Time to Exit the Information Superhighway?
A computer-screen newspaper will never take the place of a real one read over a cup of coffee. And “networking” with role-playing electronic personalities will never replace face-to-face conversation.
Subtopic: General
Information Analysis in the Net: The Interspace of the 21st Century
[Ten years from now the Internet is] going to be whatever big research system is possible … My belief is that it will be a billion-dollar business in the early 21st Century. And what is it? It’s not Web fetching, which is just straight access, it’s not library search, which is just what you’re going to see in the next years when you can put up a big collection and actually search it. It’s going to be correlation, analysis, coming in with a real problem and being able to look through many many different sources and say, this thing here and this thing here combined in this certain way solves my problem. So we’re going to talk about cross-correlation, generic community systems and spaces not networks.
Quotables
Technology always starts out as a solution in search of a problem. No one needs this stuff yet [the Internet]. Billions of dollars will be lost in this market.
Information Analysis in the Net: The Interspace of the 21st Century
What you’ll see in the next wave is more like organization, which is what you’re used to, being able to do a real search. Like what online retrieval systems have done in the commercial market like Dialog for a long time … in the year 2000. Things will be a lot different then, and what will actually happen is ordinary people will be able to solve real information problems themselves, and you will see more about correlating information than doing searching … As a grand statement you can say that we all will be moving from something like the Internet to something like the Interspace.
Traveling the Slow Lane on the Info Highway?
We are too accepting of anything new without careful thought about it.
The Ghost in the Modem: For Architects of the Info-Highway, Some Lessons From the Concrete Interstate
To help reduce adverse social impact, the federal government should mandate evaluated social trials of alternative electronic services … We should conserve cultural space for face-to-face social engagement, traditional forms of community life, off-screen leisure activities and time spent in nature. How about a modest tax on electronic home shopping and consumer services, rebating the revenue to support compensatory, local community-building initiatives? … [We should include] lay people in technology decision-making.
The Ghost in the Modem: For Architects of the Info-Highway, Some Lessons From the Concrete Interstate
Comparing the electronic and asphalt highways is useful – but mostly as a cautionary tale. Building the new information infrastructure will not entail the degree of immediate, physical disruption caused by the interstate highway system, but sweeping geographic relocations and accompanying social transformations seem probable.
Cybersobriety
The benefits of telecommunities can potentially include combatting local parochialism; helping to establish individual memberships in a diverse range of communities, associations, and social movements; empowering isolated or marginalized groups; and facilitating transcommunity and intersocietal understanding, coordination, and accountability. Systems designed to support such uses – especially without subverting local community – are unlikely to emerge without concerted democratic struggle.
We Are the Wired: Some Views On the Fiberoptic Ties That Bind
Digital convergence is not a futuristic prospect or a choice to be made among other choices; it is an onrushing train. The digitalization of all forms of information (including the transmission of sensations) has proven itself to be accurate, economical, ecologically wise, universally applicable, easy to use, and fast as light.
Fasten Your Seat Belts
Gore wants to see universal, perhaps free, access to the networks by the end of the decade for public bodies such as schools, hospitals and libraries. Leading the expected money-makers is super-TV: thousands of channels of interactive, high-definition, Video-U-Like. Rheingold sees it otherwise. “That’s like saying, when they were getting ready to build the Interstate highways, that the roads were great news for the asphalt business. I mean, they were, but there are far more important effects … It’s a Trojan horse, with the nodes of the network growing in intelligence, like crystals growing in a supersaturated solution.” He expects consumers to use these digital feeds to make their own links, to talk to each other without the interference of a corporate agent, to establish their own virtual communities. But he recognizes the opposite might happen.