Paul Delany, Simon Fraser University
[This is a first draft, without footnotes or bibliography. Copyright 1996 by Paul Delany]
Centers and Peripheries
“The Death of Distance” means that we can do more and more things without being physically present at the point of impact, and that we can do these things more cheaply. To communicate at a distance used to require significant costs in time and money. But now, more than half of the long-distance calls in the U.S. are to 800 numbers, which make them “virtually local.” As we move around the Internet, distance and connection costs are similarly irrelevant, so that the old constraints of geography and economics don’t apply. How, then, should we map the space of virtual universities, and of individual actors within the infosphere?
In its broadest sense, the death of distance represents the globalization process in the domain of information: the combination of the reduction of transportation costs with the removal of political barriers to international exchange. The world economy grew by two percent in 1995, but international trade grew by eight percent. The invisible trade in information is growing faster yet: international phone calls are growing by about fifteen percent, and World Wide Web servers are doubling about every six months, four hundred percent. There are two reasons for this “hyper-growth” of information exchange. One is technological: that Moore’s Law cuts the cost of processing information in half every eighteen months, and the cost of transmitting it (bandwidth) in half every twelve months. The other is political: when a computer scientist changed the world by inventing the telnet command, no government took notice to tax it or regulate it. Now they’re trying but, for the most part, they’re too late.
The death of distance puts into question the postmodernist dialectic of center and periphery. There’s a sense in which cyberspace has no center; and one of the rationales for extending the “Information Highway” around the globe is that it will level hierarchies based on geographic centers. Here I am going to argue the contrary: that we are going to see a reinforcement of centers and of existing privileges. The gradient between those in the world who are information-rich and those who are poor may be becoming steeper, as it also seems to be for economic differences. In advanced countries, telecommunications circulate information very efficiently, cheaply and openly. Developing countries have limited access - Bangladesh has 400,000 phone lines for 120 million people - and often restrictions on use, such as the requirement in China that all internet users must register with the police. The utopian vision of giving everyone in the world equal access to knowledge has little prospect of being achieved; and, as Paul Romer and others have argued, knowledge more and more is the economy.
Why will the Global Information Infrastructure reinforce inequality? The people who set out to improve communication with the hinterlands are, typically, people of the center who are trying to extend their influence more widely. Steam ships and the telegraph were instruments of British imperialism, and the Romans built roads for them to lead to Rome. In telecommunications, every wire has two ends; and, as Neil Stephenson puts it, “the two points at opposite ends of a wire are, for informational purposes, the same point” (98). Every improved channel of communication represents an opportunity for those already rich in information to widen their market or intrude on local activities. Further, each wire has two channels, upstream and downstream, which are often, and by design, asymmetrical. When we click on our remote control, only a very small amount of bandwidth is needed to send the message to the center, but a much fatter pipe is needed to send the program back. It’s a metaphor: not much information going towards the center, a great deal coming back.
The Persistence of Face-to-Face
Despite the rapid development of the GII, the highest level of communication continues to be “face-to-face” interaction in strategic centers. Having someone’s full attention in a face-to-face encounter is the ideal that technologically mediated communication can only strive to approach. Vital transactions like summit conferences, contract signings, or MLA sessions are still conducted face to face, after preparation through communication at a distance. The places where such meetings traditionally occur - the City of London, Silicon Valley, Hollywood, Manhattan, etc. - have long-established advantages of expertise and amenity; they have the most current information, and provide opportunities for chance encounters with strategic players. It is in such places that hierarchies are established and content generated; modern communications then “spread the word” to the provinces.
In the world of learning, places like Berkeley, Princeton or Cambridge are similarly favored. American universities have become much more stratified since World War II: top schools have creamed off students, faculty, research resources, and endowments, while institutions with only local reputations have suffered (Frank and Cook, Ch. 8). These high-prestige, compact, face-to-face universities are likely to be the least affected - in their “look and feel” - by the GII. Peripheral institutions may become more advanced in their technology: the Open University in England has pioneered new methods of course delivery, and the State of California plans to set up a major new distance university to serve a global market. Yet forty years of university investments in computing and communications do not seem to have affected the hierarchy of institutions. Elite universities continue to focus on face-to-face interaction: they are residential, they emphasize personal contact between students and faculty, and they have lavish facilities that foster sociability. These amenities draw the best students and faculty, and over time attract the financial support that keeps the privileged universities at the top of the tree. No “virtual presence” on the World Wide Web is likely to change this situation.
Change evokes heated rhetoric about “virtual universities,” “the university in ruins,” and the like; more soberly, Daniel Greenstein observes that “network technologies have to some extent blurred the distinctions that have grown up historically between separable communities of scholars, librarians, curators, computing service professionals and publishers. . . . such changes could threaten established identities and provoke a degree of territorial infighting” (iv). But this struggle is largely internal: “where you are” is still the most important single indicator of your status (though, as we shall see, the meaning of “being there” has become more nebulous).
The Brand-Name University
This is not to say that modern communications are irrelevant to the university pecking order, or to individual careers. New communications technologies enable the compact and exclusive elite institutions to have power at a distance, by reinforcing their traditional role as “content providers” to the periphery. Much of this content is “passive,” in the great libraries and data archives of research universities. Until now - and this will be true for several years to come - the GII has disseminated knowledge about these resources, rather than full-text access to any substantial part of them. Partly from mere inertia, but partly also from self-interest, libraries are reluctant to provide distant access to their resources. Using the British Library Catalogue on CD-Rom may help you to find a rare book, but you must still go to London to read it. The great research libraries are therefore more in demand than ever.
By “active” content I mean the current production within universities of instructional materials and research results. An institution’s place on the prestige ladder has been largely determined by the fame of its researchers, since most of its teaching has been for internal consumption. In future, there will be much more opportunity to distribute course modules and ancillary materials to a global clientele. At present the leaders in this market are the distance learning divisions of, for the most part, second-tier universities. But in a fantasy about the future, Peter Drahos imagines elite universities capitalizing on their fame:
Many universities took advantage of the export opportunities that the superhighway had created for their intellectual products. The problem was that in the status-hungry environment of higher education, consumers wanted brand names like Harvard and Oxford. Elite university names assumed the status of trademarks like Coke and Pepsi. (216)
Harbingers of such a trend are the new “Executive MBA” courses provided mainly through location-independent media such as electronic mail, web sites, and videoconferencing. Students are willing to cover the communications costs because they expect the credential to increase their earning power. One can easily imagine a prestigious university sub-contracting most of the actual instruction for such a program, while providing a “brand name” and quality control. Local institutions are already being threatened by distance courses offered by national or international rivals, who provide a “second-label” product while maintaining face-to-face courses on their home campus. Another modality might be the delivery of courses by master teachers over interactive video, with tutoring and marking provided locally.
Shooting Stars
I don’t see why literary studies should be an exception to the rule that improved communications will strengthen existing centers. “Commonwealth Literature,” to take a prominent example, used to be a sleepy corner of English studies, with a relatively flat hierarchy, and with considerable collaboration between scholars in the West and those in former Imperial possessions. “Post-colonial studies” has rapidly displaced Commonwealth Literature and, not coincidentally, has displayed such elite characteristics as a critical fashion system, the emergence of “stars,” and the reinforcement of the center. That all this contradicts the professed ideology of the field - leftist, denouncing metropolitan sway over the periphery - may evoke cynicism, but should not evoke surprise. Contemporary systems of intellectual circulation inexorably require that “the action” should be concentrated in a few first-world centers, from which the word goes forth to those on the periphery who absorb and imitate.
Post-colonialism displays these contradictions in a particularly dramatic form, but they are present in all fields of literary study. The development of the GII intensifies stratification and segmentation within the profession because it benefits disproportionately the elite departments and the star critics (Shumway). Those in the lower ranks “enjoy” better access to what the stars are producing, while the honorable middle is squeezed. We cannot and should not restrain the growth of the GII, but we should at least recognize its professional consequences.
Within the profession, the question “where are you?” has become harder to answer the closer you get to the top. For a department to have prestige, famous critics should “be” there, even though it goes with being famous that you are so often not where you are supposed to be, and that when you are there you are serving an off-campus clientele. When I met a famous critic one past spring - at my campus, of course, not his - he told me that he was booked to speak away from his home campus every week from then until the end of the year. Yet all the glory of a star’s career is reflected on to the place where he or she nominally (virtually?) resides. We need not labor the paradox that stars are hired in order that they should do great things somewhere else - at conferences, in journals, with publishers, as visiting lecturers - and that this is intrinsic to the workings of the academic prestige culture. For the stars themselves, their careers are built as a dispersed, individual project, with an attenuated loyalty to their employer of record (and outside their department, of course, they have many other employers). It is like the end of feudalism: loyal service to an institution has become passé, as individualist response to market signals becomes the rule. The transition is marked by the rise of the concept of “intellectual property” - which is also, in this context, private property, something to be accumulated and exploited.
All of these trends are being facilitated and reinforced by the GII. Frank and Cook point out that “As the revolution in information processing and transmission continues, there is increasing leverage for the talents of those who occupy top positions and correspondingly less room for others to find a lucrative niche” (viii). Once there were many tenors, now there are only three. There is a tradition of economic self-restraint in the academy, certainly, based on the ancient hostility between prestige cultures and commerce; and no university could afford to hire only stars for its faculty. We will not see in universities excess on the scale of the Nike shoe company, where the CEO is paid about $20 million a year and its workers in Vietnam about a dollar a day. But the death of distance will favor the “content providers” - the roughly one quarter of literary scholars who publish regularly - and within that group, the hundred or so household names of the profession.
The World Wide Web will enable individual content-providers to make themselves even more independent of the institutions that are their nominal masters. Work that they have already published in hard-copy will become much more easily available than when buried in the back-files of journals; forthcoming articles will be seen long before their hard-copy appearance; work in progress can be displayed in order to receive feed-back from colleagues (and to stake out territories they plan to colonize). All of this will tend to reinforce a personal rather than an institutional brand-name: the name of the author will be the usual search term, and many users will choose to browse through Professor X’s recent papers rather than, say, the current issue of Critical Inquiry. Enterprising scholars are already competing to have the most comprehensive and attractive web sites. The corollary to the rise of content producers on the GII is that students will become more liberated to be content consumers of materials available on the World Wide Web, rather than captive to the offerings of the institution where they reside.
Our home pages may in some literal sense reside on our university’s server, but what really counts is that they are claiming a territory in cyberspace that belongs to us, and that we can exploit as we see fit. There will soon be a payments system for small transactions on the Web; many scholars will prefer to make their work freely available, but some will be in a position to charge for it. Scholars will find it cheaper to pay a dollar or two to have an article they want delivered to their screen than to drive to the library, ferret it out, and xerox it. Students are accustomed to paying heavily for their assigned texts, and should be happy to get them more cheaply through the authors’ web sites. The prospect of such revenues will be a powerful incentive for authors to retain copyright in the electronic distribution of their works.
New methods of information management will also have their effect on literary studies. In the first few years of the Web, the emphasis has been on its use as a global publishing system, where people can browse in search of what may interest them. There is now a shift towards “pointcasting”: an iterative process whereby users identify their interests so that information can be targeted towards those who are likely to want it. In other words, strategic content will be pushed towards users, instead of just lying there waiting to be found, and will be automatically updated. Literary studies has traditionally had an extremely slow and inefficient system of information distribution. With pointcasting, users could be notified immediately when, for example, a well-known critic publishes a new article, or when something appears on “Lycidas.” Such techniques will bridge the gap between the user’s profile of interests, and the desire of content-providers to reach the likely “buyers” of their particular product.
In parallel with increased opportunities for individual producers, there will be greater scope for group projects in content building, that are either too large for one person or that require specialized research and design skills. The Voice of the Shuttle (http://humanitas.ucsb.edu/shuttle/), managed by Alan Liu at the University of California, Santa Barbara, is a good example of the new electronic resources for literary study. By the very nature of the medium, such resources tend to be interdisciplinary, and to combine text with sound, graphics and video. They offer rich possibilities for teaching literature in new ways; but because they are multimedia they are also likely to move literary study further in the direction of cultural studies, and away from a traditional focus on the single printed text.
Let us examine, finally, what is happening in this room and around us. The MLA Convention has become steadily more important for the circulation of ideas in the profession, and also for their worldly effects on individual and departmental hierarchies. The MLA staff agreed to include a web site address for this session in the Convention program. At this site we mounted abstracts and will mount the full text of papers, which have been shortened for delivery in the interests of discussion. The web site has supported discussion of the panelists’ ideas, links to related resources, arrangements for last night’s dinner, and news of the future hard-copy publication of the papers in a special issue of the journal Text Technology.
Home pages for individual sessions should rapidly become popular, because they are such convenient means of disseminating Convention papers that, for the most part, will not reach an audience through conventional hard-copy publication. But to mount all of them - more than two thousand per Convention - would be a massive job, one not likely to be undertaken soon by the MLA. Access to the papers will therefore be provided selectively, unsystematically, and by individuals.
Around this 75-minute session in Washington, occurring in one place in real time, there thus exists a virtual session that escapes such limits. We considered sending out a live audio and video feed from the session over the internet; this proved impractical, though such narrowcasts are likely to become routine in the future, and have already been mounted at other conferences. The MLA staff were fearful, incidentally, of anything that would offer access to Convention proceedings without having to attend in person and pay the registration fee. My argument here is that any widening of access will strengthen the Convention, building on its status as (in airline terminology) the “fortress hub” of the profession. Most of the people who reached the Convention over the GII would be adding to its total audience, and making it an even more desirable site to deliver a paper. If the person giving a paper was also a job-seeker, their presentation could have a wider exposure to hiring committees nationwide. Meanwhile, the advantages of personal attendance will remain, and ensure that these conference rooms and corridors will continue to be populated.
To conclude: the GII will continue to dissolve the old limitations of time and space that constrained our work, and will in due course solve the problem that has plagued us since the beginnings of literacy: where can we find the text we want? The old prestige culture rules will still encourage us to give our work away, being paid in fame rather than dollars; but those with enough fame may get dollars as well. And if you ask me now where I am, I’m here, of course, though usually I’m there, at my home department in Vancouver; but you can also find me on the Web, which is both nowhere and wherever you want me to be.