Accessing the Future

I spent time this weekend with someone who had one of those snazzy new IPhones.

It truly is an impressive gadget, sleek-looking and with an intuitive interface which makes it as much game as tool. Watching him use it (as an early adopter he has already had time to make it look easy) made me want one. The ease of handling images is especially attractive. In fact, it is so darn slick that you just want to fiddle with it endlessly.

But it also got me to pondering how such a device will change discourse as we know it. This is not news, to anyone who has been reading science fiction for the last decade. But projections and actualities still taste different when you bite into them.

Devices like the IPhone simultaneously expand upon and distract from the conversation at hand. Expand upon, because any conversational reference or question can be quickly researched. Distract from, because people "leave" the conversational arena to do the research, running as a "parallel processor" but not fully in the conversational flow, to re-enter when they have completed their search.

Too, near-instant access to corroborative information puts people on the spot while conversing. Any statistic, factoid, claim or historical reference can be challenged and quickly researched.

This is a mixed blessing. Questions arise in any discussion, and the ability to quickly find answers can be a joy. (Such as finding the proper attribution for a quote, or the date of an event.) But what if a discussion devolves into a debate, partly because the means to test the facts as presented is close at hand?

At this stage in the game, with so few such devices in circulation, it rather gives the upper hand to those holding them -- anyone going up conversationally against someone with one had better have their facts straight, because those facts may be acid-tested even as you speak them.

I have to wonder what it will be like when most people can have such devices -- "winning" a conversational debate may be a matter of who can access the information the fastest, each proferred statement followed by feverish surfing around the internet, victory to the fastest thumb. I must admit such a prospect wearies me already...

Like everything else involving the internet, it is a functional dichotomy. We all know bombastic folk who love to hold forth on all subjects -- and are often equally wrong on all of them. Having a tool on hand to easily challenge their positions would be nice. And those in positions of power could stand with a bit of real-time fact-checking when they are making promises and claims. But I would not like to see a world where discussion is constrained because each word is checked and cross-checked as it is heard.

Especially when so much information on the internet is of dubious reliability. The average searcher rarely goes into the third screen of results (consider this: a screen of results looks even larger on a handheld device, and it takes more time/effort to get to the next screen). But just because something appears on the first screen of results does not mean it is valid. Nor does having 6 of 10 search results agree -- if all of those results come from the same erroneous source.

So the greatest benefit of the internet -- instant access to information -- can also be its most misleading feature. The internet is simultaneously a great bullshit detector and the greatest means ever devised for spreading bullshit.

Interesting times, we live in. This change is occurring around us, and the change is accelerating. But the biggest changes are yet to come.

I know this, because I saw it on an IPhone.