The First Amendment; New Technology

WGBH Boston in cooperation with the Institute for Democratic communications at the School of Communications at Boston University now presents the First Amendment and a free people. An examination of civil liberties in the media in the 1970s and now here is the director of the Institute for democratic communication. Dr. Bernard Rubin. My guest on today's program is Dr. Roger Kelley of Boston University. Doc Kelly teaches courses on the impact of the new technologies on communications in society. He worked and edited his doctoral dissertation on a computer which not very many people have have done. Dot Collie is concerned with new how computers affect rights of privacy and also the new possibilities computers will have for the communications industry. Very recently he addressed his thoughts on this subject to a group called Women in communications management. They were absolutely intrigued by some of the ideas that Roger collie has about developments that will probably ensue by the year 2000. So Roger if I may let me start out by

taking that focus of the year 2000 and asking you to give our listeners some view of how the media are going to change and of course a little bit later we'll talk about some of the issues constitutional and social that will arise when they do change. But what what will reporters do by the year 2000 how they operate. Well first of all I should preface my remarks by saying the beauty of talking about what things will be like in year 2000 is that no one can really contradict you at this point. And I would hope no one saves a tape of this program. Well this is a continuing series so we'll be back with you some reruns on in the year 2000. Frightening. I think there are going to be a number of changes. And when I do address what's going to be happening in the media in the year 2000 I sort of take the newest developments today and take them to their ultimate. The danger in doing this I think is that

some intervening social or economic force may wipe out all the best prognostications of today. I remember when I was a kid growing up it was predicted that by the year 1975 everybody would be driving helicopters instead of cars. Now you know living in Boston and appreciating the traffic around here I think it's wise that helicopters have not taken over. But there was simply an economic thing. Most people just can't afford helicopters although there's no reason why they couldn't. Other than that so what are the media going to look like in the year 2000. Firstly I think that there will be almost an elimination of time deadlines for all media from newspapers to television to radio which probably radio comes the closest to wiping out deadlines of all the media today. Not only the reporter will be able to monitor major events in person but

also the whole staff back at his newspaper will be able to sit and probably watch coverage of that television or television coverage of whatever event is going on so that you'll get perhaps an overall perspective from the television cameras. In addition to the reporters on the scene experience right now most events are covered just by a reporter on location and of course he is not always able to get the large part of it. The other thing is that instead of running back to the newspaper to type up his story or phoning it into the rewrite man the reporter probably will carry portable terminals and type the story directly into the newspaper's computer so that it can be edited and immediately. Disseminated to the people who subscribe to that newspaper and I'll talk about the forms of that in a few minutes. Another thing is that based on some of the developments and computer industries in the Boston area it's entirely possible that by the year 2000

the report will simply talk its story via telephone into the newspaper computer because a lot of good work is being done right now and having computers that can recognize voices. There's work as I said in the Boston area and I think at Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh will know where these newspapers since we're concentrating on them for a moment. Will they be the forecast pieces of paper along sheets of paper that come out of a radio that is installed in the home or the office so that you don't go to a stand and buy the newspaper but you really refit the rows of paper and your New York Times or Boston Globe or Examiner will come out that way. Now that will that was forecast some time ago by the publisher of The New York Times who thought that the New York Times. I'm going back now to the late 40s though that the New York Times would be the

leader. In this area had one of these machines in his office that it never came about is that not an idea that like a like some of the other Popular Mechanics ideas you were talking about. Well you know the idea of a facsimile newspaper. I think he even went back to the late 30s and it was actually tried on a commercial basis by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch never got off the ground there are facsimile newspapers right now in Japan because it's much more difficult to get a newspaper delivery truck from one island to another. And so they've relied on facsimile newspapers. You know what I have in mind is more than just a facsimile newspaper because I think economics and technology right now just would make if it's much cheaper delivered by carrier or to sell it on a newsstand. I think what it's going to take to get newspapers printed in the home and I think by the year 2000 they will be is that you will have a sort of a communication terminal

in your home that will deliver everything from television to newspapers and what it will do is much more it'll be much more responsive to the demands of the individual. If you want a copy of The New York Times you would push a button and it would give you an updated copy of The New York Times it wouldn't be in Boston I'm sure we get the edition that's printed 10 o'clock the night before. If you wanted to copy the New York Times you would get the very latest because a computer would be taking all the stories as they come in sliding them into the newspaper if there's an update to a story it would pull out the old story stick in a new story editors could juggle the thing around so that you would truly get an up to date newspaper if you were intrigued by a story and wanted to see some news film on it. You could simply punch up another button and get a television story of it or if you could get a televised summary of the news.

I don't really think newspapers and television news are all that competitive they deliver entirely different point I want to deprive you on a little more. It seems to me that you might be suggesting a new kind of news media mix in which traditional newspapers or contemporary television or radio aren't all that distinct and perhaps newspapers might disappear altogether. You might get a readout of stories which might be fed to you from your television set facsimile or by some computer terminal or whatnot. But it is it possible that what Bantam books is doing now might you know this instant publication even of a book length material that this might be done by electronics just cutting off the traditional newspaper reader of today. If he if he was shopping around for a newspaper from his supply.

Yeah except that I was like a dope addict when I said I suppose I still don't think it's going to cut the newspaper out completely because you can. You can absorb a lot more information and detailed information more quickly through the printed page I don't think reading is going to be gone by the year 2000. Looking at the printed page now I've observed again. From a personal point of view American newspapers as they have been subtly changing over the last five or ten years they have become more and more daily magazines and I think that they are beginning to cut their own throats by no longer becoming necessary in an electronic age. I'm not saying that they aren't to me certainly I depend upon my newspapers every day but from their point of view the more magazine like they become the more they would lend themselves to a change in technology which could supply what the news part of the newspaper does much more efficiently and perhaps some other electronic gizmo or terminals would provide you with the equivalent of the pocketbooks of the day.

Again fed into your home or providers so easily that you could pick it up the way you pick up the morning newspaper on any subject that you wanted. Well if there's approval by the Federal Communications Commission I think there is. A great likelihood that you will have an information organization. And they will supply newspaper television and book movie form whatever you want and it will be supplied at the demand of the consumer. If you know there are some very interesting studies that have done on the development of media notably by John Merrill and Ralph Lowenstein and one of the interesting comments that they made was that the trend in media development is to start out with a very elite form then to move to a popularized form and then finally to a specialized form by elite they mean you know when a medium first.

Becomes available like television only a few rich people can afford it. And it's not widespread then. As the economic base expands and as it is the idea catches on becomes very popular and the medium tries to appeal to all people with you know kind of a lowest common denominator type of information gradually then it moves into a specialized area in which more specialized information a more fragmented audience. And the examples that they cite are radio which of course in the beginning just a few people had crystal sets and early radio sets. Then it became the very popular medium that many people thought would wipe out newspapers but they survived radio. Then television came in and really took over almost all the formats that radio had. So radio became a very specialized medium and you no longer have very many stations that appeal to all interest you'll have a rock n roll station a country western station. Based on music formats where you have an all news station

or a public affairs station. And you can kind of tune into the type of radio that turns you on. It was likely also just following the trend of thought that the media as we know it will change in another way. For example talking about newspapers. Newspapers usually are identified with the city in which they are published so that we have the New York Times or the Boston Globe or the Atlanta Journal and Constitution and so on and so forth. Whereas with the revolution in electronic communication especially you'll be able to cater to each community and they might be able to get that newspaper that they want for example into it. If we have X numbers of lecturers and professors and very serious students in the Boston area as we do then we will have in the year 2000 I'm sure they may have all sorts of audiences for foreign affairs news which now is becoming increasingly difficult to get even in the best newspapers because you have to wade

through the ads and you have to wade through the other news and so on. Is that is that a likely scenario that we're going to get more specialized community materials. Right because one of the the two major breakthroughs in technology that will allow this sort of thing to become possible are the computer and fiber optics the computer speeds up storage and retrieval of information and the cost now for storing information is going down dramatically every year. The Boston Globe for instance now has a system in which they store virtually the entire every word of every newspaper every page except for maybe a few football scores and high schools and maybe confidential chat but they essentially store all the news. This then can be accessed by computer terminals by the reporters to find out what's you know what kind of things have gone on in the past when he researches a story. There is no reason to think that this could not also be a service that would be available to every

individual so that if you are interested in news in a particular area you could access it. And even though a newspaper wouldn't want to print a story about what a professor at MIT or Harvard says on this very arcane subject might want to keep that in its computer so that even if only 50 people in that town want that information they do have it available. Fiber optics will allow the delivery of huge quantities of information into the to the home present metal cables. Tell us a little more about five fiber optics and what you mean by that. I wish there were one of those fabled professors from MIT sitting in here right now. But as I understand it fiber optics is little more than a long fiber made of glass and what you do is you transmit information in a laser beam that follows that. That band of light and it is my understanding that a lot. More information in fact a

tremendous amount more information can go on a given thickness of fiber optics as it is compared to metal optics. Now the problem right now is that even if you have a home cable system you're limited into the number of cables that could come into the home. You know just because of the economics of it and I think the cable or the telephone company now is is into fiber optics with a vengeance and I think it just could be a matter of time before the cost and the technology is such that this stuff can be brought into the home. There are all kinds of applications shopping via computer. When I was finishing my doctorate in Missouri the little town that we lived in was arguing over whether or not to get a cable system in one of the pitches that was made by City Council was that they were going to have computerized democracy and they wanted part of this cable system to be a two way system so that if City Council was talking about a certain

issue they could get everybody on the horn to submit you know do a straw poll instantly on what they felt about it. That I took out for the 16th time in a row turned down cable television and I don't know whether that was one of the reasons or not but it was an intriguing one and certainly is within the realm of a technical possibility right now. Well now one of the things that were a little sure about is that the changes in the television area are going to be rapid and comparatively rapid and and comparatively Radical Right now we have approximately 200 20 million people or whatever the exact population of the US is locked into communities in which everybody watches their choice out of one out of five a one out of seven stations or one out of 10 stations. Even if it was 1 out of 50 it would make an difference. The point is that I we are we're not likely to see individual entrepreneurship. In other words

individual selection from thousands of items by the year 2000 with the news coming in is a service that will be available almost as you say any time of the day or night. Yes I think that's the way it's going to go another one of the obvious methods of delivering that kind of television is via satellite. There's no reason why NBC has to send its signal to say 200 television stations to be relayed to the viewers when they could have a satellite up there. The biggest drawback right now is not technical it's political. Developing countries especially are very sensitive to the idea of television communication being beamed across their borders without their control and I must admit I have a great deal of sympathy for that sort of thing. I think the biggest obstacle in this country probably is that AT&T has all these lines that they're using to feed television signals. And unless they have a big piece of the action on

the satellite I could imagine they wouldn't be too well the old buggy whip. Axiom will follow here if they have buggy whips and there are no buggies no matter how many lines they have they're going to be cost will eliminate them. Let me just. Well in fact by 79 or 80 public television will be distributed around the country by satellite and not not directly into the homes but certainly from the originating studio whether it's WGBH or whatever to the affiliate. Let me pursue on another point you mentioned NBC. I'll mention CBS or ABC would not interested in the particular labels but are they not likely to become like General Foods or General Motors manufacturing plants rather than distributing centers operating out of network headquarters in various parts of the country but primarily Washington in New York. Are they not likely to follow the lead of their phonograph departments. Their recording departments

and provide all sorts of things because that's where the money will be rather than in the particular phase that they're in which is to produce X numbers of pilots by August something or other into choose the mall by September something or other and put them on the air whatever those dates are. Well if we go back to the Maryland Lowenstein paradigm television right now is at the popular stage and it's trying to appeal to the lowest common denominator. There are a couple of things I think that are going on right now that would certainly indicate what you suggest would probably be the case by the year 2000. First although there are statisticians that are arguing about it there does seem to be a tendency toward people watching less television today and certainly you know all you have to do is sit down especially a commercial told as their intelligence their intelligence and education go up the number of hours go down. Yes. And also I think even. You know people are just tired of it

there are other things to do that you know there's a limit to how many medical shows and westerns you can stand. Police stories if you can stand and people just are not watching it. The video games have really cut into the television market. That's one thing that indicates people are getting a little nervous with what is happening on television and they may want to change the other thing is that right now the commercial networks are virtually sold out in terms of advertising time. So what is happened rather than a fourth network being started is that there are a lot of odd Hoke networks that are being started to provide maybe just like TV s is a network that just provides sporting events to stations and they sign up independently. I think we're going to see a lot more of that in the ultimate of that of course would be that. You would bypass the stations right now the stations decide which one of these independent shows they're going to air. It would be much better if the shows were

available and the viewer himself decided what he's going to watch and what he isn't. What you've been describing is a threat to at least two categories of advertisers. One being the people who put all those atrocious automobile ads in newspapers and the other the category of advertiser that's selling all of those terrible records that nobody ever heard of before in sequences surrounding the movies on UHF. Well I think what we're talking about is that advertising as we know it today may not be the same. I think you're going to like I find an ad for a product that I'm not interested in buying obnoxious very often unless it's entertaining. However if I'm interested in buying a big automobile or whatever at that time I do want information on it and I might seek out ads for automobiles at that time. This type of system would not only specialized program content but also advertising and if you wanted for some reason or other to to watch six ads for personal soap you would have that

option. I'm sure that advertisers would find some way to piggy back on to whatever new technology there is and I'm sure that one of the studies that have been done when a town is without newspapers because of strike is one of the things people miss is want heads now want ads are really almost the ultimate in specialized. Media only eight people may read a given line in that. And yet there is no reason why the want ads should be associated with a newspaper you might pick up the want ads the way you pick up sporting news or race track information just as quickly and just as efficiently. The newspapers perhaps are riding piggyback on a number of services which if they're not careful can be selected out from their offering leaving them rather out in the cold. But newspapers have always been very conservative on this on this point they always feel that the newspaper is a repository of everything when it's not shouldn't be an almanac should it.

No but I think that the speed with which computerization has caught up the newspaper industry. In fact. There is virtually no newspaper in the country that does not have at least part of its production computerized right now probably within two or three years. The great majority of all copy that is in the newspaper will have been written by reporters on some sort of a computer terminal whether it's. An electric typewriter that is read by a computer or whether it's directly from the terminal into the computer. The wire services have been totally computerized for the last three or four years and I just think that what it's going to take away the competitive edge of television is reporting stories right now. Newspapers will be able to do that which they haven't been in the past. One of the reasons they changed the magazine format is that you know by the time most people get their newspaper they've been listening to that story on television and radio for maybe 24 hours if it hits rock the deadline and they

don't want to read that again. They want to get a new perspective on it. But I think this will will allow the newspapers both to give more depth to the story than television can because of time and it also allows them to be much more timely. Roger Cali where does this leave the ordinary individual. He's going to be in a Popular Mechanics have been the nouveau Hala or is he going to be a big raft of some of his privileges and rights in a checklist society in a digital computer society in an electronic media society. Is he going to be able to hold is his his pride and his and his responsibilities in the world. Will he lose some of his First Amendment interests curiosities or rights. Well if one can talk about the right for access to information that certainly isn't in the Constitution but I think we have a vague idea of that. And that's

certainly what freedom of the press is about. If we talk about that I think new technology will permit you to get more information on things if you're an opera fan. There is no reason why somebody at NBC ABC or CBS should decide that not enough people are opera fans. It's not economically viable to broadcast opera. Therefore they're not going to broadcast it. Fortunately we do have public television that takes up some of the slack. But you know that's the kind of thing that is going to be helpful. There are dangers though. And one of the things that I would be very cautious about before endorsing this new type of technology although I don't know if it will depend on anyone's indorsement. Is that it would allow be very simple to monitor what shows you're watching and it could pretty well wire the entire country instead of having Nielsen ratings based on fifteen hundred households conceivably everybody could be wired in that could be very scary.

And I think some safeguards would have to be built in. I would much rather have the FCC the Federal Communications Commission working on providing those kinds of safeguards and trying to figure out a way that they can thwart cable-TV. And I'm not saying that they are thwarting it but there's tremendous pressure from broadcasters to keep broadcasting the way it is. And I. I hope that the FCC will be very foresighted when it comes to a time when they have to endorse a kind of combination newspaper television station in the home that. They will go along with this and allow it to grow and again try to safeguard individual privacy. Well let's hope I hope also that while someone is sharing their own tastes picking what they want from the mass media and or listening to Jeanette MacDonald singing our sweet mystery of life that I'll be locked with my own little computer terminal there and listening to endless recordings of Janet Baker the English caller Tura singing her beautiful renditions and one of them is a

little line that I recall. LORD What is there about us that you should pay so much attention to us. To paraphrase we do hope that whatever goodness we have out of the Constitution is protected and that whatever attention we pay to the computers turned out to be in the interests of the social improvement of our country and indeed of the world. Roger Cali professor of communications at Boston University I appreciate your comments very much. We've been off on a visionary look at the year 2000 which is just around the corner so that's not too deep a look but I hope it's a helpful one and I hope you nobody in the year 2000 double checks on what I just said. Right. This is Bernard Rubin saying good night. Why WGBH radio in cooperation with the Institute for Democratic

communications at the School of Communications at Boston University has presented the First Amendment and of free people an examination of civil liberties in the media. In the 1970s this program was produced in the studios of WGBH Boston.