University Times

The best-prepared people for the evolving digital “brave new world” are not technology experts, but those with a liberal arts education, asserted an Internet expert on campus last week.

According to newly honored College of General Studies legacy laureate David H. Holtzman, Internet pioneers, including himself, were disproportionally liberal arts majors. As manager of the Internet’s master root server during the late 1990s, Holtzman oversaw the growth of the commercial Internet from 500,000 domain names to more than 20 million.

Holtzman led an Oct. 21 panel discussion focused on the nexus between technology and society titled “The Future of Technology and the Liberal Arts,” which included Pitt faculty, staff and student invitees, as well as local industry representatives.

“If you look at emerging technologies,” Holtzman said, “they are not emerging in the sense that they are new, they’re emerging in the sense of how they’re used, of their applications, things like Instant Messenging, chatrooms and on-line forms, for example.”

Internet communication has created the need to develop an on-line persona, he said. “This is not role-playing, like dressing up for Halloween; it’s actually part of your personality. I collaborate with many people I’ve never met. Nobody knows how much money you have, or where you went to school or whether you look like J-Lo.”

In other words, people take people at face value, without the actual face. “In an on-line social setting, the only way to express yourself is by using your skills in the language: metaphors and similers, allegory, telling stories, writing well, comunicating cross-culturally and cross-disciplinary. These are fundamentally liberal arts skills.”

Holtzman added that techies who cannot communicate well suffer in the Internet marketplace.

Communication department professor Henry Krips played devil’s advocate to Holtzman’s assertions. “I’m concerned that if we accept your logic, people will drift away from the sciences, and surely we want some middle ground. The career trajectory you’re painting would seem to imply that the future for a researcher, for a techie, is low down on the totem pole with philosopher kings on top.”

Sheila Wells Rathke, assistant provost for strategic and program development, said, “We need a hybrid [solution]. In business marketing, the biggest issue is that the tech-side and the language side can’t speak to each other. We need to find the intersection of language to merge the two. The model should be: If you gravitate in this direction, you still need this skill [and vice versa].”

“What I’m suggesting,” Holtzman replied, “is that students don’t have to go into the sciences, or go to law school or business school, simply to get ahead, something a lot of people have believed for a long time. If you tell people you have a liberal arts background, usually the very first comment is: What are you going to do with it?”

He said that while getting a first job may be more difficult for such graduates, the education and the acquired skills are better suited for career flexibility.

“The scientific concepts in almost every discipline, if presented effectively, can be picked up without understanding the underlying math: If you want to read about evolutionary biology you don’t have to be a biologist,” Holtzman said. “The fact that you can’t get through calculus bars you from most of the sciences and that’s a problem.”

Other observations by Holtzman at the discussion included:

* “The key profession in the next 20 years will be marketing. There are very few economic differentiators any more and the purest differentiator these days is marketing,” he said. “If you go to Circuit City, for example, you can’t tell the difference between TV sets; it’s what they tell you the difference is, which is marketing.”

* The Internet has launched the creation of a new social construct: “on-line relationships that have a certain strength, character and attributes that are different. People are just different on-line, not only aggressive, some are submissive.”

* The Internet has elucidated generational differences. “With Instant Messaging, we now see the idea that it’s OK to be 100 percent in touch at all times, and that that’s a desirable thing,” said Holtzman who is in his late 40s. “I don’t want to be bothered ad hoc at any time of the day. I want to pick when I have a communication. I want control of my life to that extent.”

He added, “We see a new personality deficiency that is starting to appear as a result of technology: The person who thinks you really want to know everything they’re doing all day. ‘I woke up this morning and had Pop Tarts, only they weren’t the usual Pop Tarts, they were chocolate Pop Tarts. Do you think I should eat more chocolate Pop Tarts?'”

And in the IM culture, it’s considered rude to not answer, he pointed out. Holtzman’s children even have used IM from one floor of the house to another, he said, insteaad of face-to-face or oral contact. “I’ve dubbed this generation, ‘Generation IM.'”

Pitt faculty member and former dean of the School of Information Sciences Toni Carbo decried the abbreviated language form of IM. There is a special Instant Messaging shorthand that sometimes sneaks into students’ formal academic work, where it is inappropriate, she said.

Holtzman said, “My theory is that Internet shorthand is a dialect, something Americans are quick to adopt. The way this generation uses it seems to go beyond the Internet. I don’t think that will go away.”

* The Internet is breaking down national boundaries, Holtzman said. “On-line communication goes beyond national boundaries, creating a cultural similarity,” he said.

As evidence, Holtzman observed that young people in Newfoundland, Canada, “dress the same as kids in Manhattan or in Nebraska. That was not true when I grew up here in Pittsburgh. We were on about a two-year culture delay from New York. That cultural latency is disappearing for everyone who is wired.”

* The Internet has replaced traditional monopolistic distribution channels with many more, easily accessible products, Holtzman said. “There used to be a retail niche, products were high volume or low volume. Cosmetics and beauty projects used to have 20-some years of brand loyalty, sometimes more. Now there’s less and less brand loyalty, much more churn.”

This presents a dilemma for advertisers: Do they track a generation with their products, adapting their appeal, or do they dump them and target the new generation?

“VH1 tracks boomers as they get older; MTV discards people every five or six or years and goes for new youth. It’s a conscious distinction,” Holtzman said. “Icons like Ronald McDonald or Disney haven’t really changed. Those companies use icons and wrap something new around it. [For consumerism] what that means is that a trademark is way more valuable than a patent.”

Another example of marketing’s influence is in entertainment, Holtzman said. “One of the things America is good at is exporting cultural icons, whether it’s one-word people like Madonna, or whether it’s reality TV, creating these Andy Warhol/15-minute people like they’re being manufactured in a factory. ‘American Idol’ is a great example. It’s all marketing.”

* The Internet has changed the political process. “”The swift boat [controversy] happened out of nowhere. We’re seeing quick mobilization on a issue,” with the opposing side mobilizing equally fast in reaction, he said. “This is not democratization, but identifying extremely fast-moving trends, right or wrong. There is a high value attached to the speed: A stock-ticker that’s 20 minutes old is free, but a real-time stock ticker costs $400-$500 a month. (And one that predicts stocks 20 minutes in advance is “priceless,” he joked.) “In the digital age, opinion is way more valuable than content. Anybody can tell you the news. We need a filter. We need someone who can tell you what to make of the news.”

A New Jersey teenager made $1 million in the late ’90s merely by starting rumors on the Internet about companies’ stocks and personnel. “This power should not be taken lightly. Somebody could disrupt the political campaign or the stock market,” Holtzman said.

“Perception is important. A politician often has one little shot at reaching people, which is why I think politicians repeat these supercilious snotty messages over and over that have no bearing on what going on in the world, like Bush saying Kerry is the most liberal senator.

“People don’t fact-check. The average American takes things at face value. If it’s said on television or on the Internet, it must be true.”

-Peter Hart