Interview With Dan Gillmor - Mercury News Technology Columnist
- Simon Harper:
- Welcome and thanks for sparing the time to talk with us. Firstly, the hypertext and web communities seem to have a very artistic slant (especially the hypertext conference). Has your time being a professional musician influenced the way you report on technology?
- Dan Gillmor:
- I think so, but more in the way I write than in the way I do the reporting. I want prose to have rhythm, because only with rhythm does it have a voice. Music has a close tie to mathematics, which was my best subject in school. And math has a close relationship with computer science. Maybe that's the closer connection to technology.
- Simon:
- How has your earlier work influenced both your journalistic and technological interests? Have these influences affected your view of hypertext and non-linear reading?
- Dan:
- Music is pretty linear, actually. I find myself wondering what will happen when some of these principles are brought into the musical world in a bigger way; it'll be fascinating. My earlier work in journalism, covering national politics and economics (among other things), brought me in contact with people who remind me in many ways of the tech executives. They are self-confident, generally well meaning -- and many believe they're actually doing something good for society. I'm both more and less cynical as a result, depending on the situation.
- Simon:
- Is the state of technology, hypertext, and the web in 2004 as you envisioned when you started reporting on these matters 10 years ago?
- Dan:
- A little over a decade ago I saw a videotape of Mosaic, then a work in
progress at the University of Illinois. I'd been using the Web for several
years, as well as Gopher and other point/click text-based systems. I
remember my reaction, which was one of slack-jawed amazement at the
potential.
The big change from a decade ago isn't the speed of the connection and the increasingly sophisticated media types we can view. It's the advent of the read-write Web that Tim Berners-Lee envisioned and created, with tools like blogs that for the first time made it easy for anyone to write on the Web, not just read from it. We're just getting started with the possibilities now that richer media types can be created so inexpensively. - Simon:
- What would be the key thing you would change with regard to the state of technology today?
- Dan:
- I'd have genuine broadband, not the pathetic imitation of broadband we're stuck with now. And I'd have a regulatory regime that kept it open to all providers, not dominated by a duopoly.
- Simon:
- If you have the choice, would you dis-invent any technological advancement?
- Dan:
- The blink tag.
- Simon:
- You've just finished working on a new book, "We the Media" (O'Reilly). What is the book about?
- Dan:
- It's about the collision of technology with journalism, and the impact on journalists, newsmakers and the audience. All of us have a lot to learn.
- Simon:
- What motivated you to write this book?
- Dan:
- I was practising what I preached, namely that the audience knows more collectively than any journalist, and that we can capture that to our mutual advantage.
- Simon:
- How do you think journalism and non-linear reading (hypertext etc) will evolve into the future?
- Dan:
- For "readers": We'll be better able to track a multi-level, multi-threaded conversation from site to site, comment to comment, and build our own news reports that borrow from a variety of sources. For "creators": We'll provide much more source material to our audience, and invite them to participate in the journalistic process. As video and audio take more prominence online, the complexities will grow, but the level of detail will expand as well.
- Simon:
- What Hypertext / Web related areas are you interested in at the moment and what upcoming areas are you excited about?
- Dan:
- I'm looking for better tools for what I do, among other things. The promise of the read-write Web is still more a promise than a reality.
- Simon:
- Finally, Reporting on technology development and research must rub-off; do you have any ideas for some technology you really want and if so can you give us a taste for what it is?
- Dan:
- Better tools for reading and writing, and following the conversations. In particular, they need to be easy for the average person, not people like us who are steeped in technology already. We're on the verge of communications and collaboration that could genuinely transform the process of work and play.
- Simon:
- Thanks for talking with us.
Dan Gillmor offers insightful analysis on the Silicon Valley technology and business revolution and its global and personal impacts. His column appears every Sunday, Wednesday and Friday on SiliconValley.com.
M: hla on 30 Jul 2004
C: S Harper on 27 Nov 2003
C: S Harper on 27 Nov 2003