Stories from the digital frontier.
copyright Mark Beaulieu 1994,1995
The following conversation between me and my Apple Newton PDA (Personal Digital Assitant) took place in the summr of 1994.
What the PDA heard:
What I said:
The Pacific and perfect corpse are nation jump platforms, think accident vermin of aborigine narcotic media whack wiggle surveying raft, puzzling, television, and Microsoft. Idiom idol a nanosecond me far near consumers.
The PDA and personal communicator are not just platforms. They are vanguards of a new media which will span radio, publishing, television, and messaging. It is a new media for new consumers.
There is nothing like a good misunderstanding, and the hand carving recognition of a PDA joyfully jogs us with riddle mixed phrases - strange jabber from the emerging jargon of the information superhighway. But the new personal communicator is designed for understanding. It is useful for the exchange of personal ideas and emotions between individuals. The personal communicator is a new breed of technology, for a new time, with new paradigms for businesses to be built around a new medium.
The Carriage without a Horse
Like early inventions of the previous century, the personal digital assistant is a pristechnolocution, a phrase made of once familiar words attempting to describe a new technology. In announcing the future a pristechnolocution equally reveals the names of passing industries. "Horseless carriage" was such a term."Radio vision" invented in the 1920's in the shadow of radio conveyed what would come to be known as television. Just as the horseless carriage traveled the common ground between two transportation technologies, so does the personal digital assistant hold a place between the computer engines of yesterday and the emerging everyday personal information devices of tomorrow.
It is predictable that the computer industry would continue to miniaturize its engines. The PDA was the first chosen name for this ever smaller computer. Once PDA was a code word for a public display of affection. To use the three letters today in an email can only mean personal digital assistant, typified by Apple's Newton and Tandy's Zoomer. Such a PDA is a miniature pony of a computer with a stylus and writing interface added on. It harnesses conventional computer-style applications and pulls the weight of a small mobile personal computer. But where does such a device take you?
Do you really want the small wonderhorse of a computer to take you to the land where computers and software rule? If we take a step back from the continuing history of computers I think you will see a different course is desired. One towards the land of communications. The center of digital technology and its social use is clearly moving away from computers and toward communications. By the end of the decade three components of the digital industry will make the market - hardware, software, and content. To summarize the historical trend with examples: Once computer hardware companies alone were the center of industry. In the mid 1980's the combined enterprise of hardware and software created the popular new markets. For example, IBM PC and Lotus 1-2-3, or Apple Macintosh and Aldus PageMaker really founded the personal computer market. Today and tomorrow's market involves a third element - informational content. To put it another way, we won't see a killer application, we will see killer information which will write the new chapters of computer marketing history. The triumverate of hardware, software and information content for individuals will produce an enormous market effect and a new pattern for social use. The audience for this communication centered world will move along and will no longer look like engineers or businessmen, but will largely be the average individual.
As a society we have seen how during the period of the invention of personal computers - all that mattered was your machine in your room. Although a personal computer was a radical statement, we rapidly ran through an inventory of personal software that runs on top of these machines. Together they formed the hit marketing strategy of the times and these two commodities defined the market. Above these two is content - digital information - the stuff that actually runs through them. Both the individual and social stage is now being set for information-era media rich communications. Fundamentally, digital information is about communication, moving bitstreams of data, not computation. The nature of digital information transmission devices is to not end up owning a small pad personal computer but a fundamentally communication-centered device.
Going Places with a Personal Communicator
A lasting successor to the PDA has appeared. The personal communicator is the newest breed of small device and is based on technology from General Magic of Mountain View, CA. Hand-held stylus-based personal communicators rolled out from licensed manufacturers in 1994. While a PDA encircles a user in a world of special personal organizers suited to the business-minded computer professional, the personal communicator services more general consumer needs. The consumer appeal is apparent with Magic Cap, General Magic's new animated object-oriented user interface. Magic communicator owners move through a digital city of many applications and services. They quickly create text with a simple projected keyboard rather than a more time-consuming PDA handwriting recognition system. Both devices provide control over portable highly personal data, but the personal communicator is designed to access and share information as a fundamental purpose.
The personal communicator could eventually replace the telephone as a preferred instrument for general social collaboration. Communication, in many cases, is really simple messaging. Presenting choices, making selections, or exchanging information is all that may matter. A personal digital communication may have many nonverbal tokens of our identity. With the communicator a person can tap out whole messages, images, and sounds.
Deconstruction of Social Media
To write software or build digital content for a personal communicator, new industries must be born, and many existing ones are realizing the incredible effort of becoming reborn. Consider where we are headed - that all media will be joined in one interactive digital carrier. This is a destiny of extraordinary power. The eventual commercial and social uses of uniform transcodable media will escape the currently familiar provinces of the television, radio, telephone, publishing and computer industries. To question the historic origins of individual and social media is critical to understanding the forces that will make the new media. Marshall McLuhan among others have developed great insights into media and messaging intent and effect.
Mass media and the attendent social mechanisms have nearly exhausted their political and technical destiny. The days of polarizing populations through broadcast are about to be replaced with a new converged, two-way media which will have an entirely new expressive, experiential, and economic character. We are entering an era of deeper personal interpretation and personal voice, with hundreds of thousands of interactive channels circuited world wide. Personal portable devices will transmit intelligently across the digital carrier. Mass media subsidized by advertising will become one an exploded icon. The print publisher, television network, radio station and newspaper will no longer broadcast with abandon. The raw power of the digital network suggests they will be replaced by smaller personal media where individual choice and individual voice will be key. The former polarizing effect of mass media machinery will fade away as individual persona emerges. Personal communicators will be very important instruments of individual power - an instrumental beacon of change.
With the interest in creating a personal culture, a new generation won't want to merely consume; they will want to produce and participate in this new communicating media whenever or wherever they may be. "I read - I write, I speak - I listen, I hear your music, I make my music". The individual creating and interpreting his or her own worldview is the driving force behind the emerging personal information products.
The Changing Face of Information - Personal, Smart, Shareable
How will the new personal communicators change the face of information? These on-your-person devices magically underscore the value of any information that has time, place, or personal value. With a communicator, anytime, anywhere you will be able to find businesses open now, where they are in relation to you, or whether any friends (or enemies) are around the corner having lunch. You can interpet things in your own highly relevant way.
Immediacy and relevance are proper outcomes experiencing intelligent digital information. When personal and global events are sent by digital reporters with precision, voice, frequency, in actual circumstance real-time, new social uses emerge. Soon the number of digital channels and their capacities will increase beyond measure. As the field of global events become a touch away, the personal communicator becomes a grand mediator of contact.
To help mediate the tremendous volume of information connections and kinds of services, communicating systems will require intelligent agents who can represent your intent. In a straightforward way General Magic's Telescript, a highly abstract platform-independent communication language, is designed to routinely let owners route digital Agents to digital Places. Agents are software objects that contain instructions. Places are computer locations usually found on a network and have special rules to allow Agents to meet and carry out instructions. Agents work on the owner's behalf essentially performing transactions. These agents work while you are away. This is unlike your typical on-line service where the only work you get done is when you are their personally in the loop with all devices running pulling the levers yourself. You really want to escape the interface and work in a world where information objects can be more than dead bits. They want to be embedded with built-in intelligence and communications that enable them to travel to places, self-install, and take actions on your behalf.
One communication infrastructure to support Agents and Places is the AT&T PersonaLink services. The value of the technology and infrastructure depends on the intelligence that the information publishing service provides.
Beyond Publishing
Conventional newspapers, books and magazines reach readers through a long, linear path of preparation, production and distribution. The physical process frequently limits the consumer value of the content. Travel guides, for example, are frequently out of date by the time they reach store shelves. Subscribers to more than one newspaper waste plenty of natural resources tossing out redundant and nonessential sections. Tomorrow, however, you may subscribe to a hundred "unbundled" electronic newspapers. Your digital restaurant guide may be a dynamic representation of every restaurant. The personal communicator may become a trusted friend in reporting highly specific events and messages, letting you select channels from many electronic sources, and recalling electronically clipped information. Putting digital content to paper becomes secondary. It is likely that it will not be the present media publishers, but new emerging convergent industries that will catch on and provide new highly personal digital content. The new content is marked by being highly relevant and offering choices, and being shareable in forms that permit highly expressive individual voice and emotion - all of these qualities differing to each "subscriber."
On a large scale, digital society will convey experience and expression through means more encompassing than print, radio, film, still graphics, or television. The new digtial media will amplify an individual who wants to express individual experience - appealing to the sensation of others. Good digital content, especially the interactive kind, requires personal substance. It reaches right through you and you get it. Although communicators will eventually be able to communicate all media, personal content is most prized. As a kind of digital "map of experiences" these media might be as valuable as maps of early ocean-going explorers. Oddly enought, the charts of the new world made by the early explorers were actually more like diaries rather than the geometric diagrams we think of as the maps of today. The value of these private writings and drawings lay as much in the recorded personal adventures and experiences as in the cartography. With small carry-around devices, personal content as maps of experience may be the most interesting element traveling the digital highway. Such information can be translated and projected as information across timelines, electronic terrain, news layouts or other forms that the reader makes relevant. As the digital culture enables the interchange of maps and values between natives and visitors, and producers and consumers, a democracy of entertaining, personal, informative and critical voices will create the conditions for a different culture.
Communication is Distribution
The new content industry is forming itself at the crossroads of the past and
future. The focus for many companies is on new distribution systems, but it
is equally important to understand the new tools and new content. With all forms
of media imploding digitally within the former electronic media, it is time
to deconstruct publishing, audiences, advertising, services, usage, distribution
means, circulation patterns, the role of the reporter and dj, financial models,
member participation and loyalties. It is fruitless if parent industries want
to reform and rebuild things in their own likenesses without understanding or
exploring the potential of the new media and the new content that desires to
be expressed with it.
With digital publishing on communicators, a new meaning will be given to the here and now. For many future publishers a kind of "radio publishing" will evolve. Real-time travel guides, self-updating newspapers, personal music, domestic DJ's, wireless newsletters are all reasonable with electronic distribution. Perhaps most importantly, a publisher can sell a software model of its publication in which almost instantaneous updates will appear for the reader. The data and the visually designed interactive publishing package will be separate products.
Personal communicators amplify and extend one's reach. On one hand you use them to "message" to those far away. On the other hand you use them to access media sources directly and be a feedback force to a digital publisher. Examples today are the Sony MagicLink and the Motorola Envoy. Some people will find their new voice and their new choices orerwhelmingly exciting. Other people will take these devices out to survey the world anew and market their measures. Yet others will ride the information highway in the most ordinary but useful ways.
The personal digital assistant shows how small a computing engine can be, but the personal communicator shows how large the world around us actually is. The communicator is the tool for having a personal effect. The communicator may well be as critical a social tool as the telephone ever dreamed of becoming. Communicating person to person, palm to palm and mind to mind, both information providers radiating to digital platforms and owners of personal communicators will mix in tomorrow's digital communicast.
Mark Beaulieu
rev. September 8, 1995
Mark Beaulieu develops personal communicator applications at Sony New Technologies in Monterey, CA. A long-time Silicon Valley programmer and software designer, he co-authored Apple Computer's book "Multimedia Demystified" and founded Digital Lantern.