Having led the way with cellphones, the Finns are making the Net move. Vic Keegan visits virtual Helsinki for a vision of the future
In the middle of Helsinki’s bustling town centre, by the Lasipalatsi (Glass Palace), there is what looks like a telephone booth made of pinewood.
Go inside the kiosk and you are faced with a screen, a World Wide Web camera and a microphone. This is the digital age’s version of Speakers’ Corner in Hyde Park in Britain, where people are encouraged to broadcast what is on their minds to politicians or anyone in the world prepared to watch or listen on the Internet.
A little further down the same road there is an unusual bookshop where you can order books that are difficult to get. I chose what was translated to me as William Shakespeare’s The Storm.
There is just time for a cup of coffee. By the time you have finished drinking it, the text has been downloaded from the Internet, printed and bound in the next room in an attractive cover.
It doesn’t stop there. Helsinki is poised to confirm its credentials as the world’s most wired (and unwired) city with its Arena 2000 project. This will give fast broadband access to the Internet (the capacity to transmit data like live video as well as to receive it) to most of its citizens.
The city is also well advanced in its plans to build a “virtual” Helsinki on the Internet. This will enable citizens to do anything from tracking the nearest buses or taxis to ordering pizza.
The brains behind this project is Risto Linturi, the guru attached to Helsinki Telephone, whose own house is an icon of the information age.
As he approaches his home, he aims his console at the door to open it. If someone rings the bell while he is away in, say, Paris, it connects to his cellphone so he can talk to whoever is there and let them in remotely.
We enter the house walking past the control room (containing 300 microchips) through rooms where the lights automatically and unobtrusively turn on and off as we pass.
“The house knows whenever a room is empty,” he says, “so there is no reason to circulate the normal level of air, just minimal.”
When the next generation of “Bluetooth” short-wave wireless technology arrives, he will be able to move from room to room with his favourite music following him through.
He dismisses inevitable comparisons with the $40-million lakeside mansion built for Bill Gates, boss of Microsoft, in Seattle.
Unlike Gates, Linturi doesn’t have digital pictures on his walls on the grounds that the essence of a picture is its originality.
Nor does he make people carry electronic badges to tag their movements. “The kids could accept that the house knows it is occupied as long as it doesn’t know who is in each room.”
The crucial difference with the Microsoft chair is, he says, that the Gates house “would require to know where I am”. In Linturi’s case “the phone knows where my phone is, not the house”.
This is a crucial point to him about whether we are driving the technology or it us. “If the phone knows where the phone is then you are in control. I trust the phone and can always turn it off … It is my ultimate remote controller. No one thinks of it as Big Brother.”
This difference is crucial for Linturi’s emphasis on inclusion. “My view is that video on demand is not important. My most important contribution is that everyone can transmit.”
This sets the Finnish inclusive model (which gave the world Linux, an operating system belonging to everyone) apart from the United States hierarchical one.
But what will people do with broadband transmission? Students, he says, won’t need to go the college if it is raining and doctors in remote places will have face-to- face discussions (via the screen) with experts or with their patients.
Working from home would also be a shared experience because you could see and talk to colleagues in the office on your screen.
The virtual city will take inclusion further. It is a three-dimensional model of the city on the Internet. When it comes on stream next year, citizens will be able to move down the virtual streets and stop at a house to telephone the dweller or order food at a restaurant.
You will be able to see where the nearest taxis and buses are because they will be tracked live.
When cellphones have micro-miniaturised locational devices (as they will very soon) parents will know exactly where their children are. You could even track the progress of your pizza delivery.
But isn’t there a downside to all this? Isn’t the cellphone revolution divisively encouraging horizontal relations between youngsters so their parents no longer knew what is going on?
“Kids have always been able to hide what they have been doing. Cellphones bring families together because you can keep control of where they are.
“In companies they [phones and e-mail] enable everyone to be involved in decisions. It breaks hierarchies, giving more power to expert groups.”
Cellphones have also changed behaviour patterns. “You can leave for a meeting and not know where you are going. People are herd animals, but now much better connected to the herd.”
In corporations, decision-makers can be reached immediately. In Finland it has happened more than in other countries and subordinates give advice to their bosses on running their businesses.
“In this culture,” says Linturi, “if bosses want to be important then they should leave their phone open or be left out.”
E-mail, he adds, has enabled people to get rid of the limitations of time and space because you can handle voicemail and e-mail when it suits you. Colleagues no longer have to be on the same corridor or follow the same deadlines. The world is rapidly changing.
And what Helsinki does today …
ENDS
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