Beware the Net-heads
The medium is being oversold, our expectations have become bloated, and there’s damned little critical discussion of the implications of an online world.
The medium is being oversold, our expectations have become bloated, and there’s damned little critical discussion of the implications of an online world.
Two distinct, interconnected publicly accessible digital internetworks are likely to emerge, which is surely better than just one. One of the future internetworks will grow out of today’s Internet, whose roots are in the technology and scientific/academic communities … The other great internetwork will grow out of the technology and mass communications industries, especially cable and broadcast industries. The “Anti-Net” will rely on advertising revenue to recoup the cost of the infrastructure necessary to create cheap, high-speed bandwidth.
The Internet is a revolution, jump-started by hypermedia Web browsers, that has the potential to radically transform not just the way individuals go about conducting their business with each other, but also the very essence of what it means to be a human in society.
It’s the beginning of the innovation, and we are witnessing experimentation and play. These sorts of activities will fuel the growth of the next stage of the medium’s development, where it starts to become “useful.”
Putting the Internet into people’s houses is going to be really what the information superhighway is all about, not digital convergence in the set-top box. All that’s going to do is put the video rental stores out of business and save me a trip to rent my movie.
Have computers become “geekfree,” or have we all become geeks?
Actual Internet/Web business application software is the growth market, not just browsers.
I do expect the Web to be a worldwide phenomenon, distributed fairly broadly. But right now I think it’s a U.S. phenomenon that’s moving to be global.
It is going radically change the way goods and services are discovered, sold and delivered, not only in this country but eventually all over the world.
This fusing of communication with computer networks is creating “an infrastructure that will profoundly reshape our economy and society.”