Publishers Get a Glimpse of What Future Holds

Where is technology leading American society? Is it increasingly fragmenting the nation, breaking down social institutions such as newspapers and television networks that have come to bind the culture together?

When five leading researchers and business people gathered to discuss their visions of the future Wednesday at the American Newspaper Publishers Assn. annual convention, that was the issue they found themselves confronting.

But the consensus seemed to be that, while technologies such as cable television and computers have led to fragmentation, a human need for community and nationhood probably will place a natural brake on how segmented America will become.

“The industrial revolution created mass society,” said Alvin Toffler, author of “Future Shock” and other futurist books. “What is happening now is the death of the industrial society” and the creation of a new one, “much less massified.”

A key reason is that computer technology has allowed individuals to take greater command of communication and thought, in effect serving as a kind of democratizing force. Technologies such as flexible manufacturing, short-run production and segmented marketing, he argued, are all part of this movement.

What is left unifying the culture are the educational system and certain mass media such as newspapers and network television, though in the era of cable television, declining newspaper readership and stratified schooling, these too are weakening, Toffler contended.

At the very least, Toffler said, major cultural institutions such as metropolitan newspapers and national television networks will find “their function, and their power in the society, sharply reduced.”

Yes, technology may lead in this direction, said John C. Malone, chief executive of Tele-Communications Inc., the nation’s largest cable television company. And clearly in the future there will be “greater fragmentation, more targeting and higher-quality programming aimed at individuals.”

But economics and human behavior will check how far this process will go, Malone argued. The technology already exists, for instance, for people to receive their newspapers on video screens each morning, but that didn’t suit the way people really behave.

What’s more, while the technology may exist for cable television to offer so many channels that people could watch only those tailored precisely to their interests, the costs of production are such that only a few channels can afford to produce high-quality programming.

Michael D. Eisner, chairman of Walt Disney Co., also argued that there is a human need for shared experience. “My entire life has been devoted 180 degrees away from segmentation,” he said. The fact is people have common concerns, common feelings, common experiences. “I believe there is a unifying force,” a human need to have those universal experiences shared and articulated.

“People will always want to see movies like ‘E.T.’ ”

In fact, John Seeley Brown, vice president for advanced research at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center said he believes that technology over the next decade could move in precisely the opposite direction from fragmentation.

The previous decade was one in which we thought about hardware and software, Brown said. In the next decade “we will forget about the technology altogether” and think more about “how it can facilitate communication for people to help each other.”

As an example, Brown pointed to one vision of the future that he considered utterly mistaken. That was the idea of a newspaper in the future, theorized by the Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in which readers using computers would be able, in effect, to create their own personal newspapers from a selection of topics each morning.

Such a vision misunderstands the function of the news media, Brown argued. “The real future that newspapers provide is of feeding into the common mind,” not dividing it.

In a similar way, Many worry that technology such as television is leading to greater illiteracy. Brown suggested that it may be leading instead to “new kinds of literacy,” particularly a kind of visual language for the computer/television generation. “There are 14-year-old ghetto kids who are supposed to be illiterate, but in front of new kinds of multimedia tools they can be quite brilliant.”

The society will need to come to recognize these new forms, Brown suggested.

Yet a key question, several of the panelists agreed, is whether a vast part of the society is left out of the technological revolution altogether. There is “a large segment of the population that is illiterate by any standard and is not going to make a major contribution to making democracy run,” said Lew Allen, director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

The key here, most agreed, is education.

But Toffler argued that fundamental change is needed: The two greatest forces on young people, television and schools, are not yet adequately merged. “Television gives people a world of tumultuous change,” he said. “In school, they get a picture of a world in which very little changes.”

The future that society chooses will depend in part, Toffler said, on whether “education and the media fuse.”