"Once a new technology rolls over you, if you're not part of the steamroller, you're part of the road." -- Stewart Brand, author of The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at MIT

I can't pinpoint the moment my attitude about technology changed, because there wasn't a single one. I never wore the label technophobe as a badge of pride, the way some writers do. I just felt mystified by machines, and sheepish about my ignorance.

I think it was the passion of the people creating the electronic future that eventually seduced me into learning more. A few years ago I had gone to a workshop on group dynamics and organizational change; it had been filled with corporate technology types from places like Microsoft. I learned a lot and found myself telling one of the organizers, a computer scientist who had worked in the space program, that I wished he would give the workshop for people in nonprofits, "people who are trying to change the world." He looked at me with a puzzled expression on his face and said, "But, Katherine, that's exactly what these computer people are doing."

You don't forget a moment like that, when you feel the sting of a blind spot revealed. But I was too busy to do anything about it. Not to mention depressed. My feelings about technology and the future of newspaper journalism in those days ranged from denial to gloom and doom. And that had been on a good day. Finally last year, after fourteen years as a reporter and editor, I left my job, and was considering leaving journalism. But first I wanted to step back and take a long look around.

As I began a fellowship year at Harvard, it came suddenly to me that it was time to stop being so stupid about machines. Naturally, I found my way down the river to MIT, to the gleaming I. M. Pei-designed Media Lab. I wandered through its corridors as though in a foreign land, forcing myself to remember the reporter's most basic lesson: there's no such thing as a dumb question. But it didn't really help. I still felt dumb and lost in a place that seemed to represent everything I found impenetrable about computers.

Some months later, I went to hear one of the Media Lab's scientists. Walter Bender, who's working on electronic newspapers. I hoped he'd be able to translate for me, but I only understood about half of what he said. He'd brush off a question or a challenge with a simple dismissal. "That's a no-brainer," he'd say, usually just at the moment my brain was most taxed. Still, he captured my imagination.

To Bender, the key new technology is electronic mail, because it is interactive. The word "interactive" hadn't become a buzzword yet, and it took me a while to grasp what he was talking about -- that the one-to-one, two-way personal communication of the telephone will merge with the one-to-many, one-way mass communication of the newspaper or the television network. Bender wants news knit into the fabric of people's lives. The newspaper he envisions is a computerized assistant that can, for example, read your calendar, then provide you with articles and ads about the place you're going this weekend. And much, much more.

It's a disturbing vision, because it conjures up a nation of people so "personalized" that we don't even have today's headlines in common. I pushed myself beyond an easy, high-minded dismissal to take a closer look.

Bender throws off little phrases that have years of thought behind them. He says, for instance, that he wants the television to have "content knobs, not channel knobs." Again, it took me a while to understand what this means. Think of it like this: reading today's newspaper or watching today's news broadcast is like riding a passenger train. The news of the future will be like driving a car. It will be a service designed to appeal to the tastes and judgments of the user.

What if you could control the content. Bender asks, by talking back to a documentary film that engages you? Suppose, having watched for an hour, you could instruct the great computer in the sky to scan the ninety-nine hours of interviews that didn't make it into the film, and show the profile subject answering the questions the documentary left unanswered for you?

That's exactly what you'll be able to do in the world to come, Bender says.

I still had some doubts. But I was engaged, excited even, by aspects of this vision.

I found myself thinking back to the gulf war, to the massive amounts of daily coverage that illuminated very little. I had wanted to read the most revealing and insightful stories each day, and I couldn't have cared less what newspaper or country they came from. I had wanted a major U.S. newspaper to do the unthinkable: to provide me with an edited news summary from all sorts of sources, not just its own. I had wanted the kind of service Bender described. not a traditional news product.

A new medium

My encounters with Bender, as it turned out, were the first tentative steps on what slowly became a lively intellectual and emotional journey. I had caught a glimpse of what might be ahead. But I was still searching for other views of the horizon.

I found one in the Miami airport, of all places, when I spotted a Rolling Stone article by media writer Jon Katz touting computer bulletin boards as "the purest journalistic medium since smoke signals."

I knew a little about bulletin boards, though I hadn't signed on to one yet. Here was just what I needed -- a guide who didn't make me feel stupid, who was instead inviting me to take a look at a media world "up for grabs."

Modems, telephones, and computers have created a new two-way communications medium already used by millions of people worldwide, Katz explained. The many talk to the many, rather than the few to the many, and everybody talks back, creating more accountability for anyone who provides information.

It's a radically democratic vision -- one I now wanted to explore, because it explained a lot about the motivation of the computer industry's visionaries, the ones driven to change the world.

I imagined that, ideally, the video equivalent of the existing bulletin boards would be neighborhood C-Spans, controlled by the block council, announcing the arrival of new neighbors, providing political alerts, organizing day care co-ops, generating conversation. Everybody would be a reporter, and episodes like the chance filming of the Rodney King beating would become commonplace. Facts and opinions would flow without intervention, and most definitely without the blessing of journalistic gatekeepers, who in this new world must surrender control and share power, "things that journalists are trained not to do."

So when do people need a "journalistic filter" and when does it get in the way? I was just starting to chew on such questions when another view of the new landscape opened up. My friend and fellow journalist Francis Pisani had organized an outing to the MIT laboratory that develops technological tools to teach the humanities. Francis was way ahead of me in exploring the new technology; he'd been taking a course on how writing can evolve once the writer sees that the computer is much more than a fancy typewriter.

Come down to MIT, Francis said. If you want a look at the media future, you should have a look at education, because the applications, as they call them, are more advanced than they are in journalism. So I went, and soon found myself sitting in a darkened classroom as an English professor began demonstrating his interactive, multimedia program.

The text of Hamlet flashes on the screen. Run across a word or an allusion you don't understand? Point. Click. The definition is before you. Want to know more? Point. Click. And off you go for a journey into Elizabethan England. You like that scene, and want to see it performed? Point, click, choose Zeffirelli's Hamlet, or Olivier's Hamlet. Presto. You're watching the scene you just read.

Honestly, I think my mouth fell open. This was serious, fun, and something quite new. I was experiencing the user-controlled future for the first time. But I was also glimpsing another new medium -- the multimedia future that destroys the old boundaries between print and video.

I had read about multimedia, of course, but I had to encounter it before I could fully grasp its significance. In the developing digital world, the messages, distilled to a common mathematical language, can include words, pictures, sound -- any medium, because they'll all be the same medium. We won't be just print journalists, or radio journalists, or television journalists. We may all be digital, multimedia journalists. And things will be possible that no one has yet imagined.

I could see the potential for the new medium to become an alloy that merged the best of print with the best of television. I could see how viewing television could be more active, and how reading could be more sensuous. I could see the fascinating challenge involved in combining the talents of writers, photographers, filmmakers, information designers, graphic artists, animators, and computer specialists. And I could see that this new medium, like television before it, could begin to have an impact before it was in widespread use.

The excitement of this vision, together with its frightening underside, was driven home to me a little later when I was gaping my way through a beautiful book called Understanding Hypermedia. I got to the chapter called Applications, which comes as close as a book can come to illustrating how the technology can be used in schools, corporations, stores, museums, in entertainment and infotainment.

I flipped to the book's index. The word "journalism" was not to be found.

"The next wave"

Journalism . . . I remembered that. Has something to do with trained reporters, determined to find facts someone doesn't want them to have. Has a lot to do with hard work and good judgment. Doesn't have much to do with graphic interfaces, high-definition television, or my sexy new PowerBook.

What would happen to journalism, and to journalists who refuse to become infotainers? Just about the time I was starting to wonder, I listened to a tape of Roger Fidler speaking to the American Society of Newspaper Editors last spring. Fidler is directing the new Knight-Ridder Information Design Lab in Boulder, Colorado, and has just finished a book called Mediamorphosis.

For the time being, Fidler said, the future is not an either/or proposition -- either paper or electronic delivery. The electronic world will develop in parallel for some time to come. Look for the process to quicken beginning in 1995, as the hardware becomes available. Like television, it will be an "elite medium" at first. Then the prices will drop.

You have to get the current complex electronic world out of your mind, he said, and imagine the computer as an affordable, portable, notebook-sized consumer appliance, as easy to use as a toaster. Other industries, such as entertainment, will drive the development of this technology, and journalism will just ride along.

When you load this computer of the future with Fidler's newspaper of the future, you'll see something like today's front page, only it will actually be a three-dimensional map for exploring layers of information. Liberated from the space constraints of paper, the newspaper in tablet form will offer the reader features not now available, and provide various levels of detail and depth about every story. No longer will a key background sidebar run only once; it can run every day. All you'll have to do is touch the story, or ask out loud, and the tablet will deliver a few paragraphs, or a few thousand words, complete with maps and comments from the writer.

This ability to navigate in the electronic world -- for each writer to break a narrative down into connected pieces, and each reader to devise a different path through the pieces -- is called hypertext. It's what my friend Francis Pisani had been studying at MIT, and it truly is a major development in the history of writing. Reporters, it seems, will face as many new creative choices as their readers in the nonlinear world in the making.

Remember, too, Fidler said, all the things a multimedia and interactive world will offer. His newspaper will enable you to touch a photograph or ad, opening a window to a slice of video. And you can send as well as receive. Having read your paper, you can instruct your notebook computer to clip and file what you need, to send a copy of an article off to a friend or to dial up that idiotic columnist.

Some things probably won't change, he predicted. You'll still want edited packages of the top stories, so you won't have to search for them yourself. You may continue to turn first to the sports scores or the stock listings, just as you do now -- and some days that may be all you read. The difference will be that you can also have the new personal news packages, with as much information as you might want about your most passionate interests.

And don't forget, Fidler said, that all this will come with benefits the defenders of print often overlook. Delivering news electronically will save enormous quantities of money, trees, and landfill space.

At last, the landscape ahead began to come into focus for me. Here were all the pieces of the puzzle, assembled in a coherent fashion: the newspaper as a service delivering content, not a product forever wedded to paper. Control in the hands of the user. The power of multimedia to tell a story in different ways.

Far from debasing newspapers, the electronic world, as Fidler described it, was poised to improve them immeasurably, especially for a generation that will grow up on interactive multimedia. Fidler told the newspaper editors to take heart: "I believe that we have an opportunity to catch the next wave and be the predominant medium for communications."

But then Roger Fidler, representing one of the nation's most powerful media companies, would say that. He's being paid to figure out how Knight Ridder can protect its interests. What will happen to the journalists? Will reporters have to carry new point-and-shoot videocams everywhere? Will editors do nothing but create hypertext links from the ballooning on-line libraries? How much will a personal newspaper cost to produce, and who will be able to afford to buy it?

My questions kept coming, and keep coming nearly every day now. I remain concerned about what will be lost in the digital future. But I'm even more worried that journalists will lose this opportunity to question assumptions and be more creative -- to recapture lost audiences and capture new ones for the stories the shopping channels won't sell.

It will take guts to face the uncertainties. It won't be easy to live with unk unks -- the unknown unknowns I heard a Harvard professor describe as the inevitable products of any technological revolution. But we have no choice but to face them, because computers are driving a change far larger than computer-assisted reporting, or paint programs, or digital photography. The economic infrastructure of whole industries is going to change, and journalism along with it.

At this point, all I know for sure is how I've changed: the " next wave" doesn't scare me so much anymore. I'm actually looking forward to riding it.

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