures, and anything in libraries and museums. The learning center will make administrations for large schools and universities unnecessary, since any group of savants could band together, create a curriculum, set up their materials at the local learning center, and place their names on the learning center's registry of such things. Classrooms will be unnecessary since professors and students can have a two-way interaction from their respective living rooms. Large organizations will no longer have any advantage over small ones, since even a one-person organization would have full access to information, and access to sophisticated filing and clerical services offered by the local learning center. Shopping and banking could be conducted by video-phoning and printing. Letters and publications will be sent over the telenet.
Will the new technology of the learning center make life better? It could. Unrestricted access could break the implicit censorship of the upper middle class on the arts and ideas of Western Civilization. It could also break the stranglehold of the democratic masses, and the nouveau riche boors, which now prevent the flights of excellence which only the few are capable of.
There is probably a constant percentage of the population capable of genius, but only some societies allow it to flourish. What new genius is waiting out there in the hinterlands? Before the telenet there are too many barriers, too many rich, stupid, and/or entrenched people who have to agree with you, or like what you were doing, before you ever have a chance to let the public decide. One of the reasons learning has had such a tough time of it is that schools and universities have been expensive things. Someone other than the student has had to foot the bill. And in the World-Machine, he who pays the bills has control, thus the ultimate control of education has been in the hands of boards of education and boards of regents, men utterly and unanimously (sic) without any real excellence or genius, men whose only claim to fame has been political and/or economic muscle. The same thing has been true of the literary, record and movie and TV industries. Only when individuals or groups can flourish despite the disapproval of people of no real worth, can anything good be done.
The telenet does not eliminate the university...only the unnecessary and harmful parts of schools and universities: classrooms, administrators, requirements, restrictions on either students or faculty, registrars, football coaches, campuses, grades (as presently understood) and degrees (as presently understood). The telenet is the ideal gadget for the implementation of the learning theorem, and for de-schooling society. Buckminster Fuller, John Holt, and others have developed this idea.
Holt: "Schools should be like a public library, movie theater or art gallery---simply there for the purposes that people want to use them for. They should have taken away from them their monopoly on the credentializing, the legitimizing of skill and learning. They've got to get out of the business of deciding what must learn." (Time, 4/16/73)
Therefore, we must think of the telenet school or university as an intellectual smorgasbord, through which students could go at their own pace and direction, for their own purposes.
Who would decide who teaches? No one. The law of supply and demand would rule. How would students participate in athletics or other extracurricular affairs? Through sports clubs which a person would remain in for life. How would degrees be given? By personal apprenticeship. Degrees would not be given through the telenet. What about grades? There would be none. There would be critique session programs in conversational mode, but no record kept by the telenet.
How would a parent know the telenet teachers and subjects selected by the child were suitable? Suitable for what? The only thing society can require universally is a conscience. The learning needs of students are as infinitely varied as our needs for libraries, museums and theaters. If curiosity is to grow, the student must pursue his own path.
What will the telenet do to books? Nothing, provided the book records and solid state printer are incorporated into the system from the outset. Nothing will ever replace the printed book. It is simply too difficult to read any sizable amount of material from a screen.
Books will exist in the telenet in digital form, probably as rolls of paper tape at local centers. The solid state printer will be a fairly high speed digital line printer, with illustrations put on the color video screen, where a specially digitally controlled camera attachment makes a photograph automatically, to be pasted in later by the user. People would probably leave their set on most of the time in the receive mode, to instantly receive letter, advertisements, newspaper, magazines, and book club selections.
In order for books and publications to be digitized, they must first be converted to microfilm and then run through a special character recognition computer. Illustrations will be converted to slides with an address, sent through the system as video-signal, reappearing at the local center as an addressable slide. Since slides will have their separate records and copyrights, anyone can use any published illustration.
What is the advantage of digitized information? The main virtue is that it can be both computer analyzed and sent through the net very easily and economically. It is probable that even video and audio signals will be digital (pulse code modulated) in the telenet. This would make long distance video-phoning a more feasible operation, allowing only an occasional picture to be sent as net capacity permits.
Books, files and all other information will be put into digital form as it is being composed in the mature form of the telenet. Writers and secretaries will write and dictate directly on the terminal.
Authors would be charged by the telenet to 'publish' their works, which would be a matter of storing and cataloging the author's records, whatever medium they may be in. Since any telenet center is accessible from any other, works would always be published locally, with cataloging information updated everywhere periodically. The author could set his own price for use of his materials. Works in sufficient demand at many centers would no doubt be physically duplicated to avoid tying up the long-range network.
There would be no such thing as free use of information in the telenet, nor any slightest infringement on copyright laws. The system is computer monitored to charge each user and to pay each author for each use.
The telenet will affect the arts quite as much as education. It will make it possible for cinema masterpieces to be enjoyed and recognized widely rather than narrowly. Cinema is already the greatest art form of the twentieth century, and many of its masterpieces have been made by giant studios purely for profit. Still, the full potential of this exciting aesthetic form probably will not be realized until we can review masterpieces at will and until anyone can make a movie without having to please bankers and until the bottleneck of the distributors can be bypassed. Masterpieces in any art form are not always recognizable as such on first contact. The test of a masterpiece is how well it stands up to repeated exposure. With the telenet, every movie ever made will be on a video disc somewhere and can be accessed.
The telenet will erect super 8 into a major art form. It is possible to buy all the equipment, film, and processing necessary to make a feature length color and sound movie in super-8 for about $750. If you shot three or four times as much film as used, the cost would still be under $1000. A commercial film costs at least 1000 times as much. Yet, both look the same on a TV cube. And this figure includes a pretty good camera, one that can do macros (super close-ups), tele-photo zooming, single frame, fast motion and slow motion, fadeouts, and has all the through-the-lens-viewfinder, light-metering and focusing equipment of a fine camera. And, it is so small it can be easily carried. The 1000 dollar cost (also the $750 cost) includes magnetic striping of the completed and spliced and edited film, and a projector with a microphone for lip synching the sound with the action, adding background sounds or music or whatever. This makes it unnecessary to have elaborate sound equipment. Once a super-8 movie is put on video disc and stored in a local telenet career, it is in effect published or distributed. If it is good, it will become famous and known, and just as successful as a movie costing millions of dollars.
It may seem incredible that a cinema masterpiece could be produced for a few hundred dollars, but the cost of materials has never had any direct relationship on the quality of the result, and in moviemaking much of the cost is simply due to the large sized film (and resulting large cameras), and the large amount of it used. One can afford to fail more often with super-8, and a wider variety of people and points of view can find their way into film. There could be movies reflecting the new ideas and forms of consciousness arising, and not a continuation of the 'industry's' present pandering of sex and violence to jaded appetites. Hollywood is so cliché-ridden partly because of the enormous financial risk of anything really different, and partly because of the difficulty that new people have in getting into the industry (significant word "industry"). The telenet solves all these problems.
In the telenet, anyone should be allowed to set himself up as an educator, or author, or movie director, actor, editor, or critic, and so forth, no matter how bad or wrong-headed or trivial some of the resulting material is bound to be. The right to express oneself freely, the right to have a chance for fame or fortune, this right follows from the right to the pursuit of happiness.
Isn't there a danger that we shall simply be overwhelmed with mountains of chaff which disguise the few grains of wheat? Isn't this unlimited freedom likely to further fragment society?
It is a genuine danger. We must combine perfect freedom with the synthesis of a center, something difficult to do. Without a common center (something lacking in this century) no high civilization can exist, because there is no cooperative effort. Genius can make no contact with other genius or with the common man. Long range efforts make no sense where one cannot see one's own life as part of some on-going pattern.
In the secular side of life, it is the humanist and the humanist synthesis which provides a center. Every local telenet center must have one or more humanists to review, catalog, encyclopedize, synthesize, anthologize and criticize everything contained in the library and everything new that comes in. Specialists don't like this kind of activity because it tends to reduce a lifetime of some specialist's work to a single footnote. It is, nonetheless, absolutely necessary if we are to avoid being mothered by the dead accumulation of history.
The ecolomat would remove any economic necessity for cities, and the telenet removes all cultural reasons for cities. If all creative works may be originated and published without leaving your living room, then a mountain cabin becomes as much the center of things as anyplace else. Even in the tail end of World-Machine economies, the telenet virtually makes cities unnecessary. You can met people, inspect factories, oversee production, transfer money and verify legal documents, do shopping, have dictation taken and sent to any number of persons, file information, computer process it, and numerous other things without leaving your living room. If you can move information sufficiently freely, it is no longer so necessary to pack human bodies into proximity. And institutions could become much simpler. Ninety percent of the regimentation and bureaucratization in our society is simply a result of herding large numbers of people into one place.
Let's look at the technical side of the telenet. The chief inventions which go into it are two-way television, the video record disc pioneered by Phillips of Holland, the mini-computer, the compact video camera, the solid-state printer, and the switched communications network. One part of the invention not yet completed is the random access library, which will have to be a physical storage and retrieval system for video discs, phonograph discs, rolls of paper tape for books and computer programs and data files, and magnetic tape for temporary storage. There are some handy analog-to-digital (A/D) and digital-to-analog (D/A) devices coming along, which will enable the telenet center to take dictation, and output verbally, and make various kinds of computer analysis of audio and video information fed in from the user's set, for instance translation of printed pages into digital signals, and voiceprint identification, signature recognition, and various sorts of electronic switching of video signals, which will lead to new games and art forms.
The telenet will make computers available to everyone for the first time. This will be good for eliminating the exaggerated fear and respect people have of computers, if nothing else. Computers have been overrated, of course. In head-to-head competition at things like translating Russian or playing chess, humans win easily (sic). Computers are very finicky about what instructions you feed them, and every computer programmer spends a great deal of time de-bugging programs. When you add the time wasted trying to get on a machine, computing is hardly the answer to most problems. but it has its uses, it's an interesting toy, and the telenet will make it easy to use.
A computer is an electronic device for simulating processes. If the electronic pulses and switches are used to symbolize numbers and numerical processes then it is a mathematical machine. If the electronic states symbolize words then it is a word processing machine. The electronic states can symbolize economic or demographic processes as the computer simulation of the world model by the Club of Rome. Or the computer can symbolize phonemes or the elements of music, or shapes on a video screen or symbols on a CRT tube. It would be wrong to think of the internal operations of computers in terms of numbers only or in terms of static conditions only. The square waves that constitute input can be controlled by any process or state; the square waves that constitute output can control any device. Computing is in fact a basically new way of expressing yourself, at least as fundamental and versatile as writing. Any process in any realm can be simulated on a computer, so long as it is possible to analyze the process in terms of an algorithm, i.e., in terms of loops, branches, comparisons, tests, logical and ordering operations.
The difference between writing and computing is the difference between potential and act. The computer acts out whatever is stated in potential form in the program. Only then can one discover the full meaning of what you've said. Perhaps what you've said makes no sense or is contradictory, in which case, no process will occur. Perhaps the process is not what intended or hoped. But whatever it is, the computer simply acts out whatever process is inherent in your sequence of instructions.
It should be apparent from this that it makes no more sense to speak of a computer thinking or creating than it does to speak that way of a typewriter. Both do exactly what you tell them to do. If a computer did anything else, it wouldn't be a computer. The responsibility for whatever is done lies wholly with the programmer and user.
Absolutely any process can be performed on a computer, from writing novels to multimedia happenings to...? In order to realize most of the possibilities it is necessary to develop these new interfaces and new types of software. In order to have word processing, you must have A/D device which recognize phonemes and voiceprint characteristics and output appropriate digital signals describing these. You must also have D/A interfaces which produce phonemes with individual vocal characteristics. In order to have multimedia happenings on your TV set, there have to be A/D interfaces which recognize color boundaries, moving boundaries both with respect to the tube and with respect to the background, boundaries of various shapes, moving in various directions. In the other direction, there need to be D/A electronic switches which operate in real time on receiving a digital signal from your real-time program. In order have really meaningful word processing (i.e., grading essays) you need computer languages which recognize the structural determinants in language and which store the incoming sentences in tree-like structures, and you probably need parallel processors to compare words and phrases against a vast dictionary to detect relationships in meaning between limbs of the input data tree and various paradigm data trees. Ideally, the user (a humanist or a professor) would just input the paradigm material, and the student or customer would input the secondary material and the program would answer correspondence, grade essays, compose reports, make comparisons and summaries.