Dear Everybody

 

Perhaps not all of you are aware, but IAPR is not only an affiliate organization of independent national societies, but is itself an affiliate member of a larger organization called the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP). As the newsletter editor, I regularly receive the newsletter of IFIP which I scan for items which might interest the readers of this newsletter. I read with interest in the latest issue of the IFIP newsletter a news item which I found perhaps a little disturbing: the world's first paper-less conference was held last year in Australia. Extracts are re-produced on page 8. Panic! Is that the end of conferencing? Shall we all start sending our presentations to a mailing list of interested people in a multimedia CD-ROM, who will browse through them at their pace, come back through the Internet for comments and thus advance the frontier of Science without the extra expense of banquets, airfares, etc? Will our sponsors catch up on the idea and stop approving money for travelling? Panic! Panic! Shall we start having teleconferences without ever leaving the four walls of our offices and our computer screens? More panic! More panic!

 

Perhaps, that is the shape of things to come. At the moment, however, if you read the article more carefully, you will see that there was actually a meeting where people held discussions on short talks they gave and the multimedia presentations they had prepared. Nevertheless, it will not surprise me in the least if the bleak picture I painted above will come sooner or later as the issue of money comes in. Part of the article, which I did not reproduce here, contained the interesting item of information that it has been calculated that it costs less to educate a student using multimedia technology than conventional methods. When such ideas catch up, according to my opinion, will be the beginning of the human race losing a major means of communication: the body language. It is believed that 60% of human communication is not verbal. True, this 60% includes pictures which a computer can reproduce, but it mainly includes the body language which no computer can reproduce. It includes the eye contact and the gestures of the teacher/lecturer which no multimedia course will use. The skill of conveying intricate information by these means will gradually diminish as it will not be passed from teacher to pupil and on. But money rules the world! Alarmist? Perhaps!

 

At the moment, however, things proposed in our immediate concern are much more mild in nature: there have been some voices in IAPR who would like this newsletter to go fully electronic. "It is too expensive!" "We chop trees down!" What do you think? Please drop me a line if you have views on the matter either way. Shall we become another Vision-list or pixel-volume or perhaps just the IAPR listo-volume?

 

Maria Petrou