September 2003
Settling the Last Frontiers
by Jan Michels, WSBA Executive Director
This issue of Bar News explores some of the new tools and adaptations to the "new" time, space, reality, and value paradigms. The information age has altered these paradigms in both predictable and unintended ways.
Time
Twenty years ago I read an article about globalization and how the only remaining "frontier" was the time between 2 a.m and 5 a.m. The hallmarks of this unsettled frontier included few inhabitants; lack of agreed protocols and conventions; quiet, even silence; and rugged self-sufficiency. The early settlers of this frontier were airline and janitorial staff, and truck drivers. But the old paradigm of doing business only during "working hours" has now transformed to 7x24 availability. There is no "dark" anymore; all hours are game for industry, internationalism, teleworking, and net commerce.
The other shift in the time paradigm is the speed of connections and responses. In "Internet time"—a common idiom for this new speed—everything is speeded up. The time it would take the human mind to process and decipher the genetic code, for example, is hundreds of thousands of hours. In Internet time, and with massive computing power, this processing time can be shrunk to minutes. We have come to expect shorter time for responses to e-mail; we get impatient if it takes us more than three clicks to mine information from websites; and we carry cell phones to stay connected at all times.
Space/Place
You no longer have to travel there to be there. You can shop stores around the globe, participate in eBay auctions, watch wars being fought in real time, and conduct live sessions with clients and customers across the continent.
Blurring the space paradigm raises new concerns. Previously, the inherent privacy protections related to having to go to the record at specified work hours posed an access barrier to otherwise public documents. When public documents such as court-case filings, tax records, and land-use records can be accessed as readily as late-night entertainment from the couch, our perception of privacy alters. But there are good sides to this shift, too. Many lawyers have begun to practice from remote locations, clients don't necessarily have to "come to the office," and business doesn't have to wait until all parties can be in the same place at the same time.
Reality
In a fantastic story of the future by William Gibson, Idoru, a rock star falls in love with an idoru—a computer-generated virtual person. My favorite line from this 1997 book is said by an incredulous friend of the rock star, who observes, "She was so comely, so complete, and so beautiful that it was hard to believe that she was simply a data set." A recent issue of Scientific American magazine carried an article about the movie industry's ability to computer-generate an actor, a synthespian, to complete a movie scene when the "real" actor met an untimely demise.
The July 2003 issue of Discover described how to create an avatar, an electronic representation of oneself suitable for communication on the Internet. Avatars can meet other avatars in virtual space and be programmed to express a wide variety of expression and emotion. Virtual-reality glasses allow life-like, three-dimensional exploration of houses, race courses, vacation spots, and technical designs which really exist only as date files, without any existence in reality!
Value
Raw information is everywhere for the finding. Anyone sitting at a terminal can learn how to book airline reservations, preliminarily diagnose medical conditions, check relevant regulations, read laws, and troubleshoot mechanical failures. Parroting facts and information has decreased in value, similar to how calculators replaced the need to add and subtract by hand. Electronic "thinkers" such as decision grids, search engines, and neural networks can walk nonmedical persons through sets of symptoms and point to potential medical conditions. New public legal education websites walk nonlegal persons through raw-data choices that lead them to possible legal-problem diagnosis.
These tools saturate us with a calculus for determining how raw data fits together to pose conclusions. We used to require middle-persons/interventionists, interpreters, and information compilers to get us information relevant to our situation—now all we require are telephone trees, search engines, and decision grids. "Value," which once meant personal service and information brokering, has been replaced by the attitude of "help yourself," and the ease of convenience, availability, and "anywhere/anytime." Value now resides in judgment, imagination, creativity, and intuition.
Conclusion
Intuition and judgment are now a lawyer's commodity, and this commodity is traded in the new time, space, reality, and value paradigms. Clients come in with increased information and their own research about their situation, often gleaned from the Internet and considered by them to be fact. They want Internet-time response and want it at all hours. They often don't want to come to the office. The legal practice of the future will likely need to be much more nimble, accessible, and responsive.
Futurists suggest that the revolution from the service age to the information age started in the late 1980s and will continue through the early decades of the 21st century. Most Americans are halfway there. Resisting the change is futile. Understanding the fundamental shifts may help us adapt to these changes and understand the 90s generation's ideas of time, space, reality, and value. Adapting is a sign of survival!
Back to table of contents >>
