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Greetings LM_Net,
I found two thoughtful reviews of Clifford Stoll's
"Silicon Snake Oil". The articles discuss at length the
reviewers' thoughts (as well as Stoll's) on the merits of traditional
library media versus the newer electronic media.
There are good arguments here if you are trying to shore up
support for traditional library roles. Some of the books shortcomings
are also discussed.
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URL for following artilce
http://www.iusb.edu/webacts/libg/BRS/SnakeOil.htm
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SILICON SNAKE OIL
A LIBRARY-ORIENTED REVIEW
RELEASE 2.01
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Silicon Snake Oil: Second Thoughts on the Information Highway, by Clifford
Stoll. Doubleday, New York, 1995. $22.00 (Cheap!)
Review by Adam Corson-Finnerty
Director of Library Development
University of Pennsylvania
The January 30, 1995 issue of *Newsweek* carried a rather astonishing story
in an article called "Wiring the Ivory Tower."
It told of a decision by the California State University Chancellor to
build a new campus in Monterey Bay without a library. Said the article:
"why bother wasting all that money on bricks and mortar when it could be
better spent on technology for getting information via computer? 'You
simply don't have to build a traditional library these days,' [Chancellor
Barry] Munitz says."
What? Colleges nowadays don't need libraries with books? They don't need
reading reserves, newspapers, journals? Students can do serious research in
a multiplicity of subject areas solely by going on-line? Balderdash!
Either the CSU Chancellor planned to bus his students to a nearby library,
or he planned to have a lot of ignorant students.
A little research needed here. July 15, 1993 *San Francisco Chronicle*:
"Chancellor Barry Munitz wants [Monterey's] students to gain access to
information electronically instead of in a traditional library." Armed with
cooperation agreements from IBM, Apple, and Pactel, the Chancellor
light-heartedly comments: "We might provide maps to a farmhouse 65 miles
away where most of the books would be stored, at one-tenth the cost."
Flash forward to *Los Angeles Times*, June 26, 1994: "Officials say they
want to create an innovative campus with an emphasis on new technology,
including a library system linked by computer to other universities." But
the article goes on to say that three or four smaller buildings will serve
as libraries "with electronic links to other universities."
Starting to question media accounts. Call Chancellor's office. Call
Monterey campus. Receive enlightenment from official spokespersons.
Turns out: (a) Chancellor has remarkable sense of humor; (b) Monterey
campus will have a building termed a "Learning Resource Center," with
journals, newspapers, lookup stations, and budgeted for an initial supply
of 50,000 books; (c) Monterey has negotiated borrowing relationships with
the local public library and the local community college library; (d)
Monterey expects to have in place a firm and final deal with UC Berkeley
and UC Santa Cruz for 24-hour inter-library loan privileges; (e) Monterey
is currently searching for a Library Director; said same director will
report to the "Dean for Informatics."
Whew! Personal Conclusion: Monterey, dubbed by one enthusiast as "Silicon
Valley [by] the sea," doesn't need a traditional library--it needs a bunch
of them!
I relate this tale because shortly after the *Newsweek* article appeared a
potential donor visited the Penn Library and asked me what I thought about
the fact that "several colleges in California" had decided they didn't need
libraries. I suspect he doesn't know about the Chancellor's new clothes,
and I wonder if the whole of California will have eliminated libraries by
time this story finishes its rounds.
(And a rubber chicken to *Newsweek* which in the interest of a better
lead-in, ignored the "three or four smaller buildings" part of the original
plans--thus helping contribute to the very "technomania" it derided several
issues later.)
While those of us on the deliverable end of the information revolution are
only too aware of the limitations, pitfalls, and snares of the chimerical
"virtual library," some important people are beginning to believe that the
super-cyber-library is just a few thousand scans away from realization.
"Books are obsolete," I was assured by a print media maven recently. "In 20
years nobody will read a book. Everything will be on-line."
And the aforementioned California Chancellor is not the only college
administrator to contemplate making policy and budgetary decisions based
upon an overly, and dare one say, naive, notion of what digital databases
will do for higher education. Some of my colleagues on "Libdev," a new
listserv for Library Development Officers, have already posted anecdotes
about budgets being cut, buildings questioned, and resources diverted--all
in the name of the "virtual library."
Thank heaven, then, for Clifford Stoll's new book, *Silicon Snake Oil:
Second Thoughts on the Information Highway*. Popularly written, and aptly
timed, this book will prove a useful antidote for those who have been
smitten by the cyberfairy.
Who is Clifford Stoll? Well, Clifford Stoll says: "Cliff Stoll backs up his
data every week, pays all his shareware fees, flosses nightly, and lives in
Oakland, California, with three cats that he pretends to dislike."
He is also an astronomer, an expert in computer security, and has been with
the internet since its early days as the arpanet. He is the author of *The
Cuckoo's Egg*, a book that describes how he tracked down German spies
prowling through computers. And he is a member of the WELL, so how cool do
you want?
*Silicon Snake Oil* is a combination meditation, rumination, diatribe, and
thoughtful essay on the hype that surrounds the coming of the infobahn. It
is not a scholarly book, and sometimes Stoll seems to substitute nostalgia
for sound argument, but, hey, if he waited until he got all the bugs out,
his thoughts would be way passe.
The book has three strengths. First, it is already out there being talked
about on the airwaves, and the name alone will help people slow down a
little. Stoll was featured as the contributing curmudgeon in *Newsweek*'s
special issue on the Information Superhighway ("Technomania," Feb 27,
1995), and he is lively enough to be taken on the talk show rounds.
Second, he is great at one- and two-liners that people should be quoting
for years to come. Like: "Interactive computer entertainment gives you a
choice of many different outcomes, all preprogrammed. The experience is
about as interactive as a candy machine."
Or how about: "...unlike a friendly game of chess, the computer provides no
opponent across the table to award your brilliance with a wistful smile of
admiration. You end up admiring yourself."
Third, his chapters on computer-assisted education and on libraries are
passionately and persuasively argued, and would be well worth sharing with
others--for instance, your governor.
Stoll is worried about libraries. As the telephone was to letter-writing,
the car to urban trolley systems, as air travel has been to train travel,
so--he fears--might wide area networks be to libraries. He does not think
that the internet renders traditional libraries obsolete, but worries that
policy-makers might *think* they do, and that "computers will deviously
chew away at libraries from the inside. They'll eat up book budgets and
require librarians that are more comfortable with computers than children
and scholars. Libraries will become adept at supplying the public with
fast, low-quality information."
With this fear at heart, Stoll takes on the "virtual library" in strong and
direct terms: "the bookless library is a dream, a hallucination of online
addicts, network neophytes, and library- automation insiders."
He advances four arguments against the realization of the virtual library.
First up is copyright. Libraries don't own the rights to the current
material in their collections, and cannot put pages online without getting
sued or paying hefty fees. This is not about to change anytime soon.
For older material, the sheer cost of digitization is staggering. He
estimates $100 per book for error-corrected OCR scanning. Every 10,000
books eats up $1 million. Every million books eats up $100 million, and who
has got that kind of money?
And even if some post Newt-onian administration were willing to put up
several billion to digitize, let's say, the collections of the Library of
Congress, Stoll raises the truly devastating argument of technological
obsolescence.
"Electronic media aren't archival," he pronounces, and invites the reader
to contemplate the many extinct formats that dot the 20th century
landscape: 80-column punch cards, 8-track tapes, 78-rpm records, 5 1/2 inch
floppies, and so on.
Since this is such a crucial point, and Stoll glides over it in a mere two
pages, readers may want to consider a somewhat weightier treatment in the
January 1995 issue of *Scientific American*. Author Jeff Rothenberg
indicates that the limiters are both hardware and software. The physical
medium decays rapidly, and the recording/reading format becomes obsolete
even sooner.
He invites readers to consider Shakespeare's 18th sonnet, which ends:
Nor shall death brag thou wandrest in his shade, When in eternal
lines to time thou growest, So long as men can breathe or eyes
can see, So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
The first printed edition, dated 1609, is still readable. Had Shakespeare
put it on a magnetic disk, it would have deteriorated completely in 10
years. Had he used "Electric-Pencil," an early word processing package,
well who of us can "call up" such documents today?
As Electric-Pencil is today, so ASCII may be tomorrow. And the solution of
re-archiving everything to current formats in ten or twenty year cycles is
not only expensive, Rothenberg argues, there may be significant
deterioration of the material itself as it is compressed, decompressed,
translated, and converted. By way of analogy he asks "would a modern
version of Homer's *Iliad* have the same literary impact if it had been
translated through a series of intermediate languages rather than from the
earliest surviving texts in ancient Greek?"
And thus we come back to the book, or manuscript, as a medium for storing
and retrieving information. Creators of time capsules had better think of
including a letter along with their videotapes and CD/ROMs, he advises,
since "the letter possesses the enviable quality of being readable with no
machinery, tools, or special knowledge beyond that of [language]."
Rothenberg raises the prospect of a kind of Electronic Dark Ages, where
vast amounts of information have been prematurely entrusted to
"state-of-the-art" formats, long since gone stale, and become effectively
"lost" to future generations. (One cannot help spinning out this fantasy
into a kind of sci-fi morality play in which small bands of unappreciated
and derided souls who have hoarded records on paper and parchment become
the true saviours of human knowledge. These saviours, otherwise known as
Special Collections Librarians, then help to rebuild civilization from the
ashes of the digital holocaust.)
But back to Stoll, whose final point about why virtual libraries won't
replace libraries with books is that online research is so hard to do, and
brings back so little of value. Besides, he says, really good databases
cost the user real money. Take Lexis/Nexis, which is $200 or more per hour.
Or consider paying $5 to download and print a one-page article from a
Ziff-Davis database. Traditional libraries start looking pretty good in
comparison--at least as the end-user will see it.
So. Librarians 1, Philistines 0? Not really. As a guest commentator said on
a recent PBS news review, we'd better "caveat" any sense of relief.
Long before virtual became a prefix, libraries have been under assault,
especially the public libraries. As Library Dean Michael Gorman of CSU
Fresno puts it "the *bureaucrats* know little or nothing of education or
libraries. They know only that they cost a lot of money; money that could
be saved if libraries were to be dismantled...." [In *Library Journal*,
Feb. 15, 1994, and you should see what he says about *technocrats* and
*technovandals*!].
Take California, where there have been so many public and school library
cutbacks that Proposition 13 is probably right up there with the burning of
the Library at Alexandria when it comes to crimes against knowledge. Take
our current Congress--please!-- where serious library spending slashes are
being proposed, while "information" is being touted as the key to economic
revitalization. No matter how you look at it, that's virtual hypocrisy.
The danger today is that spending-phobia may couple with techno- phoria and
produce a library that can't run, can't walk, can't serve. And because of
that danger, we can hope that Clifford Stoll becomes a fixture on the
talk-show circuit for many months to come.
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An Afterthought. In the process of searching the literature, I was
surprised to discover a trio of new traits that one can apparently
associate with librarians--at least with those who voice strong
reservations about boarding the virtual library lovetrain.
Think about the term "librarian," or better, "library administrator". What
descriptors do you associate with such a being? How about nostalgic,
romantic, and a believer in serendipity?
Nostalgic for a style of scholarship that seems to be rapidly dwindling.
Romantic about a building that houses many loved objects, and about the
social and community role that such buildings supposedly play.
And as for serendipity, well give me a half hour of connect time for every
use of the word "serendipity" to describe what happens when an honest
pilgrim wanders in the stacks, or flips through a journal, or happens to
glance at an open page. To whit, John Swan, Head Librarian at Bennington,
whose influential article, "The Electronic Straitjacket," (*Library
Journal*; October 15, 1993), asserts "you cannot always fit the rich,
diverse, serendipitous experience of absorbing information and acquiring
knowledge into [the] electronic Procrustean bed."
My old-fashioned, rapid-access, spill-your-decaf-on-it-and-it- still-works
*Webster's Collegiate Dictionary* tells me that "serendipity" comes from a
Persian fairy tale called *The Three Princes of Serendip.* {Hotlink: Take
the Virtual Library Challenge. Be the first to find the full text of this
fairy tale online; send me the URL, and you get a Penn Friends of the
Library totebag. No fair looking in the stacks.}
I must confess that I am not greatly moved by appeals to emotionally-laden
remembrances of research methods past. Not that I don't feel them myself--I
do--but rather that I doubt these arguments will have much effect on the
inexorable transition that scholarship is making in the computer era.
If you can be serendipitous in 18th century Persia, I believe you can be
serendipitous in cyberspace, much like the recent software reviewer for the
*New York Times* who launched himself on the Web with serious intent, and
found himself--through a series of steps he probably couldn't
retrace--reading an article about how to make grapes explode in his
microwave oven.
Serendipity: "the faculty or phenomenon of finding valuable or agreeable
things not sought for." Perhaps, in research, of finding things that make
you pause, that surprise you, that cause you to re-think something you
wrote or thought two minutes ago.
Like this: Searching online for the string "csu and monterey and librar**"
and stumbling upon an article on the rebuilding of the Cal State Northridge
campus, following the recent earthquake. (*Los Angeles Times*, August 28,
1994)
The 353-acre campus sustained almost $350 million in damage, including
enough disruption to the main library to close it to student use.
Northridge administrators decided to quickly erect a warehouse- like
building which would function temporarily as the main library while the
Delmar T. Oviatt Library was put back into shape. Then they decided to poll
the students.
For students, re-opening classrooms and getting back into the Oviatt
Library were the top priorities. "Students and faculty actually missed the
library," one administrator said. "We found out it was the center of campus
life. It was an oasis for people."
Faculty President Nancy Owens also credits strenuous faculty lobbying for
the decision to make Oviatt a higher priority. "We think that without a
library, you are not a university. The library is the nerve center of the
campus."
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This review is offered for comment and criticism. I undertook it in part
because it helped me to clarify my own thinking. Postings to Libdev or
Fundlist--critical and otherwise--are invited. Feel free to bounce it to
anyone who might find this topic of interest. Now on to Negroponte's *Being
Digital*!
Adam Corson-Finnerty
Director of Development and External Affairs
University of Pennsylvania Library
215-573-3609
corsonf@ben.dev.upenn.edu
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URL for following Article
http://www.pff.org/pff/amciv/ac-may-jun/ac695fg.html
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Reviewed by Frank Gregorsky, who intends to keep his 1991 MacIntosh LC and
"obsolete" 2400-baud modem for another three years.
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Debunking Cyber Hype
Silicon Snake Oil:
By Clifford Stoll, Doubleday 1995, 247 pages
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At last, a book on telecommunication's new era by someone who is neither
geek nor reactionary; a book that lives up to its dust-jacket promise of
being "full of passion but devoid of hysteria." Silicon Snake Oil is a book
that delivers, in passing, this minor miracle: Explaining the technology,
and much of the related culture, without a clue as to the author's politics
-- making for a provocative work that ought to offend no one ideologically.
Why is it provocative? Not because of the promised "ambivalence." Author
Clifford Stoll emerges much less ambivalent than the book's opening. In
chapter 10, a rollicking debunker of electronic mail, you find this
disarming mid-page pivot: "even as I write this, I'm having second
thoughts." A lot more of the book, however, is lighthearted
fantasy-evictor.
Stoll unravels media calculations about how many Americans really are "on
the net." Video-on-demand "will remain a dream," in part because "keeping a
thousand movies ready for instant retrieval" is a "surprisingly tough
engineering problem." Electronic books? "Your every suspicion is correct."
As for CD-ROMs: "Don't be suckered in by claims of double-speed or
quad-speed drives: Unless a database is designed with the right kind of
index, searches just poke along. And when lots of people access a CD-ROM
volume over a network, everybody hangs suspended, banana-like, in
lime-flavored Jell-O."
On it goes: The reader encounters bucket after bucket of cold water -- but
without acid. So I can't agree with Washington Post reviewer Stephen Bates
when he calls Snake Oil "essentially a venting of the author's
cyber-dyspepsia." The book has much humor, and some sorrow -- but almost
zero anger. (Yes, the title is a bit snarly, but it was probably imposed by
the PR folks.) "Quirky" is probably the harshest thing one could fairly say
about this book.
For example, the author conducts a dozen simple experiments, one of which
exonerates a system hated by technoid and redneck alike. He has his brother
mail him a postcard -- from western New York to northern California --
every day for two months. "Half the cards arrived in two days; many took
three days, and one required eight days -- [but] every postcard arrived. At
the same time, I sent e-mail to myself from five different remote accounts.
Most letters arrived within two hours; some took up to two days -- [and]
five messages never made it."
And yet: "If one sack of mail gets burned by a disgruntled letter-carrier,
it makes headlines across the country. Should the university's computer
crash and destroy three days of incoming mail, everyone shrugs," Stoll
observes. Society is cutting the new and mysterious much more slack. "We're
familiar with the mechanisms of letter-delivery, so we hold the postal
service to a high standard."
At other points, Stoll makes no-tech devices seem vastly more interactive
and creative than the high-gloss new gear: Consider "a two-dollar pack of
cards. There's a thousand games to play. You can invent new ones, change
the rules, build a house, or tell a fortune. They work equally well in the
backseat of car or around a campfire. Anyone you meet can understand and
join in. If you get frustrated, throw the pack out the window. Try that
with your Pentium."
At least three categories of people would profit or otherwise benefit from
Snake Oil:
1. Librarians. Stoll, a lifelong researcher, shows how their trendy,
budget-busting administrative colleagues, by doing things like
substituting terminals for the old card catalogue, are alienating
patrons and hurting low-income groups. In short, rank-and-file
librarians need spine-stiffening.
2. Editors. Boom times loom for text-managers of all types, as "Internet
hype" makes smart people feel stupid and swamped. How? By drowning
them in digital data and potential knowledge when they can't even make
time to read their favorite magazines and newspapers.
3. Conservatives who battle Utopianism but are lately overtaken by
telecomm's alluring giddiness. You know who you are, and that's okay,
because your reviewer faces the same temptations.
A fourth and final group of beneficiaries is small in total numbers, but
probably represented surreptitiously in your office. They believe what
Stoll is too good-natured and laid-back to say: The real "computer" is the
one God gave you. As self-improvement founder Earl Nightingale put it in
1972, the human mind is "the greatest agency ever to appear on earth -- and
you own one, free and clear." By that standard, all the rest of these
devices, from the 50-cent diskette to the fabulous Pentium itself, are
peripherals. For those who occasionally realize this in private, Stoll's
book is a fortifier.
CB Sludge and Forks in the Road
Finally, where does Clifford Stoll come down on the "fork-in-the-road"
telecomm issues, those places where America as a whole contemplates its
long-term direction?
He denies commercialization will make computer networks cheap and easy for
everyone. Salespeople, he claims, "can never be replaced by listings of
goods to sell. No pretty network graphics will make this job obsolete.
Plenty of businesses are hot to exploit cybersales. I'll bet that most lose
their shirts. Today, about the only ones making money are the
communications and computer companies."
What about the era of "boundless bandwidth" forecast by George Gilder? More
users and "flashier services" will use it all up, claims Stoll. "If every
user expects the kind of service that's being touted by today's Internet
hustlers, a gigabyte per-second bandwidth won't be enough." As with the
second-wave highways, traffic will keep expanding ahead of capacity.
Education: His skepticism about multimedia and distance-learning may give
pause to those of us who raved about Lew Perelman's 1992 masterpiece
School's Out and its "hyperlearning" menu of "tools, not schools." Won't
expensive equipment be a magnet for thieves and vandals? Then stick with
pencils and a blackboard, says Cliff Stoll: After all, "you can keep going
even if the chalk breaks." Unfortunately, Snake Oil never tackles
Perelman's fundamental point that this new technology allows children as
individuals to discover their hidden excellence, in ways discouraged by the
command-and-control "sage on the stage" model.
As for Universal Access: Even assuming high-capacity networks can reach
this stage, Stoll's model is playfully disconcerting. He was in grad school
when C.W. McCall paid his Top 40 "Convoy" tribute to trucker gangs and
First Lady Betty Ford became "First Mama" on (gulp) citizens-band radio.
"Strangely, CB fulfills many of the goals of the emerging National
Information Infrastructure: It supports cheap universal access, with
neither censorship nor restraint of communications. It supports both
commercial and private application. Heavily used, too. Yet what a barren
landscape" And what an ominous comparison.
So what does Stoll like? Toward the end of Snake Oil, only two paths shine.
One is living "a real life in a real neighborhood." The other is local
bulletin boards. If that's the case, paradise becomes Blacksburg, Virginia,
where a Bell Atlantic experiment, using high-density cables instead of
modems, lately allows hassle-free multimedia electronic interaction among a
third of the townspeople. Since it's the only place uniting their very
different telecomm visions, maybe Stoll and Gilder ought to have a Summit
there. I'd love to be their transcriber, and would admittedly need a
laptop.
[ May/June Index ]
Stuart Pollack
Humansville R-IV Schools
Humansville, MO 65674
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