A BOX OF CHOCOLATES

Dick Pountain/16:10/11 July 1995/Idealog 11


You know, that Forrest Gump isn't as daft as he looks - life IS very much like a box of chocolates. Life's also a bitch, a bowl of cherries or a 'dome of many-coloured glass' depending on which authority you believe, but a box of chocolates comes close. Actually I'd go further than Gump by saying that life is, in particular, like a box of Macintosh's 'Quality Street' chocolates.

When I was a kid we could imagine few luxuries finer (or more out of reach) than one of those big round tins of Quality Street. There were two flavours that I particularly prized, the purple ones shaped like beetles that had a hazelnut centre and the green triangular ones that contained praline. There were very few of these to a box, and we fought like dogs over them. (At this point I bet you've just sneaked at look at the cover to make sure that you didn't pick up 'Retail Confectioner and Tobacconist' instead of PC Pro - have courage, I am coming to a point.)

Then the retailing revolution intruded into our confectionary idyll - Woolworth's started selling pick n' mix sweets from big transparent plastic bins into which you delved to make up your own assortment. And, what do you know, the purple ones and the the green ones from Quality Street were among the components. I bought whole quarters of nothing but purple and green ones. After less than three weeks I was so sick of the bloody things that I never wanted to see one again, and I remain so to this day.

I guess the moral of this little parable is that being allowed to pick out the best bits isn't always such a good idea, because once you're sick of the best, what hope is there for the rest? The effect seems to be irreversible too; innocence once lost can never be regained. I just can't get excited about searching for purple ones once I've learned that I can buy a hundredweight of them.

For some reason this lesson pops into my mind whenever I read about our multimedia future in which the new digital technologies will allow us individually to choose exactly what information we want to consume. Actually you don't even need to wait for the coming of the Superhighway to see the pick 'n mix effect at work. Just observe any group of teenagers watching a video and you'll see why the fast forward button is always the one that wears out first - they like to skip all the boring bits (ie. plot, scene setting, characterisation) and jump straight to the next splatter action. The rewind button gets occasional use too, repeating the splatter ten or so times before skipping to the next one.

Movie and ad makers observe this behaviour and tailor their products accordingly, by omitting the 'boring' bits in advance and serving up movies that are non-stop splatter. Once you get bored with this the only place left to go would be to videos of real executions, but of course no-one would stoop that low...

The most articulate advocate of the new media revolution is Nicholas Negroponte, head of the famous Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Negroponte prophesies the end of our current broadcast TV system, where everyone watches the same programs at the same time, and its  replacement by a fully personalised TV which lets you watch what programs you want, when you want to ("Prime time is My time".) This change will be brought about by the cable and satellite TV companies using fully digital video delivery systems. Every home will have a two-way broadband (ie. around 2 Mbytes/sec) link to the information network - the return channel, or 'back-channel' as it's known in the trade conveys your commands back to the service provider. The box that sits on top of your TV set  will contain a powerful PC that manages the whole business of displaying what services are available and transmitting your requests. Negroponte's point is that once that much distributed intelligence is in the network, it becomes possible to run software agents to assemble customised programmes for you; one agent might filter out subjects that bore or upset you (eg. all BBC1 sitcoms) while another roams the network looking for bits and pieces to make up a travelog on Turkey (where you're thinking of taking a holiday).  

While I can see the attractions of such a service, I wonder just how long it will take for the Quality Street effect to set in. Still, if it stops me watching so much television that might not be such a bad thing. But enough of these boring technical digressions and back to confectionery. Ackerman's in the Finchley Road does a nice line in hand-made Viennese chocolates, but make sure you buy the assortment box....


CYBERPHOBE OF THE MONTH

A better class of phobe altogether is Thomas K. Landauer, Professor of Psychology at the University of Colorado, whose book "The Trouble with Computers" is published by MIT Press as I'm writing. Landauer presents evidence that all the investment in computers over the last 20 years has resulted in no (ie. null, nada, zip) real improvement in productivity. Most importantly he suggests why this should be so - badly designed software - and proposes new techniques of user-centred design that might help us do better in future. Much more about this soon once I've fully digested the book's contents.