A ticket to the future

Peter Leyden

This project began in July 1994 with marching orders from the top editors: Seek out the best minds in the country and figure out the future. The idea was to step back from the flurry of stories on new computer technologies and the so-called information superhighway and put these developments into better context, giving the big picture.

I had little idea of the full historical dimensions of the story, or that I'd get the chance to chronicle what many see as the juncture between two eras -- the Industrial Age and the Digital Age.

This project evolved into an attempt to show a first draft of what the Digital Age will be like. It's what futurists call a "scenario," an integrated vision based on a sound understanding of current trends and thorough reporting and analysis. In many ways, it's a reinterpretation of the present. And we're not predicting the future -- no one can. But we hope to offer a tangible, intellectually stimulating vision that readers can embrace or reject, build on or tear apart. It is meant to be the beginning of a discussion within our community about our collective future.

We're doing a lot of new things here and bending some traditional journalistic rules. This project takes a strong point of view, much like the emerging genre of online journalism, and acts as a catalyst for a community to address fundamental issues, much like the genre of public journalism. It's a fusion of both: our version of what some call "Way New Journalism."

The project is built on more than 50 in-depth interviews with many of the key people who are best positioned to give insights into the coming Digital Age, plus about 50 books on the subject.

But the insights of a dozen people interviewed had a major influence on the shape of this project: Don Norman, Apple Fellow at Apple Computer Co.; Nicholas Negroponte, founder and director of the MIT Media Lab; George Gilder, economist; Peter Schwartz, a futurist and president of Global Business Network; Alvin and Heidi Toffler, futurists; John Seely Brown, director of Xerox Corp.'s Palo Alto Research Center; Kevin Kelly, editor of Wired magazine; Marc Porat, chief executive officer of General Magic; Paul Saffo, director of Institute for the Future; Peter Hutchinson, head of Public Strategies Group and Minneapolis school superintendent, and Larry Walker, president of Knowledge Management of Bloomington, Minn.

These stories are a synthesis of the year's worth of reporting, and they are primarily in my voice. They don't have a lot of the usual attribution or counterpoints. As such, these stories may not always give credit where it's due. But then, no one can take the blame for the passages but me.

Peter Leyden
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Peter Leyden, 36, is the Star Tribune's information technologies reporter. A native of St. Paul, he has been with the newspaper since 1990 and covered the urban affairs beat before his current assignment. He has also worked as a special correspondent in Asia for Newsweek magazine and several newspapers and as a reporter at the Hartford (Conn.) Courant and Birmingham (Ala.) Post-Herald. He has master's degrees in journalism and comparative politics from Columbia University, and a degree in intellectual history from Georgetown University. He lives with his wife and 2-year-old daughter in south Minneapolis. He can reached at leyden@longboom.net via e-mail.
These pages were constructed and designed by Rakesh Agrawal and Jamie Hutt. The newspaper pages and graphics were designed by Pai, with Sid Jablonski, under the supervision of graphics editor Tim Campbell. Jeff Wheeler was the photographer. Librarian Sylvia Frisch provided research assistance. Kelly Maynard was the copy editor.
The project was supervised and edited by Bill Loving, assistant city editor, with Ron Meador, assistant managing editor/special projects.

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