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,
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.
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