Being Digital In Action
Last update: 12/8/97
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I am writing this to use both in my "Time's Harvest" course in Futures Studies and in my "Computers and Society" course. Many of you in "Time's Harvest" are reading Being Digital, by Nicholas Negroponte, about aspects of life in the Information Age (if that is what we are heading into).
Negroponte writes about "bandwidth", the amount of information that can be distributed over a given set of hardware. The higher the bandwidth, the more information per second that can be transferred. Rates are in units such as Kilobits per second for a modem, Megabits per second for coaxial cable, and Gigabits per second for optical cable. Negroponte predicts that we will all have access to at least tens of Megabits per second into our homes within the next decade or so. The people in "Computers and Society" will be familiar with bits. A bit is the unit of computer information. More bits means more information.
Negroponte also writes about the technical side of transferring digital information, and how this will force all information "channels" such as newspapers, radio stations, Web Sites, telephone, cable TV and others, into a common mode of distributing information, and how this will open up competition for the information business of ordinary citizens (us). Part of this we are already seeing with the competition between Ameritech, Sprint, MCI, and all of those calls and TV ads about switching over to another company. Negroponte says, in effect, "you ain't seen nothin' yet." It isn't just telephone information being put into competition, it's all information.
So there is an enormous amount at stake for information companies -- their survival, in fact. Your cable company will be competing for your telephone business (a company in Troy is already trying to do this) and your telephone company will be trying to sell you TV channels and everybody will be trying to sell you Internet access. Another aspect of competition may be more immediately relevant for the Detroit area. An article in today's New York Times (12/8/97, Pg C1),"Old Man Bandwidth; Will Commerce Flourish Where Rivers of Wire Converge?", says that Palo Alto, California, is staking a claim to being the nation's high-bandwidth city.
Cities have always depended upon transportation for their vitality. The concentration of people and businesses in a city has never been self-sustaining. Cities rely on efficient transportation networks to get food and raw materials into the city, and for getting their products out of the city to customers. The medieval walled fortress city is no more. Cities cluster around rivers, lakes, and oceans. Canals, railroads, airports and roads have been crucial for existing cities. New transportation facilities have resulted in new cities. Royal Oak, where I live, has been undergoing a period of high growth, largely as a result of the completion of Route 696. On a larger scale, the Detroit metropolitan area benefits from a deepwater port, an excellent (but declining) road network, two airports, and a rail hub. Take away these transportation facilities, and much of the metro area would wither and die. Within the U.S., we felt first the pain of international competition, and currently we are benefiting from it. We in Detroit aren't buying all of those cars, we're being successful in selling them nationally and internationally, and that is feeding many of our other businesses.
Now let's move forward and imagine that we really are leaving an industrial age, where physical products were important, entering into an information age, where it isn't physical products ("atoms", in Negroponte's words) but information ("bits" in Negroponte's words) that will be the most important product. What type of transportation now? Relatively, transportation of information could become more important than transportation of things. What type of transportation network? Relatively, not rivers, lakes, roads, railroads, etc., but satellites and optical fiber.
That's the point of the story in the New York Times. Here are some bandwidth requirements from that story:
Any city that wants to develop information-based businesses will need lots of bandwidth to support many of these businesses. The Times' story is that Palo Alto has laid down a loop of optical cable with the highest capacity of any place in the world, to enable video distribution, medical technology, online commerce and similar companies to get the concentrated bandwidth they need.
You may be asking where is all of that information going to go to get out of Palo Alto? Outside of the city, products can travel on lower-speed links. After all, to get fresh vegetables into Detroit doesn't require multi-lane highways out in farm country, because the traffic isn't concentrated there. Similarly, an online commerce company doesn't require 20 gigabits into your home, but to carry out many transactions simultaneously, the hub of that activity needs high-capacity information transportation at it's place of business. So any city seeking to compete in the Information Age will need high bandwidth networks.
Will we in the Detroit metro area try to compete here? What information transportation will we need? For one, design and engineering services can be globalized. Our Big Three are already doing this internally. Other international areas will be able to offer these services in Detroit, and we will be able to offer our services abroad, on a commercial basis, using high speed networks. With the technical developments in cars, automobile service has gone high-tech. Reading the diagnostic codes from automobile, and access to online information and available technical support are critical for automobile service stations. Are we going to retain that monopoly in the face of international competition? Bandwidth will be required. (Show that mechanic a video of how to fix that problem, and make it specific to the car he is working on, and get it to him/her now! You do want your care repairs finished by 5 PM, right?) We also have many financial, medical and information service companies that will likely enter into global competition. We were not immune from global competition for atoms (cars). Will we be immune from global competition for bits (services and information)?