Work-a-day Americans have two choices in this age of laptop computer modems and mega-databases: Join the computer class or join the underclass.
The underclass, of course, doesn`t even have a modem to phone on.
The computer class controls the world`s modem-accessible databases.
Those repositories, in the form of electrons floating on silicon, hold the entire content of every major newspaper published today in America, for example. And that`s not a fraction of it.
With the click of a few keys, the computer class can summon up the full text of virtually every magazine, every trade journal, every technical paper, every Congressional study, every court decision, every city council ordinance, every lawyer joke and just about everything else that has been written since roughly 1985.
More and more, newspapers, magazines, even encyclopedias are being stored electronically, and the traditional archiving of printed material is being phased out. But access to this incredibly valuable mother lode of computerized gold is becoming so expensive and so increasingly difficult that many observers worry that soon only the rich or those anointed by the rich will have access to the world`s latest wisdom because it will be available in electronic form only.
It`s the alarming dark side of a miracle that was heralded a short while ago as the dawn of an electronic renaissance, according to experts like New York book publisher Patricia Glass Schuman.
”If you don`t have the (computer) equipment or if you lack the expertise to use it online or if you can`t afford a password, then you`re liable to be left out just when you most need to be let in,” said Schuman, who recently stepped down as president of the American Library Association.
It all started when America went online around 1985. Home and office computers became so widespread that virtually everything that was written was stored on magnetic media and preserved in easily searchable and retrievable electronic form.
It was a simple step for publishers of everything from big city dailies to backwater newsletters to sell their data in electronic versions as well as paper ones. The age of the online database was born. Today hundreds if not thousands of these are available via phone links using modem-equipped computers.
At the dawn of this latest information age, experts predicted that the availability of modem-accessible databases via personal computer would rival the great distribution of knowledge to the common person that happened when a German printer named Johann Gutenberg started fooling around with moveable type in 1455.
But a 1992 case study of a typical computer information search in the world of dial-up data dramatizes the warnings that analysts are now sounding. It shows just how closely most office workers are skating the brink between computerized omniscience and underclass exile.
Say you want to read every word by James Coates that has been published in newspapers since 1984. The fact that those stories are avaiable to you with just a few strokes on the keyboard is one of the many miracles that are now just a modem link away from America.
All you need to do is get yourself a computer for about $900 and about $200 worth of telecommunications software and have the store install a telephone modem for about $200.
Next you`ll need to subscribe to a gateway service like the Dow Jones News/Retrieval or Genie Information Service. Dow Jones costs $30, some others push $100.
If you use the Dow Jones service and type in the query ”James Coates”
and ”Chicago Tribune,” you will find in less than a minute all stories with those two phrases in them for the last 1/2 years. At this writing, you will get citations for the 636 stories that have appeared since Jan. 23, 1984.
Say you wanted to see every story by the author since 1984 with the word
”Yellowstone” in it. Just type ”James Coates” and ”Chicago Tribune”
and ”Yellowstone,” and you`ll see that the author persuaded his editors to allow him to write about the crown jewel of America`s national parks 78 times since 1984.
Catch $2.80
”DataTimes” may be a boon to Marian the Librarian, but to paraphrase novelist Joseph Heller, there is just one catch-and that`s Catch $2.80.
Dow Jones News/Retrieval charges $2.80 a minute, or $168 an hour, for you to go online and read the ”DataTimes” group of 34 newspapers, which includes the Tribune, The Boston Globe and The Miami Herald.
Similar search capabilities at similarly steep prices are available through a wide variety of gateways that include CompuServe, Dialog, Delphi, Westlaw, Vu/Text and BRS.
Whole magazines, such as Online Access, Online and Boardwatch, are devoted to covering the computer database industry.
It is a lucrative industry indeed. The reporter`s searches described above took 11 minutes 43 seconds and used ”DataTimes” alone. Because each part of a minute counts as a whole, it cost $33.60 to find out how many stories one journalist wrote over eight years and how many were about Yellowstone.
Because it usually takes well over a minute to download, or retrieve, an average 1,000-word newspaper story, it would be properly conservative to estimate that it could cost a whopping $1,780 to obtain the full texts of the 636 post-1984 works of this one writer.
Databases of similar and equally expensive complexity exist aplenty for lawyers, doctors, business analysts, stock brokers, college professors, advertising people, business owners and just about anybody else whose worklife revolves around collecting, analyzing and producing information.
The Westlaw database offers for prices approaching $200 an hour the full text of virtually every federal and state court case and opinion, all federal regulations and major rulings on taxes, securities, labor, bankruptcy, patents, banking and trade.
The Findex database offers high-cost summaries of virtually every available market research study and industry survey published in the Americas Asia and Western Europe.
A new online service offers photographic-quality color maps of every street in every city, town and village in the U.S. for about $35 per map.
Census data can be had for every ZIP code in America, and some searches cost more than $300 each. A national telephone directory searches every phone owner in the country by area code, first and last name and phone exchanges. That one runs 75 cents a name, a costly boon for those organizing high school class reunions and for telemarketing hustlers alike.
Access means power
Obviously, access to such a wealth of information can offer ordinary employees vast new openings to shine on the job. It didn`t take the computer age to establish the fact that information is power.
But costly searches of the online treasures that could confer that sort of power with the click of a key raise corporate hackles. Bosses bristle when database search tabs are included on the expense accounts of eagerly rising corporate comers.
Because of the costs, many employers have decided to clamp a lid on the use of company computers and accounts. And that`s where the database renaissance threatens to become a new round of dark ages, complete with a class of data priests and one of dataless serfs.
Computer cops
To provide computer cops to patrol the use of cyberspace at major companies, people are promoted into slots that generally go under the heading Management Information Services. The members of this anointed MIS elite, which is referred to in computer circles by its acronym alone, choose who gets what data and see to other computer needs for the front office.
They wield heavy influence and are highly sought out as a result. Sometimes MIS executives are jokingly referred to as GOD, for Givers of Data. For the computer literate among America`s office denizens, Chicago-based Demand Research Corp. offers a continuously updated list of MIS executives at leading companies in the U.S.; the current listing approaches 500 names.
It`s wise to be on the happy side of your MIS. In a form of information age triage, the 500-member MIS elite must decide just how deeply to search for the requested facts.
A reporter is asked by the MIS person, ”Do you really need all the stories about earthquakes and nuclear reactors for your Las Vegas piece?”
A lawyer is told, ”You will have to go to court with just some of the precedents in those EEOC cases.”
A professor is told ”no dice” on a request for a literature search on recent salmonella outbreaks along the Pacific Rim.
Prized passports
Many experts warn that the Godlike power that blockbuster databases offer and their horribly high costs threaten to further widen the gap between the haves and have-nots of the information era-those with passwords to the databases and those without passwords.
A recent study by Schuman, president of Neal-Schuman Publishers in New York, which is being circulated widely on computer databases, makes that point.
”An individual must not only be print-literate. He or she must be culturally literate, visually literate, and computer-literate,” Schuman says in the study. ”With all these skills, the individual might then have a chance at being `information-literate.` ”
But, she says, ”Twenty-three million adult Americans cannot read above a 5th-grade level; 20 percent are unable to write a check that a bank can process.
”What does our fantasy about direct home delivery of information services really mean in a society where 25 percent of households below the poverty line have no telephone? Only 13 percent of U.S. households own a personal computer. Only 10 percent of these have modems.
”Seventeen percent of all white children use a computer at home, while only 6 percent of black and Hispanic children do.
”Rather than providing universal delivery, there is a very real possibility that technology could widen the gap between the information-rich and the information-poor.
”We may fantasize about universal access, but the threat of narrow control in an information society is all too real.”
