Getting Wired

Steve Gibson

This article appeared in Educom Review (May/June 1995)

Cover to cover.

Every month.

That matters, because in reading this article, you're letting me serve as one level of information filter. Picking up this magazine was another. As the Machine Age gives way to the Information Age, we already have more information than time. We increasingly need filters to keep us from being overwhelmed. Just how interested we are in a magazine like Wired depends, in part, on our sense of this looming electronic revolution.

One measure of the depth of change we might experience in the future can be seen in the past. In the 50 years following Gutenberg's invention of the printing press, the cost of copying or storing written -- or "coded" -- information dropped one thousand-fold and it became possible to copy for a penny what once cost ten dollars. The scientific progress which this unleashed led to the Industrial Age of factories, railroads and ultimately, some 400 years later, man landing on the moon. But all is not tumult and uncertainty. They also realize that information technology is inherently decentralizing. Hierarchical relationships -- boss to employee, network news to TV viewer -_ are being replaced by webs of ever-cheaper, point-to-point, direct contacts. The Orwellian world of the central records mainframe never arrived. Instead, we see a rapidly evolving information ecosystem of personal computers, fax machines, Internet nodes, cellular phones and more. The centralized icons of the past, IBM and the USSR to name just two, have been reshaped or replaced.

For a magazine by, about and for the technologically-aware, the results are twofold. First, like many of the Digital Generation, Wired is a staunch defender of personal freedom, especially in cyberspace. From apolitical technology flows this libertarianism, not the reverse. Second, as available information explodes, information filters assume greater importance. Wired serves this role explicitly in its chosen niche, trying to provide "meaning and context" for "life at the cusp of the new millennium." (Wired 1.1) An informal survey of The Bionomics Institute's email discussion list confirmed Wired 's usefulness in examining, as one reader put it, "the BSU, or Biological Software Unit."

Like many successful innovators before them, the niche identified by the founders of Wired was not being served by any existing product. To one side was "the latest PCInfoComputingCorporateWorld iteration of... ad sales cum parts catalog" (Wired 1.1) which characterized existing technology publications. To the other lay the popular press.

In the popular press, no one seems bothered by the ubiquitous phrase, "Information Superhighway." Trapped in a Machine Age mindset, the mass media are content to drive their horseless carriages down the familiar roads of yesterday. Cars and highways are physical; information and, increasingly, value are virtual. A more appropriate metaphor must be found. Non-traditional ways of thinking must be given a tryout. Wired gives a marketplace to new ideas, what one reader called "the bleeding edge," and has regular lists of both jargon and hype to help keep track of the winners. It can be chaotic and quick-changing. But so is the Information Age environment.

Even today, as Internet use explodes into the mainstream, there's distinct unease with anything as unplanned (and un-plannable) as the evolving Infoweb. "This [information revolution] sounds marvelous. But...there's a real question as to whether our current social structures can accommodate such empowerment" begins Newsweek in a recent cover story entitled "Techno Mania." Like trying to tell the water where to go once the floodgates are opened, this Luddite sentiment could never be translated into action.

It's time the mass media realizes microprocessors are more than just the brains of our personal computers and the Information Age is more than just email. In many cars, a pinnacle of Machine Age factory production, the value of the electronics has surpassed the value of the steel. Look around. Change is everywhere. Wired embraces change, even at the risk of relentless hipness.

Not surprising is a level of resistance, or even scorn, from those whose lives and livelihoods are firmly enmeshed in the paradigm of the Machine Age. The New Republic castigated Wired for, well, just about everything, from "willful rootlesness and hyper-individualism" to an "insider-outsider dichotomy" with a "taint of contempt for the poor." (January 9&16, 1995, p.21) Cyberspace is not amenable to central planning and the social engineering crowd is beginning to realize this.

Wall Street Journal editor John Fund put it this way: "The Conventional-wisdom media hates Wired for a very good reason. It openly states that much of the Old Media will wind up on the scrap heap of history and that free-markets, and not Al Gore's info superhighway with guard rails, will dominate the future. Wired is a painful reminder that their worst nightmare just might someday come true: they will become culturally redundant."

There is, of course, a contradiction to the media messenger of the future arriving in the medium of the past. Wired acknowledges this in ways both loud and subtle, from its love-it-or-hate-it graphic style, to publishing the email addresses of its authors. And, with the launching of HotWired last year, Wired 's owners established a virtual gathering place on the Internet.

For today, Wired remains the lifestyle magazine of choice for Information Age cognoscenti. Perhaps they're tired of reading about the "information superhighway." Perhaps they want more than the Luddite undertones of so much coverage of information technology in the popular press. Perhaps they are comfortable with the complexity of evolving, bionomic systems. And maybe, just maybe, they find that Wired is the best available filter for information on how technology will reshape our society and our lives.

Besides, it's cool.