Email this article The Age of Multimedia and Turbonews
Books about new information technologies fall easily into three groups. At the top end of the scale are those rare works that contain original ideas. At the bottom are popular gee-whiz "quickies" aimed at the mass market. In the middle is a bog of earnest compilations of data and opinion that instruct without enlightening or entertaining.
Despite its slangy title, this book is stuck in the centre of the swamp. It is about as interesting and informative as a collection of lecture notes which, I suspect, is where it originated. As an introduction to the subject, it is a serviceable text, but as a guide to understanding the impact of technology on journalism it is useful only as a summary of the confusion that currently exists in this field.
The title contains one of the few fragments of originality in the book. "Turbonews" is the word that Jim Willis has coined to describe "the sheer amount of information that is possible with these media and their information providers." He also suggests that "Not only is a tremendous amount of data possible electronically, but the speed with which it is being delivered is unparalleled in history."
There is no arguing with this, or with most of the information in the book. Even if you do not own a computer, the business pages of any newspaper will tell you that the "information revolution" is arguably the most important technological development of these decades. Many of us are part of it; most of us have opinions about it; few of us are able to theorize about it in a meaningful way.
A glance at the chapter headings is enough to indicate that Willis not only provides the necessary data but raises all the right questions: the regulatory chaos that new technology is creating; legal and ethical dilemmas posed by it; the effect that it is having on the right to information and the right to privacy; the impact on education; and so forth. The catalogue is comprehensive and the footnotes indicate extensive research but the end result is unsatisfying.
Part of the problem is a writing style that is surprisingly stodgy. Willis is identified as having spent 12 years in the news media before migrating to journalism education and eventually becoming Chair of Boston College's Department of Communication. This background makes it more difficult to forgive a style that is seldom personal and illuminating and often academic in the worst sense. Some of the technical explanations are hard to follow even for a reasonably well-informed layman such as myself. What is the point of inserting raw quotations like the following, emitted by a developer of high-definition television for CBS: "The system is based on a TMC (time multiplex component) video processing system, in which luminance (brightness) and chrominance (color) are not mixed together as in the NTSC systems--rather, it is sent in time sequential form"?
Willis's conclusions tend to be statements of the obvious. The last two sentences in the book provide a typical example: "We are all on the threshold of great societal changes brought about by the ability to compress a great amount of information through digitalization, and the sending of that information across hair-thin glass lines known as fiber-optic lines. The societal changes resulting from these twin technologies will be as great--or greater--than any technological developments since movable type and the printing press." That is the conclusion we reach after more than 200 pages of text. (Incidentally, we are informed earlier that these "hair-thin glass lines" are "now being lain across the country.")
The nature of the subject means that a reading of the book inevitably raises many intriguing questions. The possible replacement of unregulated newspapers by regulated new electronic news media; the circular and perhaps stifling nature of electronic news media automatically tailored to suit consumer preferences and the fate of journalistic leadership and originality in such a world; and the problem of accommodating unlimited expansion of communication technology to finite hours of individuals' available time--these and many other questions are suggested by the text but never really addressed except in fragmentary quotations taken from other writers.
Finally, Willis is critical of consultants who use exaggerated forecasts of technological development from suspect sources but his book uncritically uses identical forecasts from similar sources.
