One Bit of Prescience
Sep. 9th, 2015 07:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerA few years ago, I found an article in a fifty-year-old issue of the arts, culture, and history magazine "Horizon" that intrigued and amused me with its thoughts about the then-hypothetical idea of "universal libraries" on that old stand-by of microfilm. In going back my collection, though, I happened on an editorial comment in the very next issue that seemed that much more up-to-date. In discussing an article by Gilbert Highet dwelling on the bottlenecks ancient texts had to pass through to reach the era of printing (along with the whole "decline and fall" business and ideological pruning, there were issues such as having to copy papyrus scrolls to parchment codices), it managed to make a suggestion of its own:
What would happen, for example, if communication became total--if all the books were saved and the entire population of the planet could exchange words and images with one another.
We can assume that the technical problems will be solved. Even now it would be thoroughly feasible to subdivide the wave lengths of the air so minutely that we could have, say, a million AM broadcasting stations instead of several thousand. It is only a step of a few more magnitudes to imagine a world in which every human being could be assigned a wave length at birth, and be given at the age of discretion a little black box capable of sending and receiving the full range of audio and visual messages.
Every little black box would be in touch with every other little black box. Into it you would plug a wall screen, a hi-fi, and a facsimile reproducer for books and papers. From a central repository, at any hour of the day or night, you could dial up anything from Dr. Highet's favorite Aeneid to W. C. Fields in The Bank Dick. And you could broadcast, not only to your acquaintances, but to everybody. Theoretically there would be nothing to prevent you from going on the air and addressing all humanity.
But only theoretically, and that's the catch. For in order to address all of mankind you have got to let all of mankind know you are going to address them, and not by the same means you intend to use. You must first find some other way of getting their attention. From this follows a law, which will be known hereafter as the HORIZON Law of Non-Redundancy--namely, that all advances in communications recapitulate all other advances. In order for there to be TV, there must also be TV Guide. In order for there to be microbooks, there must first be books.
Perhaps the thought didn't go so far as to envision things being stored so that a few people can find them to begin with and then tell other people, but it was interesting.
What would happen, for example, if communication became total--if all the books were saved and the entire population of the planet could exchange words and images with one another.
We can assume that the technical problems will be solved. Even now it would be thoroughly feasible to subdivide the wave lengths of the air so minutely that we could have, say, a million AM broadcasting stations instead of several thousand. It is only a step of a few more magnitudes to imagine a world in which every human being could be assigned a wave length at birth, and be given at the age of discretion a little black box capable of sending and receiving the full range of audio and visual messages.
Every little black box would be in touch with every other little black box. Into it you would plug a wall screen, a hi-fi, and a facsimile reproducer for books and papers. From a central repository, at any hour of the day or night, you could dial up anything from Dr. Highet's favorite Aeneid to W. C. Fields in The Bank Dick. And you could broadcast, not only to your acquaintances, but to everybody. Theoretically there would be nothing to prevent you from going on the air and addressing all humanity.
But only theoretically, and that's the catch. For in order to address all of mankind you have got to let all of mankind know you are going to address them, and not by the same means you intend to use. You must first find some other way of getting their attention. From this follows a law, which will be known hereafter as the HORIZON Law of Non-Redundancy--namely, that all advances in communications recapitulate all other advances. In order for there to be TV, there must also be TV Guide. In order for there to be microbooks, there must first be books.
Perhaps the thought didn't go so far as to envision things being stored so that a few people can find them to begin with and then tell other people, but it was interesting.