In the Fall of 1989, I taught a course on Multimedia Communications at MIT. In the process I prepared a draft book in the form of notes that were used. I had been working on this area for almost ten years by then, first at Warner Communications where I was in charge of and designed the first two-way video on demand interactive shopping system on cable and then as Head of R&D at NYNEX. As one could expect Warner under Steve Ross was the height of creativity and NYNEX, now Verizon was a telephone company.
My vision evolved into this course which took the premise that multimedia communications was "displaced interactive and interpersonal communications". Namely multiple individuals communicating in a seamless manner as if they were at the same place and at the same time, Remember, this was 1989. I had developed and deployed an early version of the system at the Harvard hospitals and it became the bulwark for all future systems.
The key to my thoughts was not the technology but the philosophical underpinning of interpersonal epistemology. The driver was a small book by Winograd and Flores[1], whose focus was on software design. I took it a step further and applied that to multimedia communications. The two authors used much of the work of Heidegger as a starting point to clarify their approach and I then took this as my starting point and carried it to how one should implement such a system.
Clearly in 1989 we had a modest IP network, NYSERNET, and we had work stations, Sun, and a broadband network that delivered 45 Mbps. Not great but a start. I conceived of a media distributed operating system, MEDOS, as the basis upon which this could be implemented. We built the system and it worked, albeit it was a Model T compared to a new Ferrari. But it drove.
Now comes the pandemic. Children need schools, teachers need access, patients need physicians and physicians need to deal with patients in a manner in which they were trained and experienced. Unfortunately all they have to work with is Skype and Zoom, and a few other artifacts. The poor students have mediocre Internet access, limited device capabilities, and cumbersome systems. Some students even do this on a smart phone. In fact one physician I deal with had to use her smart phone to mine because the hospital IT folks saw that as best, after all they had an App!
One should look upon the crowd in Silicon Valley askance. Their focus is another monetizable APP or a high profit margin tool to play a monetizable App. In the more than thirty years since I built the first one, nothing has progressed. Why? It is my belief based upon my experience with the Silicon Valley App crowd that they do not understand human communications, and in fact they appear to look down upon humans outside their ken, and see them just as sources of richness.
There is a philosophy of multimedia communications, a philosophy as to what we are trying to do as humans in interacting with one another human or group of humans and even our environment. Multimedia communications is displaced human interactions. It tries to erase the sense of displacement; it tries to bridge the gap of technology qua technology. None of the systems currently available have even tried to understand this human interaction challenge. One cannot accomplish this with a screen on a smart phone. A laptop shining in one's eyeglasses creates an ethereal image of unreality. Poor speakers and microphones present an almost comedic interaction, and of course the background is more like a reality home show than a true normal interaction. Finally, the technology itself gets in the way of interacting.
As I noted then: Peter Drucker, in his biographical sketches of his contemporaries, remarks on his first encounter with McLuhan. It was during a presentation that McLuhan was making on the results of his do doctoral studies. His presentation reflected upon the impact that the printing press has had upon the university system in the late Middle Ages. He contended that the modern university came into being in the sixteenth century because of printing, which changed not only the method of instruction but, more importantly, what the university intended to teach. He further contended that the cultural results of this period had little to do with the Renaissance and was all a direct result of the printing press.
To quote Drucker, who paraphrased McLuhan;
"Did I hear you right," asked one of the professors in the audience, "that you think that printing influenced the courses that the university taught and the role of university all together." "No sir," said McLuhan, "it did not influence; printing determined both, indeed printing determined what henceforth was going to be considered knowledge."
Thus this led to McLuhan's famous phrase that the medium is the message. Specifically, as we developed a new medium for human communications, we dramatically altered the nature of the information that was transferred and the way in which the human perceived what was "truth" and what was not.
Thus, the new term of "Fake News" is to some degree the result of the new medium. McLuhan may not have anticipated all the Apps and Social Media but they are themselves the media which in turn create new "truth".
Now the Winograd and Flores book builds upon some of the key ideas of Heidegger. Namely they note:
Practical understanding is more fundamental than detached theoretical understanding.
Heidegger has a concept called "throwness", part of being-in-itself. We know something only by being thrown or involved in it. We know what a radiologist does with an image and how he manipulates it for understanding by doing the process ourselves. We cannot expect the user to detail their beliefs and in fact those understandings are time varying.
We do not relate to things primarily through having representations of them.
We relate to things themselves. We do not relate to a representation. The representation to the "thing itself" is done in the context of the task to be accomplished. For example, teleconferencing is useful is we are not to relate to the person but to a subject whose essences can be presented directly through the medium, rather than just a representation. We find that teleconferencing is inadequate for personal contact since the contact is through a representation.
Meaning is fundamentally social and cannot be reduced to the meaning giving activities of individual subjects.
Meaning is obtained in dialog, in a conversational fashion, with the ability to meet consensus.
Gadamer and Heidegger both relate meaning to the social process of communicating. Both also relate the evolution of meaning to the ongoing set of discourses.
Specifically, social or conversational activity is the ultimate foundation of intelligibility. This means that both in the design process as well as in the operations process, the need is critical to have the communications channel be conversational if the intent is to convey intelligibility. If the intent is only to transfer predefined package from one point to the other them the conversationality is not essential. In a multimedia environment, intelligibility in the context of the various media and thus intelligibility demands conversationality.
The challenge for the next generation of technologists is not to make it smaller and more profitable, but larger and more useful. Second Grade teachers and students, Oncologists and patients, are crying out for this change which has been sitting in the waiting room for more than three decades. It may be worth reading what was written way back then and give it a second try[2].
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