Leonardo

New Technologies and the Public Interest Ernest L. Boyer When Martin Segal asked me to join this conversation, I thought immediately about young Robert Benchley who-in a final examination at Harvard College-was asked to discuss the conflict between the Soviet Union and the United States over "off-shore" fishing rights. Hopelessly unprepared, Benchley wrote: "I know nothing about this crisis from the Soviet perspective. I know even less about the U.S. position, so I'd like to discuss the conflict from the viewpoint of the fish," which pretty well sums up my assignment here today. Specifically, I've been asked to comment briefly on how the intellectual "property rights" debate relates to public interest, to the larger, educational social context. And the answer is, of course, that the two are inextricably interlocked , since nothing in a free society is of greater consequence than how information is gathered and transmitted. A half century ago, MIT Professor Norbert Weiner observed that society can be understood through a study of the messages and the communication facilities that belong to it. And we are here today precisely because the new "information age" has, during the past 50 years, quite literally transformed the way we live and the way we work and even, perhaps, the way we think. In the spring of 1946, I made my first trip to New York City with my high school graduating class. And a highlight of that visit was a tour of the NBC Studios Where I saw-for the very first time-blurred images on a ten-inch television screen. The guide who led the tour called TV a novelty, as I recall it. And my classmates and I agreed that television was-at best-a fascinating gimmick. As coincidence would have it, it was that very same year, 1946, when-just down the road-the nation's first electronic digital computer was unveiled at the University of Pennsylvania. It weighed 30 tons, it filled the space of a two-car garage and it cost half-a-million dollars. A half century has passed and Ernest L. Boyer, Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, 5 IvyLane. Princeton, NJ 08540, U.S.A. 248 Intellectual Property Rights and the Arts today, 94.2 million American homesthat 's 98 percent of all householdshave at least one television set. And today, the nation's 19 million preschoolers watch television 15 billion hours every year. So much for the NBC gimmick! As for computers, the power of that first clumsy model in Philadelphia can now be packaged in a peasized silicon chip. And when these two great inventions-computers and televisions -were married in the 1980s, millions ofAmericans had, for the first time, unprecedented access to new forms of art and education with a quality of transmissions virtually indistinguishable from the real. Today, ordinary citizens as well as students in our schools can take field trips electronically to the Smithsonian. They can watch lift-offs at Cape Kennedy, travel to the bottom of the sea, peer inside a human cell, and spend an afternoon at the Louvre in Paris. Students of all ages are now able to browse in the world's great libraries, tour New York's American Museum of Natural History, listen to the Philharmonic , watch cheetahs in their natural habitat, be on-line with classmates in Australia. And in such a world, learning -quite literally-has no limits. And, incidentally, by expanding access to information, support for libraries , galleries, and museums will increase rather than decline. But it's also true that, for most students, this vision of a global classroom is still largely a potential. The harsh truth is that, while we talk about CD-ROMs, most classrooms within minutes of this meeting have only chalkboards, outdated maps, and broken-down projectors. The good news is that, today, an estimated four and a half million computers are installed in the nation's schools; from 1992 to 1993 CD-ROM use increased 93 percent. And nearly 30 percent of the nation's schools are now connected to at least one on-line service such as Internet. Still, it's sad but true that if all...