THE INFORMATION REVOLUTION--INTRODUCTION

It's not something we can see, really. We certainly can't touch, taste, hear, or smell it. Yet it's always there when we look for it, available wherever we bother to direct our attention. We can glean it from the pages of a book or the morning newspaper and from the glowing phosphors of a video screen. Scientists find it stored in our genes and in the lush complexity of the rain forest. The Vatican Library has a bunch of it, and so does Madonna's latest CD. And it's always in the air where people come together, whether to work, play, or just gab.

What is it that can be so pervasive and yet so mysterious? Information, of course. Until World War II, that word referred to the personal act of acquiring knowledge. In everyday conversation, the most frequent use of the term was for what we now call directory assistance. But during the war, ``information'' got redefined as something quantifiable that could be collected, moved, and processed. Concerned with transmitting coded signals over noisy radio channels, engineers at Bell Laboratories came up with a measure of information based on the mathematics of probability. At the same time, designers of anti-aircraft guns began laying the foundation for cybernetics, the study of how information can control machines.

Ever since then, an expanding series of phenomena--in biology, cosmology, society, business, the arts, even family relations--have been explained in terms of the exchange and processing of ``information.'' And by now, the word is a sloppy, pseudoscientific catch-all--a slippery ``amoeba word,'' German linguist Uwe Purksen calls it, with nearly two dozen connotations.

However you define it, 50 years later, the capture, manipulation, transmission, and consumption of information in digital form has become a critical function in our economy--and soon, perhaps, in our civilization. For years, the spectacular proliferation of digital computing and networking has been rewriting the rules in business, and it will continue to do so. Now, as the power and reach of these technologies skyrocket, the Information Revolution promises to touch--and in some cases radically transform--every aspect of life: our work and leisure, all manner of scientific techniques, and virtually every method for recording and transmitting knowledge, including books, newspapers, magazines, movies, television, phone calls, musical recordings, and architectural drawings.

The rivers of electronic 1s and 0s that computers create, move, process, store, retrieve, shape, and reshape, all with such ease, have become a universal language for machines--the basic ``material'' of the postindustrial era. Churning through innumerable circuits, crisscrossing the endless reaches of cyberspace, digital information is what companies, industries, even economies must master if they are to thrive.

In short, the Information Revolution is reaching critical mass. At its core is the accelerating shift from material information media--including paper, photographic film, videotape, and modeling clay--to computer-based simulations of those media. By no means are paper or books or libraries going to disappear completely. But their traditional presence and significance in our culture, and the degree to which they've informed our concepts of self, identity, and consciousness, seem poised to fade as seemingly cheaper, less polluting, more flexible, and more attention-grabbing digital media come to the fore.

There's rich symbolism in the contrast between the traditional library and the electronic ``disk farms'' where digital information is stored. A classic library, such as the Parliament Library in Ottawa, is literally a shrine to knowledge--which has been fixed on paper and bound into books. The whirring disks of the Information Age may be sealed in sterile bunkers, but the information is unfettered, instantly available to thousands of ``users.'' And the digital store of knowledge--the latest stock prices or a freshly scanned and digitized version of a 12th century manuscript--is being continuously amended and updated.

This mass digital substitution is what Glover Ferguson, director of research at Andersen Consulting, calls ``virtualization.'' It's a re-creation, like the virtual image you see in a mirror, of the ``real world.'' And while the idea may be frightening--in a house of mirrors, how do we know what is ``real'' and what is not?--the many changes that virtualization makes possible can be exhilarating to contemplate.

Take something as innocuous as letter-writing. With cheap long-distance telephone service, people had fallen out of the habit. But thanks to the new virtual post office that vast computer networks create, tens of millions of people have rediscovered the lost art. And because the virtual post is so much faster and more powerful, they're doing things with e-mail they never could on paper, such as corresponding instantaneously with dozens of like-minded individuals across the globe to share their thoughts on Buddhism or the works of Thomas Pynchon. These ``virtual communities'' are springing up everywhere, bringing together people who otherwise would never meet.

That is the essence of virtualization: Rather than simply re-creating in digital form the physical thing we know as a letter, e-mail reinvents and vastly enhances letter-writing. Unbound by barriers of time and space and endowed with new powers, the electronic letter does something new altogether. The same sort of thing can happen when business, the arts, or government are reborn in digital form.

What gives computers such awesome potential to reshape the world? For starters, all technologies that ``process information'' (although they were never described in those terms in the predigital era) affect deeply the societies that use them. Johannes Gutenberg's printing press eventually helped reformers to erode the Catholic Church's political power: Books spread knowledge in ways the Vatican could not control.

Later, the Industrial Revolution depended on new technologies to coordinate the flow of energy and raw materials into factories, to manage a radically segmented labor force, and to guide the large-scale distribution of finished goods. Industrialists also sought ways of stimulating demand for their mass-produced products. The result: the telegraph, telephone, punched-card tabulator, tabloid newspaper, advertising, financial accounting methods, market research, and broadcasting.

But the world has never seen anything like the computer. It is by far the most powerful tool ever for recording and communicating representations of human knowledge in coded, or symbolic, form. In short, it's a universal manipulator of symbols. And, by virtue of its programmability, the computer is infinitely malleable--the first machine that, fed the right symbolic information, can simulate the workings of any other machine, including imaginary ones.

Today, software can turn a computer into a television, record player, or paintbox and canvas--or make it transmit telephone conversations, edit and replay video images and music, snap family photos, synthesize human speech, imitate a 16th century harpsichord, organize databases and libraries full of books, and coordinate activities across space and time. Using real or imagined data, the computer can simulate complex physical and logical processes or entire ``chunks'' of reality and make them ``real'' through a combination of animated drawings, sounds, and even tactile feedback.

These virtual realities, or ``mirror worlds,'' as David Gelernter, a computer scientist at Yale University, calls them in his book of the same name, offer a powerful new way of viewing and understanding the world. They are already helping architects take revealing walk-through tours of buildings that don't exist yet. Carmakers can test-drive models that won't be built for years--or may never be, if the simulation finds them wanting. And in the future, mirror worlds may let students attend virtual universities or enable citizens to monitor the minute-by-minute workings of governments.

The virtualization of business is well under way. And before it's over, says Ferguson of Andersen Consulting, companies contributing 76% of all U.S. corporate revenues stand to see their businesses deeply affected--if not replaced entirely--by digital technologies. This can mean something as simple as switching to electronic invoices or as radical as completely changing the nature of the business--a very real prospect for entertainment and media companies. Today, virtualization is eliminating slack at every level of business, from the internal routines of single companies to the organization of industries and marketplaces. It's removing intermediaries, speeding transactions, rebalancing power relationships, and slashing costly fat--all of which is intensifying competition in the U.S. and around the world.

In Silicon Valley, a group of electronics companies is sponsoring a model for a virtual business environment called CommerceNet. The idea is to exchange reams of technical product information, consulting services, software products, and order forms electronically instead of on paper. By moving intracompany communications and transactions onto the network, planners expect substantial cost savings. The goal is to make Silicon Valley--and eventually the U.S. electronics industry--more competitive.

Such networks will make possible another development of the Information Revolution: the virtual corporation. Rather than retaining full-time staffs for some functions, corporations will use the network to shop for talent--subcontractors and ad hoc teams or individuals to work on a specific project or act as a virtual department within the corporation, say, for graphic design.

The virtual corporation is still far in the future for most businesses. But in the meantime, companies of all kinds are gaining efficiencies and improving product quality through the clever use of information technology. From Ryder System Inc., where special diagnostic computers are slashing repair costs, to retailers, such as Sears, Roebuck & Co., which keep better track of sales trends, companies are reengineering themselves with information technology.

Next in line for virtualization, it appears, are huge swaths of the communications, media, and entertainment worlds. High-speed networks and ``digitalization'' are remaking the world's telephone industry--both wired and wireless. Meanwhile, publishers, broadcasters, and movie studios are scrambling to figure out ways that they can prosper on the elusive Information Superhighway.

Driving the changes in these businesses is the computer's ability to reduce all conventional information forms into one big digital stew. Today, a stream of digital bits can be engineered to represent a complex expression of text, calculations, sound, moving pictures, real-time simulations, a menu of interactive programs, and even connections to ``live'' data off a network--all of it cross-indexed and able to respond instantly to the reader-viewer's desires. The prospect of brewing this exotic multimedia mix for mass consumption is fueling dozens of new business ventures that are bringing together computer, communications, media, and entertainment companies in search of ``new media'' and ``digital convergence.'' Says Alan G. Merten, dean of Cornell University's Johnson Graduate School of Management: ``It's not emerging, but merging technologies'' that are important to understand.

On one level, the digital future is easy to forecast--at least in the near term. Hardware technology is advancing predictably, making it possible to describe the approximate processing power, storage capacity, or graphics capabilities of the PC of 2001. For the next decade at least, what chipmakers call Moore's Law (posited by Intel Corp. Chairman Gordon Moore) still holds: At any given price level, microchips will double in performance every 18 months.

Equally predictable is the explosion in communications capacity and networking technologies. Fiber optics, schemes for jamming more data down old copper lines, wireless transmission, satellites, and Infobahns will put amazing amounts of low-cost, high-speed communications capacity at our disposal. And new techniques are emerging for managing that flood of information. One that's available now, called World Wide Web, allows people to browse for information scattered all over a network, without ever knowing which computer they're tapping.

As the networks spread, the traditional, self-contained computer is merging into the collective identity of the network. Maybe it's CompuServe or America Online, your office PC network, or the vast Internet, but the effect is the same: It's getting more difficult each day to draw the boundary between this computer and that.

At the same time, what we've come to know as ``the computer'' itself is likely to disappear--physically and figuratively. Miniaturized components are cramming all the functions of today's PCs into ever-smaller packages: Apple Computer Inc.'s Newton and similar handheld gizmos are only a first step. Researchers at Xerox Corp. and Olivetti are driving toward a concept called ``ubiquitous computing,'' in which computing resources are embedded throughout the human environment--in appliances, digital whiteboards, and walls, or the surface of your desk, which might turn your scrawl into perfectly formatted, spellchecked text.

Predicting how all this information technology will affect culture and social relations is not so simple. Gutenberg, after all, had no idea what his printing press would lead to. But we can see glimmers. For instance, schools are beginning to use computers in new ways--not just as electronic drill-and-practice machines. By connecting to vast networks, classroom computers are expanding students' horizons, allowing children in different states and nations to collaborate on science projects, for example. In the process, students may gain a better understanding of both the subject and one another.

Meanwhile, millions of people around the world are joining computer networks. The Internet, a global and essentially public network of networks, is fast becoming an information exchange and learning medium for professionals of all stripes--and, increasingly, for ordinary citizens, too. It's essentially one giant experiment in digital networking, where all sorts of new approaches to building digital infrastructure and creating commercialized services are being tested and perfected.

Ultimately, it's society, not technology alone, that will determine how the Information Revolution will play out. ``All tools are socially constructed,'' says David Shields, a sociology professor at Georgia Institute of Technology. They're shaped, that is, by an array of forces that includes tradition, politics, economic interests, history, and competing technologies-- the combined effects of which are exceedingly difficult to predict. Just think: The mass-produced automobile was a godsend for people isolated on farms. But who could foresee how its overuse would eventually choke cities with traffic and smog and create a debilitating dependence on oil?

Predicting the computer's effects seems equally perilous. As the most symbolic of all tools, it can be just about anything we program it to be--a telephone switch, calculator, missile guidance system, or fantasy environment. That malleability is what stirs the imagination so strongly. But we'd do well to keep in mind what computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum wrote 18 years ago in his book Computer Power and Human Reason: We must learn the limitations of our tools as well as their power. Even in its most advanced state, the computer is not, and never can be, a panacea for human problems or a substitute for our own, uniquely human judgment.