Before talking to Frank Ogden in Vancouver, I would have said I started writing this article at 2:28 p.m. Pacific Daylight Saving Time. "Chuckie, Chuckie! That's obsolete thinking," Frank says with a pitying shake of his head. (Over 20 years I have been at the receiving end of a lot of pitying looks from Frank.) "The REAL time," he says, "is Beat 935."

Postcards From Cyberspace

Dr. Tomorrow was impressed by this start-ups creativity when he recently met them in Miramichi, New Brunswick while speaking at the Learn Tech '98 symposium. This picture which they graciously provided instantly reminded him of one of his "laws", "A sentence or image that carries "shock value" contains more information than one that does not"

This guy not only marches to a different drummer, he breathes to a different clock. More on Beat time in a moment.

Frank's better known as Dr. Tomorrow, the name you'll see on his business card-unique because it carries a full-color photo of his brain scan. (You can see the scan.) He's Canada's most well known futurist, and for 20 years he has been astonishing, horrifying, amusing and enraging people all over the world with his unique blend of outrageous predictions, puckish one-liners ("Stop worrying about the forests. They have found new friends in technology") and plain old showbiz smarts. A sample of his provocative-and sometimes cheerfully mordant-prognostications can be found at drtomorrow.com

Frank's been living and working for a couple of decades aboard an electronics-packed floating houseboat in Vancouver's Coal Harbour, with the city's skyscrapers looming above a block or so away. Occasionally the wash from a passing boat gently rocks his cyber-headquarters, and he may have to raise his voice slightly now and again to be heard over the roar of a seaplane taking off for B.C.'s capital city, Victoria. From this busy, compact space he collects global intelligence on emerging technologies via satellite dish, personal communication, short-wave radio and the Internet. Then he analyzes the information and recycles it into newspaper columns, speeches, CD-ROMs, books and radio sound bites.

He never stops. For all those years Frank has been greeting visitors at the door to his houseboat with "Guess what the latest is?" Then he'll yard out a pair of ceramic scissors, or a wireless modem, or a hand-held gizmo that instantaneously translates Japanese into English, or a jacket that reacts to outside temperatures, or a solar-powered toothbrush, or a voice-print phone, or a pen whose ink contains his DNA, or virtual reality gloves, or a sample of insulating paint or a talking poster or . . . well, you get the idea.

Did I mention he was 79?

As he got older Frank's eyesight, just as it does with ordinary mortals, began to weaken. Glasses or contact lenses would be too boring a solution. He had "intra-ocular" plastic lenses implanted right into his eyes, and now his eyesight is better than 99 per cent of the rest of us enjoy. He says he is now a genuine bionic man.

Frank logs about 200,000 air miles a year on the speaking circuit (at $5,000 a pop), on research trips to Asia, Africa, South America and the Middle East, and on personal travel. Frank and his second wife, Carol Baker, a travel writer fluent in Spanish and French (and able to manage in Arabic), spend some of the year in places like Morocco, Kenya, Mexico and the Canary Islands.

Let me tell you what it's like to interview Ogden. I arrive, pen and notebook in hand, early on a Saturday morning, walk onto his houseboat and find myself plunked down on a seat in front of a Sony mini-camera. Then Frank spends an hour interviewing ME for a weekly live TV show he does on the Internet he calls Radio With a Face. The show is seen and heard by hundreds, maybe thousands, of Internet users all over the world, a modest start for what Dr. Tomorrow predicts will be a huge phenomenon in the future: home-grown TV.

Did I mention that Frank, who gives talks to business executives, teachers, doctors, nurses, union leaders, government officials and scientists, got no further than high school graduation?

He prides himself on getting audiences aroused, whether for him or against him, and talks with special pride about those occasions when people walk out on his talks. Teachers, for example, for some peculiar reason don't like being told their jobs are doomed. "In the future a well-wired home with high-speed access to the Internet will count for more than proximity to schools because learning will be done when and where desired." (A few days ago, for another project, I interviewed the principal of ultra-modern-and soon to open-Terry Fox Secondary School in Port Coquitlam, a Vancouver suburb. I learned from him that teachers seem to be adapting themselves quickly to the rapidly changing nature of learning: the school has Internet access, forests of computers and offers distance education. It must be said that Dr. Tomorrow may have a surprise coming.)

No phenomenon of the present day escapes his attention. Do you find yourself walking faster these days? Dr. Tomorrow knows why. He says people on the West Coast are walking faster to match the pace set by the growing number of Asian immigrants. That's not all that's changing on the Pacific Rim. "Vancouver is the first city already in the 21st century," he says. "It is no longer a place. It is a process."

Frank is part of that process. I'm delighted to tell you I was around and writing about Frank Ogden when his futuristic alter ego, Dr. Tomorrow, was born 20 years ago. Back then Ogden had started a service-unique for the time-that provided companies with videotaped clips from TV newscasts. If a major forest company was cited on the 6 o'clock BCTV news Ogden could have the relevant clip on the president's desk the following morning. "Business executives usually don't get home in time to watch the 6 o'clock news, and they can't watch more than one channel at a time," he says. "I prepared videotapes of specific coverage that corporate and government clients were interested in. That was a good business, but a lot of work."

He was already looking much further ahead. What Ogden showed me that 1979 afternoon was something called The Source, a stone-age version of the Internet. Based in Vienna, Virginia, The Source was really advanced for its day. And Ogden was the first person in Canada with access to it.

Oh, and Beat Time? It's a new way of marking the time in which the day is broken down into 1,000 "beats" which are exactly the same all around the world. It was designed with the Internet in mind. So I can tell you, wherever you are in the world, to tune in at Beat 708 on Saturday (what I keep wanting to call 8:00 a.m. Pacific Time) to see and hear Dr. Tomorrow.

The highlights of Frank Ogden's life-even before he became Dr. Tomorrow-would add another few thousand words to this, and you wouldn't believe half of it, anyway (like the time in Haiti he became a voodoo priest), even though it's all true. Suffice it to say that when he turns 80 next year he will still be making predictions about the astonishing ways you'll live and play and work in the 21st century:

Like this one: "If your satellite phone isn't an implant by then, you'll wear it as a piece of clothing."

Welcome | Features | Artists | Reviews | Festival & Events | Who's doing What

Design by Stratford Internet , Inc.
© 1999 Stratford Internet , Inc. All Rights Reserved.