August 25, 1989

EVERYBODY’S yammering about the horrid state of education in the United States and wondering what on earth we’re going to do about it. It’s a painful admission for one raised on, and delighted by, “book l’arning,” but pictures — in TV and movies, advertising, even music videos — have become the most powerful means of communicating ideas and information, especially to a highly image-sophisticated younger generation.

Thus it seems that the concept of multimedia is the ticket. Multimedia, says PC analyst Stewart Alsop, is “any kind of technology that allows the use of multiple kinds of media (audio, video, text, graphics, data, and so forth) and then adds the element of time.” Though multimedia is still wet behind the ears, I saw two interactive videodisc products at Macworld Expo in Boston that drove home how important this Brave New Technology may someday be.

Videodiscs are big optical platters holding images and sound, using a playback device similar to compact disks. They didn’t catch on in the consumer market like video cassettes did, but sales are picking up now that Apple Computer Inc.’s Hypercard, the de facto software driver for such devices, makes it possible to link video, still photos, text, and sound together to create an interactive, and often evocative, learning experience.

During his keynote at Macworld, Apple Computer Chairman John Sculley demonstrated ABC News/Interactive’s videodisc “In the Holy Land,” about the conflict between Israel and Palestine. ABC News/Interactive is a division of ABC that was formed specially to produce interactive multimedia products. “When Sculley showed some selections from our videodisc, it (the subject matter) was pretty depressing,” says ABC News/Interactive executive producer David Bohrman. “Computer software rarely evokes emotion, so that’s a substantial leap for the technology. It has content to deal with, to provoke you — it’s not just about the tools you’re working with.”

ABC’s newest disc, “Martin Luther King Jr.,” piles a storehouse of news clips and other data about King onto videodisc. A Hypercard program lets you browse at your own pace, exploring King’s personal life, his harassment by the FBI, his affect on the civil rights movement, his assassination and the entire “I Have a Dream” speech. You can cut and paste anything from the disc in the order you want and play back your own presentation.

The most obvious implication for such a product is in the classroom and, if we let it, it is likely to bring about a fundamental change in education.
“Teachers tell me that people who can’t work with text and numbers can work with visual information very effectively,” says Nick Arnett, editor of the Multimedia Computing & Presentations newsletter, based in Santa Clara. “So (multimedia) opens the door to some styles of teaching that will, in turn, open doors for a lot of students who aren’t served well by the system today.”

There are other benefits, too. The King videodisc preserves priceless footage that was beginning to deteriorate in storage. “With this technology, we’re “re-purposing’ our resources,” Bohrman says. “We’re sort of video archaeologists — Raiders of the Lost Archives, you might say.”

Such products also help news organizations, often the brunt of budget cutbacks, to re-use footage they have already paid to produce. ABC, for example, spends $100 million a year gathering the news. Before videodiscs, the way the network tried to recoup costs did not work well.

“If you wanted video from us, we’d sell you what you wanted and charge you $3,000 a minute,” Bohrman says. “That’s why nobody has this material. We’re providing an hour on videodisc, in a useful way, for $395.”

Newsweek also showed its experimental videodisc, “Upheaval in China,” at Macworld. It calls the disc “an instant history lesson,” and if the magazine decides to market the product it, too, will be able to repackage and sell its hard-earned info.

But instead of repackaging video clips, Newsweek’s videodisc chronicles the Chinese student revolt reusing Newsweek text and surprisingly effective voice-overs and still photography.

Newsweek editor-in-chief Rick Smith says the voice-over commentary was done by Newsweek Asia regional editor Melinda Liu and photographers David Berkwitz and Andy Hernandez, who talked about what it was like to be in Tiananmen Square during the uprising. “Not all the good stuff got into the magazine,” says Smith.

This new emphasis on information providers, such as ABC and Newsweek, has enormous implications for the computer industry. Arnett says Apple’s relationship with ABC, Newsweek and Warner New Media (which produced an interactive music product) is the foundation of this fundamental change.

“Information itself is becoming the greater part of the package being sold,” not the application or the kind of computer, Arnett says. “In the long run, that gives information providers like ABC and others a lot more clout in the industry. Some of the people in power in the software industry today won’t be in power tomorrow.”

And what that means for people like you and me is that we may have a brave new world at our fingertips.

“In a few years, it may not be videodiscs (we’re using), it’ll be some other system, and eventually you’ll be able to go into the basement of ABC news and get anything you want from our archives,” says Bohrman, who’s counting on a new wiring system like fiber optics to bring his idea to fruition. “That may be 10 or 15 years away. But it’s inevitable that it will happen, it’s inevitable that whenever people want to see pictures, they should be able to get the pictures.”