writings
Aired September, 2000
Paul Martin Lester (E-mail and home page), University of Montana
We certainly live in a communication rich society constantly bombarded daily with a steady, unrelenting stream of media messages. Some have warned that too much stimulation can lead to illiteracy and lawlessness. Other, more optimistic researchers predict that technological advances will create innovative educational, entertainment, and persuasive possibilities. Nevertheless, it has been estimated that the average person sees and hears approximately 5,000 media messages every day. And what's adding to our daily barrage? The World Wide Web. The Web with its millions of users and databases around the globe sometimes seems like an enormously confusing array of facts, figures, and graphic elements. How can we ever expect to understand this resource in any meaningful way? One way to try to figure out the Web is not by comparing it with any other medium. My great-grandmother lived to be 100. Several years ago I happened to ask her what she thought when she first heard of the automobile. She started laughing and I asked her why. And she replied, "I thought it was funny because how could everyone have their own train?" She could only understand the car based on her knowledge of what came before-the train. And we are stuck thinking about the Web in terms of what has come before-newspapers, magazines, motion pictures, radio, and television. But the Web is similar and yet unlike any of those media for communications. Sure, it has the immediacy of radio and television, the totality of information of print, and sometimes the visual qualities of motion pictures, but it is more than that-it must be more than that. When the first automobile was introduced, no one predicted the fast cars of today and interstate road systems, pollution, the suburbs, and drive-in liquor stores. And 100 years from now people will laugh about how the Web was used way back in the year 2000. But there are hints of the Web's future use when, for example, you can watch the Olympics on television and are encouraged to click on the Olympics website for more information. There are also reminders that we need some limitations to our thinking as when the Missoulian newspaper prints the Rock Creek Lodge annual Testicle Festival's website address within a front page story-a website filled with links to bare-breasted women and adult personal ads-that is no doubt tempting for inappropriately young eyes. Because the Web is unique in the history of mass communications, the thinking about it must be unique as well. Over time and with practice and patience, we will figure it out. Nevertheless, when my great-grandson asks what I thought of when I first heard about the Web I'll probably answer with a laugh because, "How could everyone have their own Library of Congress?" ___________________________________ This is Paul Martin Lester from the Practical Ethics Center at the University of Montana.
writings