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CNN/Time

Vision 21

Aired February 13, 2000 - 9:00 p.m. ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

ANNOUNCER: CNN & TIME.

Tonight, a special edition of CNN & TIME: "Visions 21," questions for the next century.

Will women still need men?

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DAVID POPENOE, SOCIOLOGIST: We have a growing number of women who are choosing not to have the guy but just to have the sperm.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

ANNOUNCER: What will we laugh at?

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JANEANE GAROFALO, ACTRESS: You know what I think in the future is that we're actually going to laugh at funny things.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

ANNOUNCER: Will there still be teenagers?

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DR. EUGENE BARESEN, ADOLESCENT PSYCHIATRIST: The physical changes of adolescence are occurring earlier and earlier each decade.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

ANNOUNCER: Will we still need classrooms?

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

HOWARD GARDNER, HARVARD PROFESSOR: It's not will computers be important but will schools be able to adjust to them.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

ANNOUNCER: How will we listen to music?

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) MOBY, MUSICIAN: In the future, I do strongly believe that compact discs won't exist and DVDs won't exist and videotapes won't exist and audio cassettes won't exist.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

ANNOUNCER: Will we have any privacy left?

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

CHRISTINE VARNEY, INTERNET CONSULTANT: It's pretty east to imagine the scenario where, you know, your medical information is accessible to potential employers or potential insurance companies.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

ANNOUNCER: A CNN & TIME special: "Visions 21."

From Atlanta, here's Jeff Greenfield and Bernard Shaw.

JEFF GREENFIELD, CO-HOST: Good evening, and welcome to this special edition of CNN & TIME.

BERNARD SHAW, CO-HOST: Tonight we come to you from the year 2025. As you can see, not too much has changed except now absolutely everything is possible over the Internet -- everything, that is, as long as you have a seventh generation neurocyber interface.

GREENFIELD: OK, so there's no such thing as a neurocyber interface and it's not the year 2025. We took a few liberties. This is, after all, our second installment of "Visions 21," questions about this new century. Tonight: How we will live in the foreseeable future based on what we know to be true right now.

SHAW: And what we know right now is that for possibly the first time in human history, making a good living, having and raising a child and enjoying a full life doesn't hinge on the cooperation of the opposite sex.

GREENFIELD: What we're talking about is true independence, freedom of choice, a world where unions between the sexes become completely optional, where our concept of the family is forever changed. It's an especially intriguing proposition for women. Though they still haven't achieved total financial equality, more and more women today can afford a home and a family all on their own. So will women still need men?

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

IRENE DORZBACK: Pick up my e-mail, I guess.

GREENFIELD: It was a pretty good life for Irene Dorzback...

DORZBACK: I met last week with over 20 of the D.C. firms.

GREENFIELD: ... a fulfilling career as assistant dean of New York University law school...

DORZBACK: Can I take you up on that raincheck to go dancing? Friday?

GREENFIELD: ... and an active social life.

DORZBACK: I had a great life. I have a great job, you know, I had a good life in the city and a lot of outside activities. And day to day, if somebody asked me, anyone asked me, I'd say absolutely.

GREENFIELD: But six years ago, she felt something was missing.

DORZBACK: I always knew I wanted to be a mother. There's never a question about it. And I would have done whatever I could do to get there.

GREENFIELD: After 14 donor inseminations and four egg donor cycles ended in failure, Irene decided to adopt.

DORZBACK: This is Rebecca, the best kid on the planet. She is my family.

GREENFIELD: More and more well-educated economically secure women like Irene Dorzback are raising children without the financial or even the biological support of a man. In the process, they're helping to change the definition of the family.

POPENOE: We've of course opened a never-never land of anonymous sperm donors...

GREENFIELD: Rutgers University sociologist David Popenoe has been studying the evolution of the family.

(on camera): In the future, will women still need men?

POPENOE: Nope. We have a growing number of women who are choosing not to have the guy but just to have the sperm.

GREENFIELD: How big a change is that from what -- from the way we might have thought about this, say, two generations.

POPENOE: It's a tremendous change. The process of reproduction has completely changed and the process of economic support of women has completely changed. And how this is all going to play out in the future, of course, is anybody guess. But it's absolutely new in history.

GREENFIELD (voice-over): With more children growing up with parents who will never marry and with a divorce rate of 50 percent, Popenoe worries whether the traditional family will even survive.

POPENOE: The only question is whether this is kind of a shift that we're going to have to make in our lives or if this is going to continue into the future and wipe out marriage entirely.

GREENFIELD: If that happens, Popenoe says, society as a whole will suffer. Beyond what happens to the children, what could happen with all those single men?

POPENOE: One of the problems with having so many single moms, you have to worry about what are the men going to be doing? To have a society with a great number of single men is not something that people should look forward to...

GREENFIELD (on camera): Because?

POPENOE: ... because women are civilizing influences on men.

GREENFIELD: Guy settles down, he doesn't go out drinking with the boys and driving his care home at 90 miles an hour...

POPENOE: Exactly.

GREENFIELD: ... doesn't get in fights in the barroom.

POPENOE: Right.

GREENFIELD: The notion that the guy getting married, the ball and chain?

POPENOE: From a societal point of view, it's everything you want.

GREENFIELD (voice-over): And from society's point of view, he says, the growing number of children raised by single parents is exactly what we don't want.

POPENOE: On the average, kids from single-parent and stepfamilies have two to three times the risk of being a delinquent, drug abuse, having a bad marriage, dropping out of school, you know, on and on.

GREENFIELD: The risks are higher even when the child is raised in comfortable economic conditions, which is not the usual case. In fact, by one estimate nearly three-fourths of single-parent kids will spend at least part of their childhood in poverty.

DORZBACK: Be careful. That's a picture of Rebecca.

GREENFIELD: But what about adopted kids like Rebecca? Popenoe says that's a no-brainer. She's far better off with a single parent than living in a Siberian orphanage.

DORZBACK: You're cold. You were cold.

I'm going to let you stir it.

GREENFIELD: Moreover, Rebecca, raised outside the traditional family that includes mom and dad, is already close to becoming the norm rather than the exception.

DORZBACK: She was in daycare with a two-mommy family, she knows two-daddy families, she knows mommy-daddy family, she knows someone that lives with grandparents. She has seen a lot of different family constellations.

POPENOE: If the present trends continue, you can conceivably create ersatz family members that weren't related. But it's a kind of frightening thought. And again, totally new in history.

GREENFIELD: Arlie Hochschild is a sociologist at the University of California at Berkeley.

ARLIE HOCHSCHILD, SOCIOLOGIST: We'll use this word "family" to refer to married couples with children, single moms and their children, single dads and their children, lesbian families and their children, gay men and their children -- variety of kinds of ways that people come together.

DORZBACK: Hochschild is less concerned with who makes up these new style families than she is with making them work.

HOCHSCHILD: The family isn't a private little sphere. It's surrounded by a community. And there's a lot we could do to strengthen the infrastructure, the ecology around the family. And if we choose to do so, I think there's good news ahead.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I can't believe you. I make you dinner and you don't even give me that necklace? I don't love you anymore.

GREENFIELD: There are efforts under way to reverse the trends on marriage.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Number four, you have nurturing, number five, you have unconditional and number three you have generous.

GREENFIELD: High schools in places like California and Florida have added courses on marriage and relationship skills.

Popenoe is also trying to educate the public about the importance of marriage, but he is not optimistic. In his research, too many young women are telling him they want to be married but don't believe they'll ever find a suitable mate.

POPENOE: They're looking at it as something they've got to be careful about, and they don't ant to be stuck. Many of them say if they don't have a man in their life they'll have a child at age late 30s.

HOCHSCHILD: I think we probably are going to see more women deciding to be single moms by choice. But the question is the "by choice" part. To what extent are women doing this because they really want to be on their own, and to what extent are they doing it because they don't see men who really fit the bill.

GREENFIELD: Irene Dorzback understands that for women like herself, who are single mothers by choice, there will be a day of reckoning with their children.

DORZBACK: I am concerned about the day that Rebecca asks me, who's my daddy? Where's my daddy? Why don't I have a daddy? I'm scared of that. As good a mother as I am, I'm not a daddy.

Clean up. Clean up one toy, and then play with Piglet.

GREENFIELD: So, while Dorzback may no longer need a man in the practical sense, her daughter may.

REBECCA: That's a seal.

DORZBACK: That's right, a seal.

GREENFIELD: And that's good news, according to Hochschild and Popenoe, because in this new century financially independent women like Irene will probably still want a man around.

DORZBACK: I want a husband and a father. I'm not just looking for a father for Rebecca, but, you know, we're open. And she's recruiting pretty heavily, I have to say. She's out there scouting. You know, I can tell. I mean, she loves men.

Get in the stroller.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

GREENFIELD: Here's a semi-educated guess: If women will still want men in the future, then men will probably still want women, no matter how much financial or biological independence is achieved in the 21st century.

SHAW: We'll be back in a moment.

ANNOUNCER: Coming up, the future of funny.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

GAROFALO: I really can't imagine that anyone wouldn't find something funny in the future that was funny today. Do you know what I'm saying?

(END VIDEO CLIP)

ANNOUNCER: When "CNN & TIME: Visions 21" continues.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

CHRIS ROCK, ENTERTAINER: Everybody needs a pre-nup! People think you've got to be rich to get a pre-nup. Oh no. You got 20 million, your wife wants 10, big deal, you ain't starving.

But if you make 30,000...

(LAUGHTER)

... and your wife want 15...

(LAUGHTER)

... might have to kill her.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

GREENFIELD: Comedian Chris Rock takes one of the more recent developments in modern romance to an absurd conclusion. And while it may seem hilarious on-point now, that bit from Rock's stand-up routine, "Bring the Pain," may not even be comprehensible in the decades to come. If Bobby has two dads and Wendy has two moms, if the little ironies and foibles of marriage and partnership drift off into obsolescence, so will one of the cornerstones of humor: which raises this sobering question about the future that we put to comic Janeane Garofalo. What will we laugh at?

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

GAROFALO: You know what I think? In the future, we're actually going to laugh at funny things.

Oh actually, I don't know. I was kidding about that. I don't think anything's going to change, because it's not like we're going to as a group become a lot smarter as the years go by unless some pill is invented in the year in 2000-and-something that you -- that really jumpstarts your cerebral cortex or your brain pan or your, you know, synapses to fire a little more readily or something.

You'll have the old mother-in-law joke, the "we don't have sex anymore, honey, since the kids were born" jokes. It hasn't worked yet, but I think that -- I really think flatulence's day will come in cinema. I've invested a lot of money in it, and it will be from the BBC sound library where we get the sounds from. But there -- in the future, because of the new weightlessness and the new anti-gravity, we're going to have manufacture it. And that's why it'll be so funny in the future.

I really can't imagine that anyone -- you wouldn't find something in the future that was funny today. Do you know what I'm saying?

(END VIDEOTAPE)

ANNOUNCER: Next, from hanging out at the mall...

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JANET CASSIDY (ph), 11-YEAR-OLD: What's up?

(END VIDEO CLIP)

ANNOUNCER: ... to talking on the phone...

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

J. CASSIDY: The image of the carefree wild teenager may be slipping away.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

ANNOUNCER: Growing up fast: the consequences of coming of age in the future, when CNN & TIME continues.

"Visions 21: Questions for the Next Century."

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

SHAW: In John Hughes' coming-of-age film "Sixteen Candles," the humorous and often embarrassing moments faced by every teenager are magnified by star Molly Ringwald as her character's doting grandparents realize in a not-so-subtle way that their little girl is growing up.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP, "SIXTEEN CANDLES")

UNIDENTIFIED ACTRESS: Sam, let me look at you. Fred, she's gotten her boobies.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

SHAW: But if that movie came out today, at the very least you'd have to subtract a few candles from the title. Adolescence used to be associated the last carefree teen years of our lives: a time when we could mess up and not get into too much trouble. But experts say that coming of age is coming faster these days, young people are developing earlier and the pressures of adulthood are felt sooner rather than later.

The question is: Will there still be teenagers?

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

SHAW: Janet Cassidy looks like a teenager.

J. CASSIDY: You can kind of express your feelings with fashion. I like black.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

J. CASSIDY: What? Was it scary?

(END VIDEO CLIP)

SHAW: She sounds like a teenager.

J. CASSIDY: Yesterday, we went to the mall.

My first name is Mary, and I had that for like 10 years and then I got tired up. So now I'm telling people to call me Janet.

Janet's like exotic and unusual.

SHAW: And she has the worries of a teenager.

J. CASSIDY: If you start thinking about it now, then you can make plans and you can be like prepared for college, because if you're prepared for college, then you're like prepared for life.

SHAW: But Janet Cassidy is 11 years old, one of America's children growing up faster every year.

LESLIE BACHUS (ph), JANET'S MOTHER: When I was 11, I was into horses. I would go out and I had a bunch of girlfriends and we would play horses. We did a lot of pretend games. I was not at all into makeup or dressing or any of that kind of stuff.

JANET CASSIDY: ... and two hours.

SHAW (voice-over): Janet Cassidy lives with her parents, Leslie and Greg (ph), and her 14-year-old brother, Steven (ph), in Silver Spring, Maryland.

(on camera): When did this earlier adolescence happen, occur?

L. CASSIDY: I caught a glimpse of my daughter in the bathtub and just suddenly realized that she was physically changing more than I had expected at such an early age.

SHAW (voice-over): While the arrival of their children's adolescence takes almost every parent by surprise, Leslie Baccus is right on one point: Kid's bodies are developing earlier.

Dr. Eugene Baresen (ph) is an adolescent psychiatrist.

BARESEN: The physical changes of adolescence are occurring earlier and earlier with each decade. We see about two months earlier every decade. So girls are developing their periods about two months earlier for every decade.

BACCUS: ... got them a little bit too brown.

SHAW: Baresen says expect more and more children in the future to be like Janet, hitting puberty at ever younger ages. The reason: improved nutrition and health.

BARESEN: How far is the lower limit? I don't think anybody knows that answer.

SHAW: Baresen says society may not be prepared for this phenomenon, kids whose bodies are developing ahead of their minds, and he's concerned that television and now the Internet, with their relentless messages about sex, make growing up more difficult for teens. Janet's parents already discovered their 11-year-old daughter was looking at a Web site showing oral sex.

(on camera): And what did you think when you found out?

BACCUS: Well, I was...

SHAW: Mortified?

BACCUS: ... horrified that it was so easily accessible.

GREG CASSIDY, JANET'S FATHER: Well, try school and library users.

SHAW (voice-over): Leslie and Greg now monitor computer time for their children, but they have another much larger concern that their children are under too much pressure to grow up too fast.

Steven is in 8th grade, but already he is worrying about college, which is why he has taken up the French horn.

STEVEN CASSIDY, JANET'S BROTHER: The French horn is one of the uncommon instruments that not a whole lot of people pick. A lot of colleges, I've heard, will pay full-time scholarships if you come and play in their band and you, like, play something like the French horn, and so I'm just sort of hoping that, that will sort of help me get into a good college.

SHAW (on camera): Has the child been taken out of childhood?

BACCUS: I think childhood has become a lot more organized. I remember vast amounts of time where I would just go out and play, and nowadays the kids have more homework in elementary school, and they have after-school care because more parents work, but they just -- their lives seem to be so much more organized. I don't see them just being allowed to go play.

Maybe you can do some homework, and then practice.

S. CASSIDY: No.

SHAW (voice-over): Dr. Baresen agrees that is what adolescence is supposed to be about, not just the hours of homework that teens like Steven and Janet do everyday, but more time to experiment and grow into the role of adult.

BARESEN: The image of the carefree, wild teenager may be slipping away.

SHAW: Gone, says Dr. Baresen, are the days of James Dean, or even the sort of teenage years that Steven and Janet's parents enjoyed.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Now what happens if I do this?

SHAW: Replaced, he believes, by the pressure to race through adolescence to college.

J. CASSIDY: Forty-five.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Very good under pressure.

BARESEN: So the big piece that's going to be missing as we rush these kids through so fast in their task-oriented achievement fashion is the emotional underpinnings of what the human experience is all about, and that's going to be very bad news for relationships and for society. You can't understand another person's feelings by doing your homework, by mastering a task, by achieving your goals. SHAW: Dr. Baresen worries that as more and more adolescents fail to learn how to balance school and friends, the consequence will be a generation unable, when it reaches adulthood, to balance a career and a home.

BARESEN: Having free time to hang out with kids, to try different things out, that's the way kids can learn who they really are.

SHAW: For Steven, that has been a challenge. Janet has been more successful.

J. CASSIDY: No, I mean where do we go right now?

SHAW (on camera): Who are you trying to impress, yourself or your friends?

J. CASSIDY: Both mainly, because you want to impress yourself because you want to feel good about yourself and have self confidence. But you want to impress your friends also, because they're your friends and you don't want them to think you're a total loser.

SHAW: What about you, sir?

S. CASSIDY: I always try to impress myself mainly because I don't have a whole lot of friends to impress.

SHAW (voice-over): Steven says his focus on succeeding in school is why he doesn't have more friends, so Greg and Leslie are sending him to a psychiatrist, hoping to improve his social skills. The parents and the professor agree, it's tough to be an adolescent these days and getting tougher every day.

(on camera): Would you want to be in their shoes?

BACCUS: No, I don't think so.

G. CASSIDY: I don't know if I'd want to be in their shoes right now.

BARESEN: There is a lot of pressure to have adult models imposed on kids more and more in this society and it's a very scary and potentially dangerous thing. The kids aren't old enough to handle it.

J. CASSIDY: Nowadays there is this idea that you have to be grown up and civilized and sophisticated. You have to get good grades, you have to wear the right clothes, you have to act the right way, you have to have the right hair. You have to do so much more these days.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

SHAW: With young people maturing sooner, the complexities are troublesome. How do we raise these new age teens? More importantly, how do we educate them?

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: People who believe deeply in public education, as I do, are realizing that the old definitions have to change and they have to change rapidly.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

ANNOUNCER: Will we still need classrooms, when "Visions 21" continues.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

SHAW: Welcome back to "Visions 21," a special edition of CNN & TIME.

GREENFIELD: Here is the understatement of the decade: The way we gather knowledge and the way we learn are changing. With high- speed Internet access, CD roms, video conferencing, galaxies of facts and images today are just seconds away.

SHAW: If parents and children can visit the Smithsonian in Washington, or take in the Louvre in Paris without ever leaving home, then will we still need classrooms?

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

(voice-over): It doesn't look like the high school most of us remember. There are no rows of desks, no dress codes...

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: So projectile motion...

SHAW: ... no bell signaling the start or end of class. Students can hold class in the hallway...

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Make sure you have articles on Thursday.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Hi, Trev.

SHAW: ... eat lunch when and where they choose, call teachers by their first names.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Hey, Kate, we don't have to do (UNINTELLIGIBLE)?

(CROSSTALK)

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: It's a very different atmosphere.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: This school definitely prepares you for the future.

SHAW: Francis Parker School in Devens, Massachusetts is a model for the school of the future, founded five years ago by Ted Sizer, former dean of Harvard's graduate school of education.

TED R. SIZER, CHAIRMAN, COALITION OF ESSENTIAL SCHOOLS: People who believe deeply in public education, as I do, realize that the old definitions have to change, and they have to change rapidly.

SHAW (on camera): What is your model of education for the 21st century?

SIZER: My model is very simple, highly focused schools where every youngster's known well, where the families are fully indicted co-conspirators in the education of the children, where there is real authority in the hands of the people at the school level.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: What I want to do today is start talking about (UNINTELLIGIBLE)...

SHAW (voice-over): Parents and teachers will have more say as large educational bureaucracies continue to give way to smaller school systems, to magnet and charter schools like Parker, where lessons are tailored to fit the needs and interests of each student.

MARCIE MULKIE (ph), STUDENT: One of my favorite things is that I can mold my own education a little bit.

SHAW: Sixteen-year-old Marcie Mulkie collaborated with her teachers and parents to create an education plan that reflects her love of drama as well as her curiosity of physics.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

MULKIE: Should we put down our input and output variables?

(END VIDEO CLIP)

MULKIE: It's also a lot more project-based, so it's not, you know, test every Friday, quiz every Tuesday. It's a lot more writer the paper and let's revise it three times, and then it's let's work on a project and do an art piece to finish it.

SHAW: Because 18-year-old Tom Gibson (ph) is interested in computers, his education plan allows him to design a computer system for a homeless shelter.

TOM GIBSON, STUDENT: There's this really big emphasis on learning how to learn rather than just learning: how to take notes, how to research, how to write, how to "how to" basically. And that's all -- to me, that's more important than learning a bunch of facts.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Anime is Japanese animation, and I wanted to make my own Japanese animation.

SHAW: Technology is driving changes in education, revolutionizing what, how and where students learn.

GARDNER: As we look to the future, so much of our learning will take place via the Internet.

SHAW: Howard Gardner is a professor at Harvard graduate school of education. GARDNER: I am quite convinced that the computer, both as a place for people to do their work on, as a work station, and as a place for people to get information will change education fundamentally.

SHAW: With the information highway at their fingerprints, students may not go to school to collect information but to learn how to process it.

GARDNER: The skill is of picking of scientifically, historically, mathematically and artistically -- those are the disciplinary skills which I would put front and center. And particularly, because those are the kinds of things which you'll never learn from a Palm Pilot or from just surfing the Web.

SIZER: It's what the computer tells you, what ideas come out of the computer, how the computer provokes you that's important, just like how books provoke you.

SHAW: The role of the teacher will also change.

GARDNER: I think of the teacher of the future as being less a purveyor of information, because CD-ROMs do that fine, and more an orchestrator of materials, of children with their different strengths and difficulties and learning styles, and of helping kids to work together on problems: something else which you need to have some help on. You can't just do it sitting alone at your terminal.

SHAW: At Parker there are workstations, open areas where students freely work together and exchange ideas.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Initial velocity, which is basically the hypotenuse.

SHAW: There are also no freshman, sophomore, junior or senior classes. Students advance to three levels of learning: not by taking tests or getting grades, but by completing projects.

GIBSON: You have to have a lot of self-discipline to, I guess, succeed here.

SHAW: The advantage for students?

GARDNER: They can work at their own pace. They can pursue their own interests. They can have contact with people who could be mentors. And I think equally important, they can give. They can help other people.

SHAW: With young children exposed to computers and students able to progress at their own pace, it's not inconceivable that some children may begin school as young as age three and head for college by age 10.

(on camera): By the year 2025, will kids go to school as we know the system today, 12 years?

SIZER: Probably not. If we're lucky is that some will go for 14 and some will go for 10, because you take your formal education as long as it takes to demonstrate that you have the intellectual power that the state, that your community, that your family expects.

SHAW (voice-over): At the same time, the availability of technology is allowing more students to learn from home.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We're going to use this one. Mom, we're going to use this one.

SHAW: In the next few years, the number of children home- schooled is expected to double to 3 million.

GARDNER: People will be able to work more at their home will be able to have contact with other kids elsewhere who have the same kinds of talents and skills they do. They won't be sort of stuck with the same 30 kids in a classroom for eight or 12 years.

SHAW: With technology revolutionizing education, the greater concern in the next 25 years may not be that Johnny can't read but that he can't go online.

GARDNER: Unless schools prepare us for an information-rich society, then our youngsters simply won't be prepared for dealing with a world that's here any day now.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: So any questions? This is something...

(END VIDEOTAPE)

SHAW: If our education will be tailor-made in the future, why not our entertainment?

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: You could theoretically be driving in your car and just say to your computer, "Play `Purple Haze' for me." And so it starts playing "Purple Haze." And then you say, "Well, no, just give me the drum from `Purple Haze' and put Billie Holiday's vocals on top of it."

(END VIDEO CLIP)

ANNOUNCER: How will we listen to music, when CNN & TIME continues.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

SHAW: You say you prefer the classics, the Stones and the Beatles, but your kids groove to more contemporary artists like Blink 182. Will you ever find common ground?

This may be the century when the past and present collide on command, at least when it comes to music. By the year 2025, listener and composer may be nearly indistinguishable. Already, musicians are blending new and old. Entertainers like the performer known as Moby, whose taken blues numbers from the 1930s and reinvented them for today.

We asked Moby, in the future, how will we listen to music.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

MOBY: In the future, I do strongly believe that compact discs won't exist and DVDs won't exist and videotapes won't exist and audio cassettes won't exist. Everything will be downloaded instantly.

Music will exist on a hard disk somewhere, and if you want to hear it, it will come off that hard disk. It's basically going to be a combination of, like, the listener becoming the composer and the musician incorporating a lot of the music that's been that's been recorded into the past into original compositions.

Like what I have here are some vocals that were recorded in the early 20th century by a woman named Vera Hall (ph). This is trying to play piano on top of it.

I would imagine that in 30 or 40 years, possibly even sooner, almost everything will be done with voice commands. So you could theoretically be driving in your car and just say to your computer, play "Purple Haze" for me. And so it starts playing "Purple Haze." And then you say, well, no. Just give me the drums from "Purple Haze," and put Billie Holiday's vocals on top of it. So it would do that.

I mean, it's just going to be fascinating. I mean, if something as dynamic and phenomenal as rock'n'roll basically came from combining country and western and rhythm'n'blues, those are two types of music combined. Imagine what sort of amazing things are going to come when people can combine hundreds of different types of music. It might just be cacophonous and awful, but it might be, you know, magical in ways that we can't even conceive of.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

ANNOUNCER: Next, whether you're downloading music or buying a stock, if you're looking over a Web site, it's likely someone is looking over you.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

RICHARD SMITH, PRIVACY ACTIVIST: What used to be, quote-unquote, "anonymous," you know, surfing on the Web now can become identified. And that's got a lot of people very scared.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

ANNOUNCER: Will we have any privacy left?

When CNN & TIME continues.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

GREENFIELD: To many of us, convenience is king. If it's easier to go online for something than it is to go out, well it's likely that we'll confide our credit card numbers and other personal information to the Internet with little more concern than dropping a personal letter or an income tax return into the mailbox.

Well, in fact, whether we know it or not, entire electronic life stories are being tucked away in cyberspace, all in the name of convenience. If this trend continues, will we have any privacy left?

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

GREENFIELD: It is a scene so familiar that it has become part of our daily culture, settling in front of the PC for a few hours of work or fun, and all of it in the privacy of your own home.

From his home in suburban Atlanta, Terence Flynn (ph) sends e- mail, banks, shops or just surfs the net.

TERENCE FLYNN: Usually it';s after I come home at night, after I have dinner, I'll call up the -- bring up the Internet, use AOL, and then I do my purchasing, see if I have to go on any trips.

GREENFIELD: But whenever he surfs the Net to shop for a CD or to make an airline reservation, Flynn's actions are being shadowed from deep inside the computer by "cookies," lines of computer code that allow big advertising companies, such as DoubleClick, to build a profile of the computer user. And chances are there's at least one cookie sitting inside the computer of anyone who has ever gone online to shop, to fill out a form or even to click on a banner ad.

SMITH: Now what many people don't realize is it's really a two- way communication that's going on there. A banner ad, you know, is pitching you a product, but at the same time the company that's showing that banner ad is getting information sent back to them at what page you're on.

GREENFIELD: Richard Smith is a prominent privacy watchdog. He worked with the California Health Foundation on a recent study of Internet health sites. The findings: Most of the sites are violating their own privacy policies by allowing ad firms and others to see customers' confidential data. And he's concerned about the privacy practices of DoubleClick, the Internet's largest advertising company.

SMITH: DoubleClick is now in a position to know who the person is. And they can know your name, your home address, phone number and these sorts of things. So what used to be, quote-unquote, "anonymous," you know, surfing on the Web now can become identified. And that's got a lot of people very scared, basically.

GREENFIELD: Kevin Ryan, DoubleClick's president, says that in fact most Web site visitors aren't scared at all. In fact, they welcome targeted advertising. But, he adds, they are given a clear choice.

KEVIN RYAN, PRESIDENT, DOUBLECLICK: At the point that you enter information, the point that you enter your name, we require our partners who are collecting any names to put notice and choice right there. We don't allow them to bury it at another place on the Web site. And that's incredibly important.

GREENFIELD: But concerns about privacy go well beyond Web sites. Jason Catlett, founder of Junkbusters, an Internet privacy site, says the millions who believe they are entering chat rooms with their anonymity intact are just kidding themselves.

JASON CATLETT, JUNKBUSTERS: Example: Here is the story of a woman with cancer who's trying to get some support on how to break the news to her daughter that she won't be alive for much longer. And she's given only a pseudonym here. But she's also given an e-mail address. And with a few keystrokes, you can go to a lot of other indexing sites that will let you find out more about this particular person.

GREENFIELD (on camera): Including who she is?

CATLETT: Including who she is.

GREENFIELD: So you access a popular search engine, Google in this case, and you type in the e-mail address. And you're doing what now?

CATLETT: Now we're finding the indexed pages...

GREENFIELD: Oh, my god.

CATLETT: ... where she's...

GREENFIELD: But you now know her last name.

CATLETT: That's correct. This gives her last name and the city that she resides in.

GREENFIELD (voice-over): Christine Varney (ph) is a former federal trade commissioner who now advises DoubleClick and other big firms that do business on the Internet -- including AOL and Time Warner, the parent company of CNN.

She shares Catlett's concerns about the privacy of health, financial and other personal information, whether it's from chat rooms or Web sites. But, she says, most people who surf the Web don't really care if non-sensitive is gathered for commercial purposes.

VARNEY: When you talk to most people about when you're on a golf site, do you want to see an ad for golf clubs? When you're on a travel site, do you want to see an ad for discounted beach vacations? When you're on a car site, do you want to see an add for a Toyota or a Chevrolet. most people really don't care.

GREENFIELD: In fact, magazines and advertisers have for years gathered consumer data and then sold or traded mailing lists to each other. The public response has been no more serious than complaints about bulging mailboxes, or overstuffed garbage cans.

And with barely a whimper of protest, most people have accepted security cameras in banks to catch thieves, or hidden cameras in homes to catch abusive babysitters, or cameras over city streets to better control traffic.

In the past year, several companies have bought software that allows them to monitor employee e-mails and Web surfing. And soon, the notion of fences may be made obsolete, as firms use satellites to sell to anyone detailed photos of anywhere on Earth.

DAVID GELERNTER, YALE PROFESSOR: I want to control all of my environment.

GREENFIELD: David Gelernter is a Yale professor of computer science, and advises Neuro (ph) Worlds, a technology company based in New Haven. He says that the potential for snooping into someone's life is about to increase dramatically. He envisions the 21st century as a cybersphere, where every piece of information about everyone of us will exist as one coherent stream of data.

GELERNTER: When I walk up to any computer, tune in my life's dream, I see the succession of electronic objects. The one at the front is what just happened, a little further back is yesterday, a little bit further back is last week, all the way at the beginning is my electronic birth certificate.

When I gather this together into one coherent unit and I can look at it from this computer, or that computer, or the computer at the supermarket, or a computer on the street, it's a great convenience to me. But on the other hand, if anybody breaks into this data structure, my life is available in one integrated coherent package in a way that isn't true today.

GREENFIELD: So every bit of information about our health, our finances, our jobs, our children, information that at the end of the 20th century was stored in many different places, will at some time in the 21st century be right at the fingertips of anyone who has the right password.

At first glance, this cybersphere has all the makings of an Orwellian nightmare. But for Gelernter, the promise of the 21st century bares little resemblance to the world of "1984."

GELERNTER: Orwell imagined the autocratic government imposing it on us. Instead, we're volunteering for it in a sense. Elderly people want to be monitored around the clock, because things happen. We want our streets monitored for crime, we want them monitored for traffic. I mean, people are demanding that they be allowed to buy comfort and quality of life in exchange for privacy.

VARNEY: One of the great things about the Internet is the richness and the personalization. I mean, look at, you know, My Yahoo!, or when you can go to eBay and see everything that you're interested in buying or selling, or you go to your own Weather Channel, or whatever it is. There is a huge amount of personalization.

GREENFIELD: But, as we exchange privacy for information, or for convenience, are we opening the door for invasions into our lives that we never imagined? That is exactly what the Navy did to sailor Timothy McVeigh. They persuaded AOL to provide chat room information that revealed his homosexuality. That led to a discharge that was later reversed. In two separate divorce proceedings, AOL has been subpoenaed for data about members e-mail's messages and chat room records.

Short of unplugging your computer, there are ways you can protect your privacy online. For example, this software from Privacy lets people create their own profiles and control the sites that get to see them.

GELERNTER: The defensive technology is there. It will depend on people asking for it. When they ask for it, they'll get it.

GREENFIELD: But for David Gelernter, the ultimate safeguard to our privacy, whether online or off, is ourselves, whether we can teach our children basic moral and religious principles.

GELERNTER: Increasingly I see children arriving at college, reaching college age with whom nobody has ever sat down and said, this is right and this is wrong, and if you've got a different opinion, tough, you're wrong. Better know what the facts are, what the moral facts are. If we don't do that we are opening ourselves up to enormous danger in this electronic age that will make the danger from professional criminals, I think, look small potatoes.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

GREENFIELD: For our own peace of mind, we may have to accept that no one can have total anonymity, that privacy is no longer considered a right, but a perk, a frill that's nice when you can get it. Now if that sounds chilling, then it's time to take privacy seriously with new laws, new rules, and new software for your company, because what you don't know that they know just might hurt you.

SHAW: And that's it for this installment of "Visions 21." I'm Bernard Shaw.

GREENFIELD: And I'm Jeff Greenfield. For everyone at CNN & TIME, thanks for joining us.

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