had developed a love of gadgets. During my stint as diary writer in the mid-’80s I had bought a battery-powered Tandy 100 computer, which displayed a few lines of text. On assignment in Australia I learned how to unscrew a hotel phone and, with crocodile clips, squirt copy back to London using packet-switching technology in the middle of the night.
It felt like landing a man on the moon. I had no idea what was to come.
3
The New World
In 1993 some journalists began to be dimly aware of something clunkily referred to as ‘the information superhighway’ but few had ever had reason to see it in action. At the start of 1995 only 491 newspapers were online worldwide: by June 1997 that had grown to some 3,600.
In the basement of the Guardian was a small team created by Peter Preston – the Product Development Unit, or PDU. The inhabitants were young and enthusiastic. None of them were conventional journalists: I think the label might be ‘creatives’. Their job was to think of new things that would never occur to the (largely middle-aged) reporters and editors three floors up.
The team – eventually rebranding itself as the New Media Lab – started casting around for the next big thing. They decided it was the internet. The creatives had a PC actually capable of accessing the world wide web. They moved in hipper circles. And they started importing copies of a new magazine, Wired – the so-called Rolling Stone of technology – which had started publishing in San Francisco in 1993, along with the HotWired website. ‘Wired described the revolution,’ it boasted. ‘HotWired was the revolution.’ It was launched in the same month the Netscape team was beginning to assemble. Only 18 months later Netscape was worth billions of dollars. Things were moving that fast.
In time, the team in PDU made friends with three of the people associated with Wired. They were the founders, Louis Rossetto and Jane Metcalfe; and the columnist, Nicholas Negroponte, who was based at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and who wrote mindblowing columns predicting such preposterous things as wristwatches which would ‘migrate from a mere timepiece today to a mobile command-and-control centre tomorrow . . . an all-in-one, wrist-mounted TV, computer, and telephone.’1
As if.
Both Rossetto and Negroponte were, in their different ways, prophets. Rossetto was a hot booking for TV talk shows, where he would explain to baffled hosts what the information superhighway meant. He’d tell them how smart the internet was, and how ethical. Sure, it was a ‘dissonance amplifier’. But it was also a ‘driver of the discussion’ towards the real. You couldn’t mask the truth in this new world, because someone out there would weigh in with equal force. Mass media was one-way communication. The guy with the antenna could broadcast to billions, with no feedback loop. He could dominate. But on the internet every voice was going to be equal to every other voice.
‘Everything you know is wrong,’ he liked to say. ‘If you have a preconceived idea of how the world works, you’d better reconsider it.’
Negroponte, 50-something, East Coast gravitas to Rossetto’s Californian drawl, and altogether more buttoned up, was working on a book, Being Digital, and was equally passionate in his evangelism. His mantra was to explain the difference between atoms – which make up the physical artefacts of the past – and bits, which travel at the speed of light and would be the future. ‘We are so unprepared for the world of bits . . . We’re going to be forced to think differently about everything.’
I bought the drinks and listened.
Over dinner in a North London restaurant Negroponte started with convergence – the melting of all boundaries between TV, newspapers, magazines and the internet into a single media experience – and moved on to the death of copyright, possibly the nation state itself. There would be virtual reality, speech recognition, personal computers with inbuilt cameras, personalised news. The entire economic model of information was about to fall apart. The audience would pull rather than wait for old media to push things as at present. Information and entertainment would be on demand. Overly hierarchical and status-conscious societies would rapidly erode. Time as we knew it would become meaningless – five hours of music would be delivered to you in less than five seconds. Distance would become irrelevant. A UK paper would be as accessible in New York as it was in London.
I decided I should go to America and see the internet for myself.
*
It was easy, in 1993, to be only dimly aware of what the internet did. The kids in the basement might have a PC capable of accessing the web, but most of us had only read about it.
Writing 15 years later in the Observer,2 the critic John Naughton compared the begetter of the world wide web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, with the seismic disruption five centuries earlier caused by the invention of movable type. Just as Gutenberg had no conception of his invention’s eventual influence on religion, science, systems of ideas and democracy, so – in 2008 – ‘it will be decades before we have any real understanding of what Berners-Lee hath wrought’.
And so I set off to find the internet with the leader of the PDU team, Tony Ageh, a 33-year-old ‘creative’. He had had exactly one year’s experience in media – as an advertising copy chaser for The Home Organist magazine – before joining the Guardian. I took with me a copy of The Internet for Dummies. Thus armed, we set off to America for a four-day, four-city tour.
In Atlanta, we found the Atlanta Journal-Constitution (AJC), which was considered a thought leader in internet matters, having joined the Prodigy Internet Service, an online service offering subscribers information over dial-up 1,200 bit/second modems. After four months the internet service had 14,000 members, paying 10 cents a minute to access online banking, messaging, full webpage hosting and live share prices.
The AJC business plan envisaged building to 35,000 or 40,000 by year three. But that time, they calculated, they would be earning $3.3 million in subscription fees and $250,000 a year in advertising. ‘If it all goes to plan,’ David Scott, the publisher, Electronic Information Service, told us, ‘it’ll be making good money. If it goes any faster, this is a real business.’
We also met Michael Gordon, the managing editor. ‘The appeal to the management is, crudely, that it is so much cheaper than publishing a newspaper,’ he said.
We wrote it down.
‘We know there are around 100,000 people in Atlanta with PCs. There are, we think, about 1 million people wealthy enough to own them. Guys see them as a toy; women see them as a tool. The goldmine is going to be the content, which is why newspapers are so strongly placed to take advantage of this revolution. We’re out to maximise our revenue by selling our content any way we can. If we can sell it on CD-ROM or TV as well, so much the better.’
‘Papers? People will go on wanting to read them, though it’s obviously much better for us if we can persuade them to print them in their own homes. They might come in customised editions. Edition 14B might be for females living with a certain income.’
It was heady stuff.
From Atlanta we hopped up to New York to see the Times’s online service, @Times. We found an operation consisting of an editor plus three staffers and four freelancers.3 The team had two PCs, costing around $4,000 each. The operation was confident, but small.
The @Times
