Beyond Calculation: : The Next Fifty Years of Computing

Citation

Boettger, O. (1998), "Beyond Calculation: : The Next Fifty Years of Computing", Information Technology & People, Vol. 11 No. 2, pp. 152-154. https://doi.org/10.1108/itp.1998.11.2.152.1

This book marks the 50th anniversary of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the oldest and most important association of computer science in the broadest sense. At the same time, it is a statement about the changing nature of this field of computer science illustrated by the contributions of prominent scholars such as Donald Norman, John Seely Brown, Terry Winograd, Fernando Flores and Sherry Turkle, among others.

While the beginnings of computing were mainly concerned with hardware (as the name association for computing machinery indicates), this has changed considerably over the last 50 years.

With the rapid development of hardware, software became more and more important in the 1960s and 1970s. Software engineering was an attempt to address the so‐called “software crisis” by managing large software systems according to engineering principles. The main problems of computing were no longer confined to hardware, they also comprised software maintainability, dependability and efficiency.

During the 1980s, usability emerged as one of the main focuses of information technology research and application. With the advent of the personal computer, it was no longer the computer specialist or professional who determined the future of large computing companies but the general public. This change of users led to a stronger emphasis on the design of the human‐computer interface.

By the 1990s, most organisations have moved into using information technology in their day‐to‐day business. Areas such as computer‐supported cooperative work (CSCW) have emphasised the non‐technical issues related to informational technology such as human factors and organisational implications. Large‐scale case studies (e.g. the Lancaster studies on air traffic control) have involved disciplines other than computer science, such as information management, psychology, sociology and strategic management, in the design of information technology.

Despite never changing its somewhat outdated name, the association for computing machinery has taken these developments into account and reacted by introducing numerous special interest groups (SIG) to cover the new areas within computer science. For readers of this journal, the special interest groups SIGCHI (computer‐human interaction) and SIGGROUP (groupwork, formerly office information systems) might be of particular interest.

Denning and Metcalfe’s book is an attempt to both summarise the developments of the first 50 years of computing and to look ahead into the next 50 years. The 23 contributors approach the issue of looking into the future from different disciplinary and methodological perspectives. Some try to predict developments (not without mentioning the difficulties of doing so), whereas others concentrate on today’s main issues in the IT area. Accordingly, the book is divided into three parts: “The Coming Revolution, Computers and Human Identity”, and “Business and Innovation”.

The first part of the book deals with what we might call the technicalities or, in Denning and Metcalfe’s words: “speculations about speeds and sizes of processors, memory, bandwidths, and networks” (p. xvi). The reader is invited to taste the opportunities ahead, to judge the different between “science faction” and science fiction in these accounts of information technology in 2047. John Seely Brown and Mark Weiser’s paper is probably closest to the concerns of the readers of this journal[1].

In their contribution “The Coming Age of Calm Technology”, Weiser and Brown examine ubiquitous computing which is characterised by many computers sharing each of us. This is distinctively different from the mainframe era, when hardware resources were so scarce that many users had to share a mainframe computer, and the PC era in which each user owns their own personal computer. Microprocessors (especially those found in a typical middle‐class home, e.g. in alarm‐clocks, TV remote controls, microwave oven etc.) and the Internet are instrumental in moving computing into this new area because once all these microprocessors get connected to the Internet (and, by doing so, to each other), they form part of a large ubiquitous computing network. Weiser and Brown compare the social impacts of these developments with those of such fundamental technologies as writing and electricity which we have come to take for granted. Ubiquitous computing will be fundamental, too, because it changes basic human relationships (and, thus, cannot be avoided) and it serves as a source of innovation as well as a rethinking of old assumptions.

Weiser and Brown suggest that ubiquitous computing may be a calm technology if the information technology is moved into the periphery (as opposed to the centre, i.e. the focus of our attention). The “Dangling String” is an example of such a calm technology: It represents the load on a computer network through its movement ‐ slow movement stands for a low load on the network, while a wildly dangling string represents a high load of network traffic. Such a dangling string does not take up much space on the user’s screen, nor does it attract the user’s focused attention. By means of calm technologies, users can attune to more things without losing the power to take control by re‐centring (e.g. by looking at the network load more carefully whenever the movement of the string is unusual).

The second part of Denning and Metcalfe’s book, “Computers and Human Identity”, is possibly the strongest indication that computing has indeed moved beyond calculation. The contributions to this part examine that nature of the human‐computer relationship, the human identity and the nature of the border between life and non‐life. While all papers in this part of the book are worth reading for those interested in the social and organisational aspects of information technology, Sherry Turkle’s paper is my main focus in this review.

Turkle reviews the changes that have taken place in the conceptualisation of computers. While they had a clear and stable identity as a calculating machine up to the early 1980s, our image of computers has now changed. Turkle is especially interested in the ways children conceive computers[2]. Children often have unstable and emergent ways of dealing with such issues as “Are computers alive?” The essay describes the increasing complexity of the identities of both humans and machines. No longer is there a clear division between the biological and the mechanical. Turkle develops this examination into thinking about the role of information technology in our lives more generally.

The last part of the book, “Business and Innovation”, has a somewhat unfortunate title, as most of the contributions do not deal with either business or innovation. However, it must have been difficult to find a title for such an eclectic collection of essays regarding the “macro‐issues” of information technologies today. Rather than highlighting a particular contribution, I confine myself to a list of the topics of the essays: threads to security and privacy, the politics of large IT corporations, the ecology of cyberspace, leadership, the economy of presence, and the dynamics of innovation.

In summary, I strongly recommend this book to everyone who is interested in information technology and its future. This truly interdisciplinary collection, with all authors writing beyond their own subject areas, is an opportunity for the reader to catch up with the main issues of computing in the broadest sense. The language is clear and understandable for non‐specialists. The book is carefully edited and has a helpful index. The only drawback could be the way of referencing which is unfamiliar for those who do not usually read computer science books and journals. Nevertheless, this is a commendable book for the 50th anniversary of the Association for Computing Machinery, and for computing itself.