{back from break--Issues At Hand logo, dissolve to Richard}

{Behind him, national map of information pathways glowing, pulsing--IH2-18/I3--with dots brightening and fading, brightening and fading}

Objections run from the political, to the economic, to the philosophical, to the Neo-Luddite. And such diversity of opinion has surrounded the Information Agenda since its inception.

In 1993, two months after the February Flurry, the New York Times interviewed three thousand potential Window users--people with telephones--regarding their opinions about the Information Agenda. At that point the Agenda was mostly legislation-in-waiting: the taxation initiatives weren't to be instituted until July 1, the Window software was a gleam in a the eyes of a hoped-for Programmer's Cooperative, and the educonomy had barely begun establishing its protocols.

{background changes to bar charts representing figures}

Thirty-one percent of the respondents thought they would have no interest in using such a system for anything.

Twenty-three percent thought they would be using it only for correspondence. Only seventeen percent thought they would be using the Window every day. Of the sixty-nine percent who thought they would want the system, 85% already owned a computer, and the remaining fifteen percent wanted the free computer.

While these numbers indicate a wide diversity of reactions to the new technology--as well as wide range of levels of understanding about the potential of the technology--the numbers also indicate how distrustful people were about the government's ability to achieve what it said it might achieve.

Comparing those figures with the follow-up study performed eighteen months later on the same three thousand people shows how a bird in the hand is judged differently than a flock in the air.

{overlay second bar chart, showing second figures; first bar chart shaded back}

Eighty-one percent had systems in their home. Of those households, eighty-five percent used it daily, and another ten percent used it at least once a week. Of the first thirty-one percent who had thought they wouldn't be interested in using such a system, more than three-quarters were using their system at least once a week.

As we shall see in the next segment, the breakneck speed with which the American society has gone online has excited many people, but it has also left many people bewildered, or frustrated, or even, occasionally, enraged.

This latter subsection of America, which comprises almost twenty percent, cuts across economic and geographic lines.

Nationally, seventy-eight percent of the homes have a Window connection, whether that is a privately-owned or a publically-assisted machine. With that level of technological infusion happening so rapidly, it's no surprise that emotions run high....

{dissolve to:}

{caption:}

{teasing and curling a customer while she talks}

I think it's a bunch of hooey. Window. Computers. A lotta talk, that's all it is. Lotta talk. Me, I do my job, and I keep to myself. What do I want with a bunch of strangers sending me things on the computer? I get enough junk mail every day in the box, why should I want something in my house?

Besides, I don't trust 'em. I think they watch us through them Windows, and I'm damned if I'll let them put one of those things in my home. Not a chance.

Y'know, I hear they're thinking of making us turn in our taxes from one of those computers. And I tell you what, I could care less what they say, I'm not turning in no taxes form on a ----ing computer.

Those tax forms're hard enough already. They can keep my refund. Or I'll hire somebody else to fill it out. But no matter what, I'm not having one of 'em in my home.

{dissolve to:}

{caption:}

{in booth, sipping coffee. Other truckers in other booths crane their necks to watch the interview}

{cut to shot of receding Cadillac bumper with the sticker:}

{dissolve to medium shot, two students}

{sitting on steps outside sorority; these two speak with vivacity and certitude}

I don't think you can call it a tool for democracy. My political science professor thinks so, and his lectures are just filled with that sort of thing, but I don't see it. If anything, the Window would make me be a tool for the government, and what's that, if not totalitarianism? Why should our lives be so drastically influenced by the government?

Reva:

C'mon, Bets, it's not like we've gotta have the thing on.

There's no law that says you have to have the Window in your home any more than you have to have... what, a car? I mean, sure, if you're gonna live decently, you have to have a car, but you don't have to have a car. Y'know?

Elizabeth:

It's only a matter of time before they make you have a Window. It's not just a convenience. If it's anything, it's a threat to the privacy and independence of the American family, that's what it is.

Reva:

Where'dya hear that line, Bets, from your dad?

{dissolve to:}

{caption:}

{chipping away at piece viced on workbench in sunlit room; he's calm and placid}

Sure, my friends tell me that it would be a real boon, that just having the computer would revolutionize my lifestyle. And that may be so. It might revolutionize my lifestyle. But why?

I'm one of the sanest people I know. I work at my own pace on things I love. I'm rarely stressed, rarely in a hurry, and mostly can focus on doing what I do best as well as I possibly can. Why should I revolutionize that? There's no off switch to technology. So I just don't turn it on.

{dissolve to:}

{caption:}

{in office, by computer; his desk has many vertical files, though each stack is tidy)

I work on a computer all day long. Why in God's name would I go home to do it some more? Regardless of how cute & fun it is. Maybe next year, when I can afford a full-wall HDTV setup, then maybe. But for right now, I have little or no interest in going home to more of the same. Give me my wife, my family, my television.

The kids and the wife really want one in the house, but I've put my foot down on that. When I come home I want to be with my family, not huddled around a Window. We do a little TV watching, but not much--mostly Saturday mornings for the kids. But otherwise, I want to play games, talk, relax, and read.

Most people just assume that I'm really excited by the Information Highway. And lots of business associates are irritated by not being able to e-mail me. But that's the breaks--they've got to talk to me in person. Even the boss gives me grief. So far I've been able to fend him off.

What I know about the web is only what I've heard from others, and what I've read. It sounds fine, and I've looked over other folks' shoulders, but I've made it a very conscious decision not to sign on. This sort of thing should be a conscious choice, not a lemming decision.

{dissolve to:}

{caption:}

{beside his phone truck, which is parked beside a telephone pole}

{caption:}

{sitting in a cubicle}

And since the Agenda kicked in, all these hightech companies have been working nonstop on voice keyers, those things that turn spoken words into letters. And scanners that read handwriting. So what's gonna be left for me?

I've seen what happens, and I know that people like me are always going to end up getting the bottom of the barrel, no matter how fancy and pretty that barrel is. We just have a bunch more gruntwork now, mindless busywork typing documents from voicemail, typing words from press conferences, and all that. And when that gruntwork is replaced by computers, then there'll be something else stupid and pointless for me to do. For six bucks an hour.

And who does this kind of stuff? Women and poor people.

You call that "empowering"? I call it keeping the bees in the hive. How much creativity is "fostered"? How much does that improve the world? How satisfying is that kind of work?

How much of a sense of accomplishment can you get from doing a drekwork?

We've gone from word processing to human processing, and I'm tired of coming out artificial American processed cheese food spread. From a tube.

{cut to:}

There are also complaints that the Window makes the split between rich and poor, between white and minority, and between educated and uneducated, actually worse. Lisa Lefferson reports from our Washington, DC bureau:

{cut to:}

{caption:}

Richard, there's no question that the changes of the last three years have helped many of the previously disadvantaged. But that doesn't mean there hasn't been resistance. This city was among the first to receive some of the five million publically-assisted Window units, but there is still talk in this community about limits of the system.

Limits, they say, that may be changing their culture.

{cut to:}

{caption:}

It's whitebread society reaching out its pallid hand to water down black culture. It's more sly than tv, more slick than workfare. It makes the strong proud voice of a black man and makes him faceless, and makes him talk like a white man.

It's as bad as all those tests--the SATs and ACTs and IQ tests, because there is no way for us to use the smarts we know on the system. What balls they got, to say they'll give us this thing, thinking we'll just nod our heads and say Yassuh to joining their world.

{cut to:}

{caption:}

"Until there is more black heritage available on the net, I'm not going to be happy. It's embarassing how little public information is available.

We're collecting oral histories right now with a grant from the government, and we're paying many at-home mothers a small stipend to type these recorded oral histories, and paying others to proofread them. We're teaching, in this manner, textual skills to previously computer illiterate people. And we're amassing a great base for black historical research.

Right now, however, I'm dissatisfied. Just try doing a rough search for information on Jackie Robinson. In the Public Encyclopedia, you only get 63 hits. Compared to, say, Eddie Bauer, who has 258 and rising. There are paybases that have more information, but that's counter to the principals of the Public Encyclopedia. And how many of the disenfranchised, the ones who need those sorts of heros, are going to be on the paybases? I hope that will change, and it can, as long as there is community involvement in developing our own information base. Like we're doing. We are, and we will.

{cut to:}

{caption:}

Here in North Washington, black civic leaders were among the first to use the vast educational potential of the Windows.

People like Viola Batt, who we just heard, are working to incorporate minority voices in the information web--not only historically, but in an ongoing fashion. Programmers are developing language packages that assist individuals who are unfamiliar with corporate discourse, for example, like Raymie Collins:

{cut to:}

{caption:}

{we may need to delete a few of the expletives, but the FCC's been loosening the regs, and we are on at 9, after all}

Sure, I watch the Window. Check out the laws. Check out the answers to the laws. There's thousands of folks doin translating. I mean, look, they got a new law comin up here...

{camera moves to screen; shows Congressional Record topbar}

... about banking. It's in banking talk. But beside each hunk of text is the option box, see? I get the open library over there.

NAACP, ACLU, Republicans, Democrats, Sierra Club, shit, even the Bloods and the Crips got word there. I can read about it. Learn what the bank talk mean. Learn how these others think. And I can even ask questions. Most often only takes a day to get answered.

I can't click thinkin like the banks think. Or how lawyers think. But I wanta know how they think. I mean, I better know how they think. I hafta fuckin know, or they'll shit on me and mine some more.

{cut to:}

{caption:}

And people like Magya Fisher Queen, a single mother who receives ADC funds...

{#IH9684-4298, interior of Ms. Queen's public housing living room, standard-issue Window in the corner. One child sits before it, touching keys, watching motion graphics. The other two children crawl on Ms. Queen}

. . . who with her three children under ten years old simply couldn't finish school for lack of child care or money. In the last two years since her Window arrived, however, she has not only gotten her high school diploma, but has been using the Window to teach her own children.

{caption:}

At first we just, uh, just like used it for a tv, cause it'd been months since we'd had tv, but then my pastor showed me how to start out with it, how to ask questions. How to send letters. I don't type much, but that oldest of mine do, and she's got Windowpals all over the place.

And she just readin, and readin. She wants to know about stuff, and she can find it. Sometimes she shows me things I never knew nothing about before, and here she is ten years old. And me, I just got a WindowWashing job, government work, and they'll put another screen in for me to work. The kids can use the other one whenever they want.

{timecut dissolve}

Sure the Window's been good for me. I don't know what I'd be doing now if Williams hadn't been elected. I don't know what I'd be doing, but it wouldn't be nice. There wasn't nothing waiting for me but more misery then.

Single welfare mom, 26 with three kids, I knew I had a dozen years at least till I could expect to do anything but be a welfare mom, tending my kids and collecting my checks.

And then what? Forty and broke. It looked bad.

{The following section was used in Promo II}

Maybe them chips are still stacked against me, but I feel like I got a lot more chips now. And my kids have it.

That's what really matters. They're learning. They won't live what I been living, the way I been living. And I'll always be thankful to Williams for that.

{cut to}

Richard, the general consensus in this community is that the Information Highway is an improvement over how things stood three years ago. An improvement, but one that still has a way to go. Richard?

{cut to:}

The dangers, and the advantages, of the Window system--even before it was a reality--was lost neither on President Williams nor on the news commentators. In March, 1993, President Williams made a statement during a news conference that relates directly to this issue:

{cut to:}

Some say that having literacy be such an important tool for information access puts an unfair burden on the illiterate, or the poorly literate. That it is an unfair advantage to those facile in language, those whose culture is dominant.

Let's be blunt. That it benefits the dominant white culture and fosters its educational imperatives.

It seems to me that that argument is akin to saying that the system advantages those who can speak.

Communication is the essence of human dynamics, and without it one cannot prosper.

There will be a dominant language, a dominant style of discourse, a dominant--or more properly, prevalent--communication style. But fashion exists in all things human.

Just watch. There will be many kinds of communication styles, and fashions, and forms. Give it three years, and there will be dozens of communication-style subcultures, if not more. And there will be a prevalent communication style.

That dominant style will likely be the pinstripe-suit-and-tie style of corporate and government affairs. But there will also be the jeans-and-patterned-shirt style of the ecoradical. The hip-hop rap style. The dressed-all-in-black style of the neopostmodern.

There will be a wide range of diversity in a wide range of pockets. But there will be a standard language for most official business, just like you would wear conservative clothes to court, or to apply for a loan.

I think that everyone can learn different languages, especially when they have examples of it available in many forms, as people use them, as people live. And I suspect there will be enough of a demand for training in different languages that educational systems will be developed and put on the Web. There will be translation systems for the layperson that translate legal documents into standard language. There will be tools for language assistance.

And, as I said before, there will most certainly be government-supported assistance for anyone who needs it for dealing with the government bureaucracy as it is manifested on the Window. The Direct Grants, for example--there will be public assistants who will help people with grant proposals, regardless of their level of literacy. And these things will foster literacy on the larges scale.

I believe in the educatability of humans. I believe that anyone who wants to learn can learn. What's more, I believe that a government must operate on that assumption, whether or not it's true.

{cut to}

Williams was right on most of those counts. Indeed, by insisting early on having the first five million Window units being distributed to libraries, community centers, and the poor, he created a momentum that is still pushing us forward.

{cut to:}

{GRAPHIC chart: Window use between '93 and '96--IH2-18/I3.
Red=public, blue=X.400 access, green=2400 baud access, black=Window placements (WEB protocol)}

The public-access use skyrocketed over the last three years, proportionally moreso than even the modem access, which peaked early and plateaued. The public-access use--in libraries, in government offices, in community centers--was also of longer duration, indicating more involved use.

What the public-access Windows did was provide free access to a wide range of special-interest or community education tools. Literacy-skill programs became available in late '93, and they blossomed in '94.

{cut to See IH2-18/I32, stills in series from the Window reading course READIT}

Literacy packages like Readit and other self-paced skill courses were among the most popular. As a national-level educational system, it sends mini-diplomas to graduating students, and has online assistance as far away as the F1 button.

{cut to:}

{caption:}

We've got sixty-four different literacy packages on our line. One of them works with nearly everyone. With a will to learn to read, one of these will take you, at your own pace, through a literacy course.

Can't ask for more diversity than that. And we've had startling success, especially with our mentor program. Using the phone and the Window works really well with many people, because they feel like there's a human being on their side, not just some computer program.

{cut to:}

While existing minority cultures are carving their own niches out of the vast environment of the Information Web, there are small pockets of newly developing subcultures that would have been impossible without the Highway.

{cut to:}

{caption:}

{this guy is a 10. Probably 19, tiny mirrorshades, stripshaved eyebrows, every bit of clothing black, and he sits in front of his screen with music just blaring. He turns it down, and says these words while never turning his mirrored eyes from his screen, or slowing his fingers.}

Yeh man I go cruisin flying down the Highway. Kinda night rider, kinda sleek. Meet up with other cruisers, shoot setshot out, meet up, man it's the best. I love it. Stay with it all day long. Some of these guys have VRs to take me in to meet them, and that trip is the way, it's the way of the next, the tomorrow....

Virtual Reality, man, that's what's ripping through the waves now, and it's clicking with where the world's going.

Download the zipped Reality, and then enter it, and talk with someone else. The Highway just sends the triggers, not the world, and so forty, fifty V-buddies can click together.

Another three months and I'll have my VR specs and gloves, and they may never see me again, I'll just romp with my virtual buddies till they flick my switch to OFF....

{cut to:}

And while such "virtual realities" may send a chill through the minds of some dystopian futurists, who anticipate a separation from human feelings that far outstrips what TV violence seems to have done to our youth, others think that virtual communities may assist us in furthering our essential humanness.

Regardless of what world we choose to be in--the virtual or the real--there seems to be no question that we are all staying home more now. Some analysts say that over 62% of the working population do at least some work at home.

For many of us, the home is where we do all our work, and there is much work to be done, as well as much work to be had.

{cut to:}

{caption:}

{at home, in den, with coffee in hand; he's small, and moves with precision}

There's always work. The federal government alone generates about ten megabytes of finished data per minute, and then there's all the state and city governments. So there's a lot of proofreading that needs doing. All those files that you pull up on the Window, you know, you assume they're correct. But they rarely are to begin with. I think that there's something like four different people who proofread any given document--each from somewhere else in the country. I don't remember exactly how many people are doing this, but it's a lot.

It's a pretty cool system. I know that I can expect to find a few errors, because the system puts in a few intentionally, to be sure I'm doing my job. And it's not like I even need to know the text. I pull up the text on the screen, and that's all I have, and then the software leads me to places that might be faulty. What I'm most closely proofing is the coding--the WEBMARK coding.

That's the standard coding scheme--the Window form of SGML coding--that all Window documents adhere to, so that there can be continuity for the retrieval software to use.

If the coding is off, then a document stops being as useful, because all its elements aren't searchable. Or it can even get lost to the system, which fits into the other part-time work I do.

Sometimes, for diversity's sake, I shift my job to what I call "gleaning." I inspect documents that haven't been accessed at all in the last year or more. Often they're a result of bad coding, bad entry, faulty saving, or some such other problem. They are on the Web, but not in the Web, if you know what I mean. I flag the document, indicate the problems I've fixed, write a little note, and let someone else handle it from there.

And the rest of the time I have to myself. It's not bad at all.

{cut to:}

{caption:}

I call lonely people for my pay. I mean, sure, there's more to it than that, but that's a lot of my job.

With the changes in the healthcare being what they are, so many more people are staying at home instead of going into nursing homes, and the Window becomes a lifeline in both senses--I mean that's what their life tends to be.

They're the ones with the fanciest home systems, and they can interact with the world without necessarily moving.

One of my clients is 85, has bundles of dollars, has a fullwall screen, voice activated controls, voice-to-data transcription devices, Virtual Reality capabilities, and every other gizmo that he can buy for his Window.

In another five, ten years, the numbers of the homebound is going to skyrocket. There will no doubt be some changes in the finances, but not substantially, I'd bet. But there will be a change in the pay structure, because there'll be a need for novelty in these people.

My actual pay comes from the insurance companies, but it's a rather complex breakdown that ends up saving the insurance companies money, pays the government a little for expediting the process through the Windows and the fed employee base, and pays my salary--which isn't all that much, really, but is still substantial enough to keep me fed. And I like doing it. I've got my nurse's aide certificate, which is necessary for me to be doing the work I'm doing, but other people just want company, not even a healthcare aide.

{cut to:}

These and hundreds of other home jobs are available to the unemployed or underemployed. The federal job bank allows companies from all over the country to advertise for new employees--another benefit of Williams' Agenda rule of only allowing one logon per individual. Often requiring a minimum skill level--tested on the Window--these tasks vary from doing research for multinational corporations to inputting the archives of government data.

When we return, a look at HomeCare, an investigation into some recent legal entanglements, and a special report:

The Educonomy: Sloganeering or Social Change?

{ad break: 120 seconds}

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