■ antiques WELCOME In My Opinion Driving forward ord has just unveiled a new dashboard console with three digital screens. A 4.2-inch screen gives info about the car, the fuel level and such like; a similar one displays things like the name of a cell phone caller or the title of the digital song file being played; and in between them, just above the gear shift, is an eight-inch touch screen with Wi-Fi capability that displays maps, Web pages and email. There’s a port to plug your keyboard into and a couple of USB ports for your laptop or whatever. You are actually driving around in a computer to which Ford has added an engine and wheels. “Cars are going to become the most immersive consumer electronics device we have,” said Michael Rayfield, a chip-maker. “Customers are expecting more and more,” said Mathias Halliger of Audi, “especially business people who expect to find in the car what they find in their smart phone.” (New York Times, 1/6/10) It’s all part of our world of non-stop connectedness: wherever I am, wherever it is, whenever I want; I can be connected to it. We are always-everywhere in touch with all the information we could ever need, as well as mega-million bits of it that are totally useless to us. I’m reminded of the New Yorker cartoon of the man with a laptop saying to his wife “You gotta help me stop looking up stuff I don’t actually care about.” Given that this is the world, where on earth do antiques fit? Not all of us live in that world, not yet, anyway, but we do want to sell our antiques to people who do: We do want our digitized images to show up on Ford’s dashboard. Aren’t you going to grin delightedly when you first read of a fender-bender caused by the driver who couldn’t take his eyes off the nineteenthcentury whirligig displayed above his gear shift? But to be fair, the web functions are disabled when the car is moving – which in Boston is not all that often. F Who’s driving? In the world of mobile, always-on connections, the consumers of information are in the driving seat – metaphorically speaking, though Ford is making it literal. They no longer receive information like couch potatoes in front of the TV: They know the information they want and they know the information sources that are relevant to them; they are active searchers for information, not passive receivers. In the pre-digital age it was the senders of information who controlled the communication process; now it is the receivers. Our digital world has two factors that human beings have never before experienced. The first is the open availability of a universe of information. Before this age, information was always controlled by authorities or experts. The early church kept the Bible in Latin so that priests could control the information-flow from it; social elites opposed education for workers and women because they didn’t want subordinated groups getting information for themselves. If you controlled information, you had power; if you didn’t, you lost power. The internet has ended the ability of elites to control the flow of information – ask the governments of China or Iran. Coming closer to home, this means that customers are now in charge of the information-flows that disseminate our antiques across the internet. Today’s customers are hunters who, when it suits them, go searching for information and good sources. Here they use the second factor unique to the digital age: The search function. Searching has put the consumers of information into the driving seat. We are the only human beings in history to have both a Google and a universe of instantly searchable information. And that makes our world profoundly different. It also changes our approach to information. Continued on page 50 Page 12 ■ Antiques Journal ■ March 2010