July 8, 1990

SOMETIMES WHEN people like me spend too much time talking to other people like us — “breathing our own exhaust,” it’s called — we tend to forget that there’s a huge world of people out there who don’t know a computer from a calculator, and are really struck with amazement when they can watch someone use a computer and a modem hooked to a telephone line and “log on” to an information service like America Online or The Well.

We’re so accustomed to jockeying around the ether, vast amounts of power (i.e., information) at our fingertips, that it’s easy to forget how many people are lucky to even have a telephone in their homes, let alone a computer.

So I was very happy to trek to KPFA-FM in Berkeley on Thursday to meet Jude Thilman, host of an eight-part KPFA series for Pacifica Radio called “The Communications Revolution,” and talk about electronic democracy.

It gave me and my fellow panelists — Robert Deward of Pacific Bell’s “Electronic Citizenship” project, Jeff Aldrich, founder of the EPIC (Effective Performance in Candidates) online project in Fairfield, and David Bolt, executive director of the Bay Area Video Coalition — a chance to talk about the impact that communications technology has made and will continue to make on the lives of real citizens.

Thilman asked us to consider three things: how does society make sure that the poor and disadvantaged get access to the power of information? How do we deal with the tidal wave of information out there once we get access to it? How can we ensure that our government will act with some kind of intelligence about the civil liberty issues being raised by electronic teleconferencing?

I’ve always had a big problem with Thilman’s first question, about getting computers to the poor. I remember interviewing Timothy Leary, Mr. Peace-and-Love himself, when I was at InfoWorld in 1984 and asking him the same question.

His reply (I paraphrase): It’s just like evolution. Some people just don’t make it out of the water. I guess he means you’re just holding back progress if you don’t feel like shoving the majority of the world’s population off a cliff.

Obviously the problem is not that poor people are less evolved, but that they are largely ignored by the marketplace because they can’t buy stuff. The French government’s PTT (telephone and telegraph), which is my usual example for progressive attitudes about technology, has at least begun to address the problem with its Minitel service. The little Minitel terminal with a modem is given away free or sold cheap (around $200, or about the cost of a Tandy Model 100), the PTT doesn’t print the national phone directory on paper anymore (it’s all “on line,” along with an electronic mail system), and people have to use it.

That’s the kind of sink-or-swim that will move society out of the primordial ooze. And to give France even more credit, using the service to get government or public-type information is very cheap, if not free.

This problem, getting technology into everyone’s hands, is really the crux of the issue. How to manage vast lakes of digital information will become just another market opportunity. Paul Saffo, a research fellow at the Institute for the Future in Menlo Park, figures that we’ll all have to figure out how to do what he calls “information surfing” — that is, learn to be picky eaters at the buffet instead of loading up our plates.

And if the majority of America’s citizens can actually get their hands on computers and modems and start using them with impunity, that’s bound to help solve the scariest and most painful issues of all — those of civil liberties.

Today there is much consternation in the on-line world about this topic, because FBI and CIA agents are out confiscating computers and modems left and right. Always one of my favorites, the issue of privacy and civil liberties will be big news very soon, and I’ll talk more about it then.

But my fervent belief is that teaching people about technology and getting ordinary citizens to start using computers and modems will stop some of the crazy, witch-hunt mentality that law enforcement agencies have (and only partially for good reason) about certain people who use computers and modems. Then we can let the citizens — who will then be users of the technology — decide what’s right or wrong.