The advance of computer and telecommunications technologies holds great promise for individuals and society. From convenience for consumers and efficiency in commerce to improved public health and safety and increased participation in democratic institutions, these technologies can fundamentally transform our lives.
The best use of our technology enhances our humanity. Telling stories establishes computers as a communications medium, prevents each one of us from being labeled a number, passive recipients of media marketing. If we all have a place to publish, the Plugged-In channel, the GK Darby channel, there’s no way the Web will end up as banal and mediocre as television.
Someday you’ll be backing an 18-year-old who’s writing software that will change the world.
Cyberspaces will require constant planning and management. The structures proliferating within it will require design, and the people who design these structures will be called cyberspace architects … Theirs will be the task of visualizing the intrinsically non-physical and giving inhabitable form to society’s most intricate abstractions, processes, and organs of information. And all the while they will be re-realizing in a virtual world, in cyberspace, many vital aspects of the physical world, in particular those orderings and pleasures which have always belonged to architecture and the artifactual landscape.
More deregulation awaits us. This will mean the end of cable company monopolies, and the beginning of a new era of computer-integrated interactive entertainment, consumerism, and education.
Identified by and targeted for our product consumption, we will find ourselves receiving more personalized mail from products than from people. They will know us, and they will manipulate us. We will end up hating the Internet, and ourselves.
As society and culture assimilate the Net, our attitudes as a group will evolve, leading to various calls for increased and decreased freedom in different aspects of Net activity and attempts to enshrine those freedoms or limits on freedom in laws … We will see increasingly complex and subtle battles over Net control and freedom, where no one clearly wins most of the time, and everyone protects their turf.
[Expectations include] A network for the exchange of information for industry, governments, public authorities and users … the establishment of international links among existing high-speed data networks in various industrialized countries … access to distance-learning facilities and various sources of knowledge by interconnecting educational institutions, small business resource centers and other institutions … an advanced infrastructure for the interconnection of libraries that will provide an open and global platform for access, manipulation and circulation of digitized information in many forms … the interoperation of networks for open multimedia access to major museums and galleries … infrastructure and information management technologies to address key environmental and natural resource issues of relevance to both developed and developing nations.
It is a little terrifying, at times, to think that virtually anyone, armed simply with a computer, modem and telephone line, can, at least in theory, reach a worldwide audience with whatever communication he or she wishes. This fact, coupled with the anarchic freedom of the Internet, has brought to a head a number of fundamental issues that may have significant ramifications on how the Information Age unfolds: surveillance and public safety vs. privacy through encryption and anonymity, censorship vs. free expression, more control vs. a decentralized anarchy of information.
Business meetings will increasingly take place in cyberspace, involving participants scattered across the global marketplace. Scientists and researchers on different continents will probably work jointly on projects with a degree of collaboration that is unrealistic today.