What
What is Broadband Good For, someone asked me.
In “Casanova in Bolzano,” a novel by Sandor Marai, an aging but powerful nobleman comes to pay a call on Casanova. The nobleman has intercepted a letter written by his young and beautiful wife to the famous womanizer, and has come to convey a warning to Casanova. But before he delivers the warning, he does a close reading of the letter for Casanova’s benefit. The nobleman says:
The letter is very brief. There are four words. “I must see you.” The nobleman takes his time with his interpretation. “Next comes ‘must.’ Not ‘I would like to,’ not ‘I desire to,’ not ‘I want to.’ Immediately, in the second word of the text, she declares something with the unalterable force of holy writ.”
This slow exegesis is compelling and sinister, and while it is going on you imagine Casanova’s clever mind trying to map out a way to avoid the painful plans of the nobleman.
I realize that communications policy is not always viewed as a dramatic subject. But when I was asked to write a brief response to the question “What is broadband good for” it seemed to me that to take the words as simply a banal phrase would not do them justice. Each word has a weight and import of its own. The intentional choice of each of these words is, in fact, significant. And it is much more fun to approach the task this way. So, each day this week I will take on a separate word. Let's start with
What
There is an implication hidden in “what.” It implies a kind of “service”-oriented thinking. “What” is something you can point to, draw lines around, and understand as a single or aggregated coherent thing/activity in the world. When people want to hear about the activities their aging relative has undertaken during the past day, they say “what did you do today.” They expect that the output will be a list of events, each with a distinct starting point and ending point. Each item on this list will have a boundary and will fall within a category that already exists in the listening (even if slightly bored) mind of the other. There will be errands (to, from, the shop visited, the item bought), conversations (who with, the plan made, the information exchanged), entertainments (music heard, videos seen), and, if the aging relative is employed, a series of work-related events (meetings, who attended, more conversations, outputs).
This “service” mindset for what people do or will do online has a long and distinguished pedigree. This is the mindset that sees each communications modality as a categorizable, separate entry on a list. New forms of these modalities occasionally arise, but they can easily be related back to the old form. The use of “what” is a prompt for output-categories like “IPTV” and “VoIP” and “email”: a new form of broadcast television, a new form of telephony, a new form of terrestrial mail. Each item on this list of “whats” has a clear boundary (“Verizon plans to roll out FiOS TV services in January”) and a start date. Before January, there was no FiOS TV from Verizon, after January there will be. The entire “IP-enabled services” rulemaking initiated by the Commission in 2004 has this “what” orientation. The FCC stated that there that it was dealing with “services and applications relying on the Internet Protocol family,” and trying to decide how those “services and applications” should be regulated.
“What” “services and applications” will people use online? To ask the question in this way assumes that we will be able to perceive boundaries around categories of online activity, that what we do will be recognizable to us and others as a new form of what we used to do, and that we will be able to talk calmly and intelligently about the substitutability of these services for regulatory purposes. It assumes that the internet is a content-delivery supply chain – much like a railroad – that is a souped-up version of earlier communications modalities.
This focus on the application-layer, service-oriented view – celebrating the advent of Wikipedia, YouTube, eBay, Second Life, blogging software, and other new substitutes for the delivery-chain applications of the pre-internet era – provides an impoverished (or at least incomplete) perspective on communications. The landscape of the internet can usefully be perceived differently: Human online communications are best captured intellectually as a complex adaptive system that can generate economic growth. New forms of persistent social interaction (often crossing application boundaries) are quickly evolving in direct reaction to collective human attention, and these communications are creating opportunities for the development of new ideas and new ways of making a living. This has never happened before at the same rate, with the same directness, or with similarly persistent results.
The use of “what” is meaningful. It is intended to elicit a list of activities, a letter (now, an email) home from camp reciting events and activities. To resist the use of “what” is quite a challenge – humans look for patterns and lists in everything they do.
But the only answer to “what” in this context is “everything.” Communications online will not necessarily fall into easily-categorizable chunks, even though they may seem to now. We will hear that something like ten social-network sites account for about 40% of internet traffic. That tells us only that humans are social, not that these sites are “services” that replicate earlier “services” or will remain a definable category. We are dealing with a transformative system, not a supply chain. Communications policy should be about optimizing communications.
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The latest is that WSJ representatives can't/won't talk about the Vonage ad. [from GigaOM]