Simple, easy machines. Self-propelled. And free. Kids
need places where they can talk to each other, talk back and
forth naturally. They need media that they can fingerpaint
with, where they can jump up and down and breathe hard,
where they don't have to worry about Mr. Science showing up
in his mandarin white labcoat to scold them for doing things
not in the rulebook. Kids need a medium of their own. A
medium that does not involve a determined attempt by cynical
adult merchandisers to wrench the last nickel and quarter
from their small vulnerable hands.
That would be a lovely scenario. I don't really
expect that, though. On the contrary, in the future I
expect the commercial sector to target little children with
their full enormous range of on-line demographic databases
and privacy-shattering customer-service profiles. These
people will be armed and ready and lavishly financed and
there every day, peering at our children through a
cyberspace one-way mirror. Am I naive to expect better
from the networks in our schools? I hope not. I trust not.
Because schools are supposed to be educating our children,
civilizing our children, not auctioning them off to the
highest bidder.
We need to make some conscious decisions to reinvent
our information technology as if the future mattered. As if
our children were human beings, human citizens, not raw
blobs of potential revenue-generating machinery. We have
an opportunity to create media that would match the splendid
ambitions of Franklin with his public libraries and his mail
system, and Jefferson and Madison with their determination
to arm democracy with the power knowledge gives. We could
offer children, yes even poor children in poor districts, a
real opportunity to control the screen, for once.
You don't have to worry much about the hardware. The
hardware is ephemeral. The glass boxes should no longer
impress you. We've shipped our images inside glass boxes
for fifty years, but that's a historical accident, a relic.
The glass boxes that we recognize as computers won't last
much longer. Already the boxes are becoming flat screens.
In the future, computers will mutate beyond recognition.
Computers won't be intimidating, wire-festooned, high-rise
bit-factories swallowing your entire desk. They will tuck
under your arm, into your valise, into your kid's backpack.
After that, they'll fit onto your face, plug into your ear.
And after that -- they'll simply melt. They'll become
fabric. What does a computer really need? Not glass boxes
- -- it needs thread -- power wiring, glass fiber-optic,
