What I found, however, at the Digital Divides conference convened by the Pacific Regional Humanities Center at the University of California, Davis, was that the academic world has made quite a turnaround. In the 80s and early 90s there were a handful of university folk exploring topics like hypertext or the social impact of computers, but by now the topic of digital change has infiltrated every department from history and linguistics to art and psychology. The Digital Divides event was itself one of a series of three such conferences within the University of California system.
The conference topics ranged widely. Martin Kenney, a UC Davis professor, studies the history of Silicon Valley, tracking the influence of the earliest firms on subsequent generations in the same way that literary scholars might follow the influence of the Lake District poets. He theorized, in fact, that the key to Silicon Valley’s success was not so much the legendary Hewlett-Packard garage start-up in 1938, but the fact that in 1957 a particularly crucial semiconductor firm, Fairchild, happened to locate there. The company spawned dozens of “Fairchildren” nearby, building the fundamental engines of the digital revolution. Had Fairchild happened to start instead near Boston, the history of digital technology might well have been written on the opposite coast.
Alladi Venkatesh, of UC Irvine, looks at the results, rather than the roots, of the digital revolution: using ethnographic research techniques to study the impact of home networks and highly-wired communities on family life. For his research he has focused on a housing development called Ladera Ranch, in southern Orange County, where homes have “IT nooks,” high-speech Internet access and the entire community of 2000 homes is interlinked with a common intranet. “Unlike other appliances,” he notes, “Americans haven’t yet figured out which room of the house the computer belongs in. This will be a very important time to study.”
His findings should interest Lee Rainie, head of the Pew Foundation’s ambitious Internet and American Life project, which for two years now has conducted in-depth polling to study how the Web is changing U.S. society. At Davis, Rainie presented some newer findings about the 70 million Americans currently not online. Of that number, fully 45 percent say they don’t believe they will ever go online, for reasons that include fear, cost issues-and 40 percent who simply say they don’t need it. Among the offline, 23 percent are disabled-a number underscoring the importance of Web site accessibility-and close to 20 percent are “drop-outs” who once had Web access but no longer do. On the connected side, Rainie described the 63 percent of American teenagers who use instant messaging. Among them, 14 percent have used IM to ask for a date, 12 percent have broken off a relationship with IM, and 20 percent have shared their screen name and password with a “best friend.” In the last instance, Rainie adds, often with unhappy consequences: “Best friends don’t last forever in the teen world.”
Perhaps the most symbolic presentation at Digital Divides came from a non-academic named Rick McGowan, vice-president of a little-known Silicon Valley non-profit company called Unicode. Unicode represents the most fundamental fusion of CP Snow’s Two Cultures: nothing less than the effort to make certain that all of the world’s languages can be represented in computer form. Unicode began with informal discussions in the late 80’s at Apple and the fabled research lab Xerox PARC and is now funded by many of the major computer and software companies. Unicode’s goal is to make sure that every form of writing on earth has a unique and universally accepted representation as a string of numbers.
By now there are Unicode representations for 96 forms of writing, which in turn represent every language on earth with more than 5 million speakers. Available “scripts” range from old standards like Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, Hebrew; Arabic, Katakana and Han to Thaana, Devanagari, Khmer, Runic, Cherokee and Braille. The goal is to turn every written language into code, and McGowan figures there are at least 25 more “minority” scripts that remain untranslated into Unicode.
Unfortunately, as the languages grow more obscure, the battles between experts over what is official grows more intense. An early Unicode developer coined the rule: “For every expert there is an equal and opposite expert.” In addition, the rarer the language, the less likely there is much of a market for software, and so the companies that fund Unicode show increasingly less interest. Linguists used to say that a language was a dialect with an army; in the world of Unicode, dialects may turn out to need markets more than armies. But that is where the university world may ultimately come to the rescue. Academic experts are currently working on a Unicode version of Egyptian hieroglyphics-and next on the docket are the symbols of the Rosetta Stone.
