Adapting ’60s Sensibilities to the Internet
It’s the early ’80s again. There is the feeling again that computers are going to change the world, but this time it’s on the Net.
Subtopic: General
Doubts About the Fantasy of a $500 ‘Network PC’
Internet companies might follow the cellular telephone model and offer cheap PCs at below cost, to get customers to sign up for more lucrative network services.
Guilty
Digital media could make it possible for people to interact – maybe even changing each other’s minds in the process – something traditional media inhibit throught their addicition to objectivity, spokespeople, and sensationalism … Online news suggests a forum in which it would be easier for fragmented political or racial groups to begin … teaching members of [many] tribes how to communicate and providing them with the simple means of doing so … If one tenet of our age is that information wants to be free, its companion is that media want to tell the truth. Neither information nor media get what they want much of the time; this is one of the great ironies of the information revolution and the sad legacy of the O.J. Simpson trial.
All Things Considered
The future we are heading to is one of increasing diversity, with hundreds of broadcast channels, thousands of channels on cable, tens of thousands of channels on telephones and the Internet.
Reality Check
The falsehood of the Internet is that it will provide us with close, meaningful relationships, with cheap, good information and with useful life skills. Within each one of those promises is a grain of truth, but on balance they are simply false.
Infobahn Warning Flags
From your library or home, you’ll be able to surf from one end of the World Wide Web to the other, but what you’ll get is a jumble of contextless data. In their relentless pursuit of discrete factoids, computers deconstruct conventional forms of information – books – into bytes. “Data isn’t information any more than 50 tons of cement is a skyscraper.”
Toward High-Performance Organizations: A Strategic Role for Groupware
There will be critical issues of interoperability within and between our organizations and their knowledge domains. The ever-greater value derived from online, interactive work within a hyperdocument environment will require a significantly higher degree of standardization in document architecture and usage conventions than heretofore contemplated.
Toward High-Performance Organizations: A Strategic Role for Groupware
We should become especially oriented to pursuing improvement as a multi-element, co-evolution process. In particular, we need to give explicit attention to the co-evolution of the Tool System and the Human System.
Internet Hero Tries to Kick the Habbit: Clifford Stoll Aims to Stir Up Some Skepticism About the Information Network
The linking of the world’s people to a vast exchange of information and ideas is a dream that technology is set to deliver … It will bring economic progress, strong democracies, better environmental management, improved healthcare and a greater sense of shared stewardship of our small planet.
Reality Check
In the next 10 years, somebody will figure out how to charge for information over the Net, so you won’t get things necessarily for free. That will have several good effects, including a way to pay authors for their work. And because of the economic incentive, it will become easier to filter out the good from the bad.