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What Consumers Want from the Information Infrastructure

by David Bellin

CPSR News Volume 12, Number 4: Fall 1994

MacWorld recently continued in its tradition as one of the industry magazines willing to examine issues critically, in the October 1994 issue. They commissioned a public opinion survey, described in Charles Piller's article "DreamNet: Consumers want more than TV overload from the Information Highway." The results may pleasantly surprise jaded readers of The CPSR Newsletter.

Instead of home shopping, the potential "consumers" surveyed ranked voting in elections, searching reference books, distance learning, and obtaining school information highest. Video on demand does show up as the tenth among twenty-six items, after participation in opinion polls and in electronic town halls. It is even rated lower than obtaining government information. Gambling and video dating occupy the bottom two slots.

It is interesting to me that, as Piller points out, the services most desired require two-way interactivity, with asymetric bandwith. Moreover, they generally do not call for fiber, but can probably be provided by ISDN-based copper service. On the other hand, the so-called advanced cable systems envisioned by corporate champions of the NII demand a sophisticated network infrastructure.

The relevance of the poll has been challenged by some network activists, who maintain that statistics on newsgroup popularity contradict the survey's results. However, this is not necessarily the case. The most popular is news.announce.newusers, read by 12 percent of newsreaders. Alt.sex.stories and alt.sex follow, with readerships of 8.8 and 8.7 percent; news.answers comes in third, at 7.9 percent.

Most importantly, newsgroups are by nature two-way interactive, with both topics and content determined by the user community. Video on demand and home shopping, the uses of the NII most often mentioned by corporate promoters, seem to me just the opposite. They depend on a model of the consumer as a source of profit, not creativity. This model represents production by the consumer as a threat to the system. Actually, CPSR should argue, this threat is essential to a democracy. The NII should provide citizens the ability to run their government, not the other way around.

David Bellin, a former national Board member of CPSR, is currently Director of Graduate Studies in Computer Science at North Carolina A&T State University, and can be reached at dbellin@ncat.edu

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