Editor's Notebook: This magazine followed information technology’s public evolution from the start

In late 1982, Carolyn Marvin, a professor in the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, was working on her book about how people of the 19th century imagined the communications of the future. But when Illinois Issues invited her that fall to write an essay for our pages, she responded with what is still one of the more thought-provoking analyses of the communications technology that emerged in this era.

“Our public fairy tales about computers are plentiful but shallow, perhaps because they are very new,” she wrote. “They tell us the contents of our wishes but do not present the framework of wish-making and the problems it presents.” 

Revisiting Marvin’s essay is especially appropriate as Illinois Issues prepares to enter a fourth decade of publishing in-depth reporting and analysis on government and politics. A lot has happened since we went to press with our first magazine in January 1975. In the final months of this year, beginning with this edition, we’ll highlight a few of the issues Illinoisans faced over the past three decades. But throughout next year, we plan to explore some of the challenges they are likely to face over the next three decades. Carolyn Marvin’s essay is a good place to start precisely because it explores terrain that traverses past and future. 

As with a handful of transformative shifts — the rise of the global economy is another — that came into public view during the life of this magazine, the rapid evolution in information technologies is still under way. The full significance of this advance is as unknowable, as difficult to frame, as it was when Marvin wrote her essay. We can say it has begun to reshape human experience; we can’t yet say how. 

In 1982, the magazine was beginning to publish articles on the promise in the “computer revolution” just then capturing the imagination of citizens and policy-makers. In the years since, we wrote about the potential benefits to educators, and the capacity to wire together urban and rural communities. We explored the relationship of online to printed texts, and the potential impact on reading itself. But in the past few years, we have begun to examine some of the unintended consequences of computers and their capacity for virtual life, the dangers they can pose to personal identity and global security.

Marvin would be on familiar ground. She likened the attraction of the new technology to the fairy tale of three wishes. When we look into the computer monitor, we wish, she wrote, for the freedom to choose our destiny, the capacity to nourish democracy and the resources to liberate the spirit. But tools are never neutral; they always alter power relations, often in unexpected ways.

“The consequences of the wishes always surprise the wisher and always outstrip his efforts to negotiate an advantageous bargain with destiny. Outdone as often by his ignorance as by vanity and greed, he often must use his final wish to undo the unforeseen consequences of earlier ones.

“One of the lessons of this tale is that we can bargain with fewer aspects of destiny than we think. We are never completely in control of the future.”

Unintended consequence, if not a framework of wish-making, was the key theme of a policy summit on issues in cyberspace this past summer at the University of Illinois at Springfield. The summit, hosted by the Center for State Policy and Leadership, the institutional home of Illinois Issues, took a long look at some of the bargains we’ve negotiated for our increased ability to find and transmit information. And some of the ways government has been outdone.

At the top of the list is unsolicited mass e-mails. If our friends can find us more readily in this era of electronic communication, so can strangers, some who want to sell us things, and some who mean us harm. This would seem a small trade-off for a larger gain. Yet, even at its most benign, electronic junk mail clogs personal computers with unwanted messages from scam artists and costs us in lost time and productivity. 

It’s known in the trade as spam. Philosopher James Moor calls it “a kind of tragedy of the commons.” Moor, a professor at Dartmouth College, is the editor of Minds and Machines and president of the International Society for Ethics and Information Technology. Consequences change, he advised those who attended the summit, and so will our responses.

Other participants were not sanguine, including Matthew Prince, who helped draft portions of the federal law designed to reduce spam. Prince, who teaches at John 

Marshall Law School, is the CEO and co-founder of Unspam, LLC, a Chicago-based company that advises business and government on ways to fight unwanted online messages. 

Prince offered a cautionary tale. Since 1997, some three dozen states have approved essentially the same anti-spam provisions. They include requirements to label subject lines, such as “ADV:” for advertising, so recipients can delete them without wasting time. Illinois’ labeling law was signed last year. But Prince says since 1997 the volume of spam has only increased. Compliance with ad labeling is on the order of 5 percent. Yet state governments are approving the same law over and over again and expecting different results. “It’s the definition of insanity, right?”

Prince suggested states need to draw bright lines on what is and is not allowed, and impose costs for breaking those laws on the people who hire the spammers. He points to Washington state, which created a registry of e-mail addresses, essentially putting spammers on notice that if they send messages to those addresses, they will be subject to Washington’s law. And he called for stronger enforcement by the states and the feds.

In fact, as we were going to press, The New York Timesreported that federal authorities have arrested or charged dozens of people with crimes related to junk e-mail and computer fraud.

Technology offers a solution, as well. David Nicol told summit participants a secure system can be built, but won’t be because citizens won’t allow it. Nicol, 
a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, once headed the Institute for Security Technology Studies at Dartmouth. There are, he said, ethical tensions between security and privacy. It’s not a technical problem, he said. “It’s a political problem. It’s a legal problem. It’s a societal problem.” 

Marvin, too, reminded us that new technologies don’t release us from the obligation to make “responsible value choices.” 

“New information technologies,” she wrote, “will be used by the powerful to increase their power unless somebody makes other plans. And just as freedom, security and pleasure have never been easily won in the history of the world, just as that battle is never fully won and must be continually refought, so it is not going to be easy now. But it is going to be important.”