ON TECHNOLOGY

Which would you rather do--read a book or stare at a computer screen? For most people, it is physically leas taxing to get their information the traditional way.

It is therefore not surprising that information distributed online must be packaged--streamlined to be digestible, Moreover, the online packaging must add some, value to the information in order for it to be worthwhile.

Otherwise, what incentive is there fore people to use a medium which is harder on their eyes.

One can stare at the glorified light bulb known as a monitor for only so long before the eye muscles begin to retaliate. And therefore, when people ask me for advice on the purchase of a new computer, I usually emphasize that the monitor they choose be ergonomically sound.

Yesterday, The Crimson announced that it was going "online," joining the many periodicals now available in cyberspace. The product is accessible via the Harvard gopher and is updated daily with selected articles from the paper.

The growing inclination among publishers to offer Information online is natural, as the computers used to compose the text of a publication can often export these data to an online service with little or no additional hardware. Periodicals are especially suited to the online medium since they are updated regularly.

Will the public embrace such online publications.

Not for long time--imagine having to read the morning newspaper off of a screen at breakfast.

Perhaps in the distant future of "cyberpaper" will replace the tree based variety as a medium for printed material. But I believe that this will not happen until such cyberpaper could be endowed with the look and feel of the free-sniff. The convenience and disposability (sorry, environmentalists!) of the traditional medium for outweigh any advantages a 1990s' cyberpaper could possibly have.

The only reasonable value of online publication lies in the fact that the new medium has the potential of being a universal source for archive retrieval. That is, rather than serving as the front end for the distribution of information, online publications will always be available as a supplemental resource to traditional means of communication.

Consider the screen that many people have no problem looking at during breakfast today--the television screen. We don't have to read text or graphics from it is order to digest the information it provides, so the eyestrain factor is minimized.

We can, however, choose to read the screen directly when Willard Scots introduces the weather map. Similarly, we can choose to read the sports scores when they finish on screen.

The future of online publication lies in this interactivity. Perhaps a news story on the 6 o'clock news interests us; say, Mario Cuomo drops out of the New York gubernatorial race. Even if we live in California, we should be able to press a button on our remote control and instantly get reprints of all the New York Times's related articles from the past week. And that means true reprints, replete with original text, layout and graphics, not just printer-dumped text output.

We would likely need to be charged a few pennies for this service (no more no less, or the whole idea won't fly); could be added to our monthly cable or telephone bill.

Beyond online publishing we've not even grazed the surface of broadband media in the discussion. Not to mention that our example is currently impossible, as the New York Times is entangled in a legal spaghetti that hinders them from setting up shop on the Infobahn then a limited manner.

For now, however, we can cheerfully peruse the online publications available via gopher, the World Wide Web and commercial services, considering them as nothing more then what The Crimson rightfully calls its new online edition--an "experiment."

Eugene Koh "97, is Remote Media Services Director, America On Line, Inc. His weekly column on computer issues appears in The Crimson on Tuesday.