Our goal was to examine three key areas -- technology research, industry concerns and international issues -- as they related to the national information infrastructure and converging technologies. To achieve this goal, we spent our time in one of three ways: listening to panel discussions in conference rooms (and other, more elegant spaces) scattered across Manhattan; sitting on a large tour bus moving from one address to another, or eating very well.

We rarely, however, ate unless we were also listening. For lunch on Monday we had "A Conversation with Anthony Smith."

Tuesday's breakfast at the Century Club was headlined "Public Affairs and Media Studies: A Conversation" with Jeff Greenfield. For lunch we had "Media Criticism" with Ken Auletta. Dinner at the Harvard Club (rounded out with brandy, cigars and comfortably stuffed leather sofas) was with Everett Dennis, the executive director of the media center.

On Wednesday we trekked through the snow to Columbia's Faculty House for a special luncheon honoring media pioneers W. Phillips Davison of Columbia and Leo Bogart, formerly of the Newspaper Advertising Bureau.

The locus of our conference was the Media Studies Center, which occupies the first floor of the journalism building at Columbia University. One wing houses the center's staff and seminar rooms. The other is home to the library and to the offices of the resident fellows.

Below is the technology lab, where, for example, Roger Fidler developed his prototype flat-panel newspaper before heading to Knight-Ridder's media lab in Boulder, Colo. Typically, a lab session runs about two hours. Our group hurried through in only one (some of us could have spent dozens) on our Tuesday afternoon there.

Our overview of media technologies included a look at the on-line service Prodigy, a local Internet interface, Fidler's project (at which, we heard, Dow Jones is taking a close look), and the new Newsweek CD, which is issued quarterly.

The CD, which contains material not published in the magazine, is interactive: Users can click on a part of the screen -- say, a word in the text -- to explore a topic in greater detail. Clicking activates a video complete with sound.

The Internet was a prime topic Wednesday morning in a discussion hosted by NBC titled "NBC News and the Internet: Implications for the Information Highway." Joe Harris, former NBC East Coast media sales manager cum born-again technophile, raved about the potential of Internet for commercial enterprise.

Harris sees the Internet as a pathway to a potential new audience. In December 1993, NBC set up an e-mail address for responses from viewers of two documentaries. After the first, an overview of the communications revolution, NBC received 6000 to 8000 responses. After the second, on violence, it received several thousand more.

NBC has stored the responses, but for now seems unsure what to do with them. Several students in our group were planning to work with the Freedom Forum to coordinate a content analysis project. In the meantime, the salesman-cum-technophile has turned consultant, and would happily have recruited any one of us to his cause.

At other panel discussions, we found Harris's gung-ho tone resonating among the industry types. But some were more cautious and, perhaps, more thoughtful.

We were all a little surprised when Richard MacDonald, investment banker and former Center fellow, asked us during his panel discussion -- on "Media Research and the Information Highway: Setting a Research Agenda" -- who's in charge here?

"These issues are often technically and legally fascinating," MacDonald said. "But who's minding the store on policy issues -- who has a voice in Washington?"

MacDonald was "centrally involved" in the failed TCI transaction with Bell Atlantic, so he was believable when he told us, "There are big firms and big money involved -- ubiquitous, powerful and competitive. But who's asking the social policy questions?

"I have a fear of asking these after it's too late. Academics have to ask these questions in a direct and unconflicted way. The numbers may look compelling and the technology may look fixed as the MBAs flash their cash flow charts. But these are still illusory.

"People have to stand up and have the backbone to ask the social policy questions when no one knows. There are lots of shenanigans going on," MacDonald continued. "Corporations may think about these issues, but personal incentive pushes them in particular directions -- you can't pursue these questions within the context of hunting and gathering.

"The conservation of wealth pushes these people," MacDonald said, verbally waving a yellow flag. "And the move is toward reducing universal access on new services, not to providing access to less profitable areas."

Technological convergence isn't all that's happening. This became clear as we worked our way through the questions with the panelists brought in to discuss them.

Topic: As we develop new, extended technologies, we simultaneously accelerate the possibilities for blurring distinctions between reality and fantasy, between entertainment and news, between trying to reach an audience and trying to sell to it, and between social responsibility and commercial interest.

We are presented with the need to make meaning of those categories and try to guess the consequences of seeing these boundaries shift. Panelists looked to the past to try to make sense of the new.

"We constantly lose respect for old technologies as new ones develop," Anthony Smith said in his keynote address, "Fantasy and Reality in Moving-Image Technologies: A Psychological History of the Media." "But as we study the evolution of information technologies, we must also hold onto the strands of social, psychological and human history that lie behind them."

Said John Carey, director of Greystone Communications, who sat on the panel with MacDonald, "We faced a similar period at the turn of the century, but it occurred over 30 to 40 years. We've now compressed and sped up the same innovation to about five years.

"There is the problem of sorting it out. And there's no easy solution. Just more technology. I predict an anti-technology movement."

Smith later pointed out that "new technologies de-legitimize the old. For example, TV is ceasing to be an invincible spear carrier for reality. The Rodney King beating appeared on television, but it did not convince everyone that they had seen a piece of reality.

"The realist image is being delegitimized, and there is a sense of loss of conviction in the images of TV, both as an institution and a technology."

But it isn't only TV whose legitimacy is threatened. Will the consequences of TV's delegitimization extend to all screen-based news media? As newspapers attempt to compete with television for advertisers, will economics put pressure on serious print organizations to emulate the docudrama or tabloid television formats?

If current technologies make it possible to distort an already weak sense of American history, what happens as we bring those values to the possibility represented by new technologies, especially as print converges with broadcast and video?

In the print world, we've known for years about the technological capacity for photographic manipulation and enhancement. When I saw my first Scitex demonstration years ago, it was understood that photo enhancement was a tool for advertising.

As we prepared to leave New York, the Center's staff walked in smiling over a photo on the cover of New York Newsday. The computer-generated image showed Tonya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan as a happy duet on ice in a pre-Olympic, post-beating pose.

This wasn't an example of photo enhancement, it was reality manipulation. It's an inconsequential example on some levels, but if newspapers are staking their future in part on a reputation for credibility, the repercussions of a casual attitude can ultimately have much larger consequences than anyone is bargaining for. Reputations have been lost for even the appearance of impropriety.

In other words, we could be screwed by our own promiscuity.

Perhaps the bottom line is that we have to be careful not to let the excitement of technological potential distract us from social responsibility and the importance of content in order to preserve the future well-being of both the industry and society.

As J. Herbert Altschult, professor at Johns Hopkins University and a former editor at the New York Times, said in his first-day presentation, "If news equals entertainment, what meaning does that have for the First Amendment? Should we, perhaps, reconsider it?"

In a Monday round table, participants considered some related questions:

In that case, she asked, "What will the 'local news' be? How will it change from our ideas of the church supper menu, school board votes, and the discussion of the values of those votes? And if newspapers don't address those issues, who will?"

The panel discussions were useful. For many of us, they served as a springboard for the most rewarding part of the seminar -- the round table discussions among seminar participants, moderated by members of the Center's staff.

People spoke about current projects, and of work that would come out of this seminar. Most of all, panelists and participants asked questions, questions designed to bring about an open exchange between industry and social scientists.

Some were specific to the news media industry:

But others were far broader-- alien to the newsroom mind, familiar to the academic:

The Freedom Forum, perhaps agreeing with those who argue that communication technologies can and do change the world we live in, strives for a holistic way to approach the role of communication in society.

The Media Studies Center seminars provide a platform, hopefully more than temporary, where mass media practitioners and scholars may explore questions that spring from one issue -- how democracy and technology will converge.

The answers are still out there.

-- L. Carol Christopher

From THE COLE PAPERS, April 1994, Copyright (c) 1994, All Rights Reserved.