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Multimedia - worse than Tomorrow's Schools?
This is a column from an issue of Macworld, about the dangers of the
upcoming multimedia 'revolution'. I think it's important to be aware of
just what may lie behind the hype and marketing. Think.
With thanks to Mark Norman, who typed it all in....
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THE END OF LITERATURE
Multimedia is Television's insidious offspring.
By Steven Levy
(C) 1990 Macworld Communications Inc.
Multimedia has become a certified buzzword in computerdom, so much
so that the only people who's heads don't drop to the table when that word is
intoned are those who have something to sell. At the heart of the instant
boredom concerning this presumably exciting concept is overhype. The
promise of multimedia is just a little too far ahead of what Macintoshes
(and other PC's, including those of IBM, a company also touting multimedia
as the platform of the future) can presently deliver. And besides, in the
mantra-like repetition of the word, its definition has fuzzed to the point of
near-meaningless. What is multimedia, anyway? Should we care?
We should care very much. Because despite its vague beginnings,
multimedia is just as potent as its myriad promoters say it is. The forces of
history almost dictate that it will succeed, and in the not-distant future,
multimedia will be so easy to produce that it will be pandemic as a means
of communication.
But no one, at least to my knowledge, has anticipated the potentially
disastrous effects of multimedia's success. So please say you read it here
first: multimedia will hasten the end of literacy. Despite the fact that its
promoters are almost universally well intentioned, multimedia's lasting
legacy will be the debasement of the remaining forms of communication in
this country that have not already been debased by the perpetually widening
gyre of television.
Tale of the Tube
First of all, let's consider the nature of multimedia. Once you strip it
bare of its considerable pretensions, multimedia is essentially one thing:
computer applications that aspire to being television. Once you add video-
quality images, high resolution animation, and high-fidelity sound to
computer files, you've got your MTV. That's why some folks are calling this
Desktop MTV. (Wimps call it Desktop Media - same difference.) Presumably,
these multimedia capabilities aid the user in communicating and learning.
But this is a different form of communication we're talking about,
something that, according to Business Week magazine, "could change the
way people work, learn and play." How is multimedia different? With colours
and pictures and noises and motion, it's oriented not to the mind, but to the
senses and the gut - like television. Multimedia disregards the previous
communications paradigm: the person as reporter, blending logic, language
and perhaps illustrative charts in order to inform or compel. The new
paradigm sees the user as a television director, most often one who works
in the advertising business.
The result is a debasement of content, because the language of
television, as convincingly argued by New York University professor Neil
Postman in his book "Amusing Ourselves to Death" (Penguin, 1985), is
inherently incapable of promoting complex discourse - style _always_
overwhelms substance. Postman writes, "Television's conversations
promote incoherence and triviality...the phrase 'serious television' is a
contradiction in terms...and television speaks in only one persistent voice -
the voice of entertainment."
Entertainment, of course, is the bottom line of multimedia. Just
listen to its promoters. (Most of them are marketing men like John Sculley.)
Invariably they describe these innovative modes of expression as "exciting"
or - the most common description of all - "sexy". These adjectives are
applied regardless of the content of the concepts or facts to be processed
through the multimedia mill. Multimedia deals solely with the style in
which information is conveyed. Thoughts are permitted, but they can't look
like thoughts - you have to dress them up like showgirls. Sooner or later you
realise that you communicate more effectively in this medium if you ditch
complex thoughts altogether.
The ethos of multimedia was unwittingly expressed recently in a New
York Times op-ed piece written by Robert W. Pittman, the television
executive who created MTV. He argues, in essence, that the postwar
generation of so-called TV babies have grown accustomed to, indeed are
entitled to, the short-term, emotion-geared, nonintellectually engaging
forms of discourse exemplified by television news and music video clips.
Pittman suggested that politicians and educators should use even more of
this form of communication. He wasn't speaking of computers, but
multimedia fits right into his vision: it stretches the ability of computers
to cater to the short attention spans and nonlinear thinking processes of
nonliterate TV babies. Thus we face a future where our business reports and
school papers aspire to the communicative standards of a Def Leppard clip
in MTV heavy rotation.
Will It Fly?
We see a good example of this TV baby communication in the
justifiably excoriated Apple advertising campaign in which some would-be
geniuses in some corporation hatch the idea of a "helocar," and proceed to
convince their bosses to give the project a thumbs-up. What bothers me
about the ads is that by using multimedia to illustrate the concept - making
a kinetic report chock-full of exploding charts and flying vehicles - the
main effort is spent not in doing the hard work of figuring out whether or
not the thing will literally fly, but in creating the sexy images that will get
their bosses all heated up about the concept. What makes the workers
successful is not the idea, but the flashy presentation. Who cares whether
the helocar makes financial sense? Look at it fly!
Essentially, the ad campaign views workers, even engineers, as
marketers whose job it is to sell ideas to their superiors. That may be a
valid interpretation of part of an engineer's job, but placing the heavy
artillery of Madison Avenue in the hands of an engineer will likely do much
more harm to the process than good. Those tools are effective precisely
because of their ability to bypass logic and access emotion. The victory goes
to the engineer who can make the best commercial - not the best vehicle.
This process almost guarantees that choices will be made on
irrelevant criteria. To quote Neil Postman again, "The commercial disdains
exposition, for that takes time and invites argument. It is a very bad
commercial indeed that engages the viewer in wondering about the validity
of the point being made...Moreover, commercials have the advantage of vivid
visual signals through which we may easily learn the lessons being taught.
Among those lessons are that short and simple messages are preferable to
long and complex ones; that drama is to be preferred over exposition; that
being sold solutions is better than being confronted with questions about
problems."
This is what we want to introduce as the standard means of
communicating? Obviously, yes. Catherine Nunes, in charge of multimedia in
Apple's publishing, presentation and audio visual markets, told me that it
was "very likely" that the writing tools of the future would be able to
process sound and video images as well as words.
Lowering Higher Ed.
If multimedia in business isn't bad enough, consider the potential
effects of multimedia in education. Here again, this platform is being touted
as a beneficial revolution. No on has bothered to ask, "What are we
revolting against?" The answer, of course, is reading and writing. Implicit
in all the hype about multimedia is the premise that language alone just
doesn't cut it. Those still nourished by this antiquarian activity may argue
that the ability to express oneself in words, and to understand the words of
others, is essential to the process of thinking. But multimedia laughs at
that objection - because multimedia, like its progenitor, television, is
designed to entertain, at the cost of thinking.
Let's look at a multimedia project geared to the education market: the
ABC-TV products that utilise television news footage of important events,
such as the presidential elections, or the Middle East crisis. Presumably the
product's purpose is to amplify the failings of the written word. As Doug
Doyle, Apple's manager of multimedia solutions for higher education, puts
it, "Traditionally, we thought that information resides in the library - in
books. But that's not true any more." Multimedia is a way to capture that
information and, as Doyle says, "add value" to it by including it in the
learning process.
That seems to make some sense, but is the gain sufficient to
overcome the danger that the images will overwhelm everything else? Take
the ABC product dealing with the Middle East. Presumably, by interacting
with a multilinked set of video clips loaded with key images and sound bites
from the Holy Land, the student gets a deeper understanding of the situation.
Actually, since the language of television is the main form of
communication here, and the student is encouraged to browse the material
by accessing a subject here and a subject there, a lack of context is almost
guaranteed. Some of the clips are quite dramatic but lack a full explanation
of the circumstances under which they were taped.
In order to get full use of the system, each student needs to spend
unhurried time with a Macintosh, a video monitor, and a laser disc player.
(Apparently one advantage of multimedia over book learning is that the
former generates significantly higher revenues.) Once installed before a
machine, students are encouraged to create their own reports on the system.
Drawing on the culture of TV babies, these reports are not driven by
language or reasoning, but by the accumulation of vivid images. The students
are literally asked to perform the function of a television news producer,
splicing clips together for maximum impact. And clever students will soon
learn, as clever television producers understand all to well, the facts of
dealing in a visual medium: one dramatic image, even if misleading,
communicates more effectively than an interesting idea without a
compelling picture accompanying it. It's history by sound bite. Doug Doyle of
Apple insists that responsible teachers will prevent this from happening,
but in light of our national experience with television - which has
trivialised literature to sitcoms and transformed our politicians into
pitchmen - this seems rather optimistic.
If Books Could Talk.
Recently I spent a session with Marc Canter and John Scull, the two
key executives of MacroMind. They guided me through an impressive tour of
their newest version of Director, a program designed to enliven information,
multimedia style. Canter was frank in admitting that, given the present
state of computer power, the only way Director and other powerful
multimedia tools can be implemented is in expensive machines with
relatively hard-to-use applications. Even so, those who do this type of work
anyway - art directors and advertising people and television graphics folks
- will currently find a Macintosh to be a cost-effective tool. I see no
problem at all with lowering the cost of tools to people already involved in
this form of show business, and MacroMind is doing honourable work in this
regard. Likewise I think that multimedia capabilities have real value when
used in areas such as scientific visualisation.
But Canter and Scull were both gushing about the not-too-distant day
when our Macintoshes will be more powerful, and their software will be as
simple to use as a Nintendo machine. At that time, they guess reasonably,
multimedia will be as accessible to ordinary users as, say, word processing
is to people today. That will be the day when multimedia will be utilised in
many instances where previously, logical communication sufficed quite
nicely - except for the fact that one had to be literate to participate. Marc
Canter believes that ultimately, multimedia will make significant inroads
in replacing the beleaguered holdouts of communication, those dinosaurs
that refuse to yield to pictures and sound...you know, books.
Earlier, Canter and I had been talking about my current book project.
As with the previous ones, I proceed with my research on the assumption
that any images I collect in addition to the the realms of written and spoken
material I gather will be conveyed only by my language. The finished project
will be a bound stack of pages consisting of words, accessed a page at a
time. Canter is convinced this process will be improved upon. "Steve," he
said, bursting with enthusiasm, "I really believe that ten years from now
you won't be writing a book in that traditional way. In ten years, books won't
be written only in text - they'll be done with sound and video and images,
and people will access it by links, not start to finish."
Multimedia fulfilled: a world where sensory input is king. Where
writing is replaced by "authoring." Where the techniques of sneaker ads "add
value" to charts and spreadsheets, and a thousand words die with every
picture. Words we could have used. Words that bind a reader and a writer,
words that bear rereading, words that when carefully unraveled detonate
fireworks inside the mind and change lives.
Canter couldn't have meant this, could he? Yet, he said it - within a
decade, books are going multimedia.
"What you don't understand, Mark," I said to him, "is that you're
describing my nightmare."
________________________________________________________________________
Steven Levy is a Macworld columnist and author of "The Unicorn's Secret:
Murder in the Age of Aquarius" (NAL, 1989).