Originally published 8 February 1993
Later this week, thousands of scientists from around the world will gather in Boston for the [1993] annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. They will lug to the meeting laptop computers, modems, fax machines, cellular telephones, beepers. Circuits in and out of Boston will be humming.
Scientists like to keep in touch.
In a sense, there’s no need to have the meeting at all. The international scientific community is online, 24 hours a day. It’s the rare scientist who does not have access through a computer to the international electronic data exchange network — Internet. Reaching out and touching someone is as easy as tapping a key.
Keeping in touch is hip, it’s hype. Nobody wants to be out of the loop when out of the office. Taxi cabs in New York will soon be equipped with telephones in the back seat for customers who cannot move five blocks across town without making a call. Commercial airlines and Amtrak trains offer pay phones for passengers; some planes have a phone in each row of seats. Every airport has public fax machines.
Award yourself 10 status points if you have used a laptop on an airplane. Award yourself 20 status points if you have taken notes on your laptop while talking on the phone at 30,000 feet.
Nothing is allowed to fall through the cracks. Taking a bath? Working in the garden? Take the portable handset with you. Going to the corner store for a quart of milk? The answering machine will record any messages. Fax memory, call-waiting: Not even being in touch interferes with keeping in touch.
Keeping in touch is hot, it’s cool, it’s cutting-edge. Ten million cellular phones are now on the market. Cellular phones have taken off faster than any electronic consumer product in history, including color TVs and VCRs.
You can take a cellular phone jogging, biking, or swimming at the beach. I was passed on the freeway the other day by a guy making a call at 75 miles per hour. Smaller, more portable cellular phones are on the way — the size of Dick Tracy’s two-way wrist radio. Award yourself demigod status if you are the first on the ski slope to use a phone on a downhill run.
Keeping in touch is wicked, it’s word, it’s where it’s at. It can only be a matter of months before we have laptop computers with built-in cellular telephones connected to built-in modems. My laptop already has fax-send. The computer-fax-cellular phone will be the hottest consumer product of the Nineties. Let your fingers do the walking. Let your fingers do the talking. Let your fingers keep you in touch.
President Clinton and Vice President Gore are keen on building the electronic equivalent of the interstate highway system, a vast, high-speed, fiber-optic communication network that will hurry information — words, images, music, medical or financial data — to the remotest corners of the nation. The network will have the capacity to transfer 3 billion bits of information per second — roughly the equivalent of 300 copies of the Bible. Are you ready for 3 billion bits of e‑mail per second?
Each of us will sit at the apparent heart of this system, like a spider at the center of a silky sensitive net of communication.
Or, if your tastes are different, like a fly caught in a tangled web.
I just got back from a two-week working vacation on an out-of-the-way island in the Bahamas. No telephone in our accommodations, nor in any other hotel room as far as I could see. Only two public phones on the island, and one of them was broken. No phone jack for the modem of my computer. After a few days it became clear: I had taken myself to one of the few places on earth where I couldn’t keep in touch.
After a painful period of electronic withdrawal, I began to remember what it’s like to be out of touch. I went for long walks. I had long talks. I watched sunrises and sunsets and spectacularly starry skies. I paddled in blue pools with technicolor fish. I drank beer under sheltering palms. I did those things folks used to do on vacation before the age of FedEx, fax, and cellular phones.
But it couldn’t last. Like everyone else who makes a living as a sailor on the sea of information, I’m back in the loop, zapping my stuff along the wires and being zapped in return, hardwired to everyone else, happy as a spider in silk, helpless as a tangled fly.
And now the scientists are coming to town, the gurus of instant communication, the arbiters of electronic fashion. Thousands of them. You’ll know them when you see them — disembarking at Logan, riding on the T, walking down Boylston Street — briefcases bulging with modems and computers, beepers beeping at their hips, never far from a fax machine, pioneers of a global village bound together by an incessant frenzy of keeping in touch.
Oh, if you only knew what was coming. ‑Ed.
