Americans can harness this technology to: Create jobs, spur growth, and foster U.S. technological leadership; reduce health care costs while increasing the quality of service in underserved areas; deliver higher-quality, lower-cost government services; prepare our children for the fast paced workplace of the 21st century; build a more open and participatory democracy at all levels of government.
Imagine you have a device that combines a telephone, a TV, a camcorder, and a personal computer … Imagine … the dramatic changes in your life.
An advanced information infrastructure will enable U.S. firms to compete and win in the global economy, generating good jobs for the American people and economic growth for the nation. As importantly, the NII can transform the lives of the American people – ameliorating the constraints of geography, disability, and economic status – giving all Americans a fair opportunity to go as far as their talents and ambitions will take them.
People could live almost anywhere they wanted, without foregoing opportunities for useful and fulfilling employment, by ÔtelecommutingÕ to their offices through an electronic highway. The best schools, teachers, and courses would be available to all students, without regard to geography, distance, resources, or disability. Services that improve AmericaÕs health care system and respond to other important social needs could be available on-line, without waiting in line, when and where you need them.
While the highway metaphor illuminates the strengths of an interconnected society, it also suggests possible problems. Writing in the computer journal Communications of the ACM, Peter G. Neumann notes some of them: traffic jams, road kill, drunken drivers, and car jackers, as well as drag races, joy riders, toll bridges and crashes.
The multi-billion-dollar investments in the developing new telecommunications landscape are driven by a simple, irresistibly tempting vision – the prospect of converting every home and workplace in the nation into a computerized electronic movie theater; shopping mall; video game arcade; business, information and financial center; and perhaps even gambling casino, run by remote control and open all day long, every day of the week. The information highway will not be a freeway but an automated private toll road, traveled mostly by those who can afford the pay the price for the wealth of popular entertainment, information, data, communications, and transaction services it will carry.
“Boiler room” organizations, hired by special interests, will seek to manufacture and mobilize “grassroots” opinion and stimulate the outpouring of selected messages and votes – to make sure that particular viewpoints are heard. They do that now. In the next century, it will become a mainstream business. Computerized political advertising, promotion, and marketing campaigns, targeted with as much intensity as legislators, regulators, and public officials are lobbied today, because public opinion – the fourth branch of government – will play an even more pivotal role in major government decisions.
To the telecomputerized citizens of the next century, today’s public opinion polling will seem as crude, primitive, and limited as the first Gallup polls in the 1930s seem to us now. Sample groups of citizens will be empaneled to represent the whole or specific parts of the population. These focus groups will be surveyed to express their choices in some depth and dimension, and then monitored to reflect any changes in their views. Electronic juries will be asked to render judgments on individual public questions. Professional polling companies and political consultants already do a good deal of this work. We shall see more of it in the future, carried out in more structured and sophisticated ways.
There will be a continuing flow of audio, video, and written communications, dialogue exchanges, yes/no votes and polls, position papers and programs, interviews, speeches, presentations, and advertisements – all rattling around in cyberspace and all instantly available on command. And day by day, numerous polls and surveys, both official and unofficial, reliable and meretricious, impartial and self-serving will take the pulse of the public, and continuously tabulate political opinion. Using a designated personal code – one’s Social Security number, citizen registration number, or special-purpose phone number – each citizen’s message, vote, or question will be capable of being instantly tabulated and sorted to determine its legitimacy, what sort of interest group of geographic constituency it is part of, and whether enough citizens care sufficiently about a particular matter to be worth paying attention to.
Using a combination telephone-video screen computer, citizens will be capable of participating in audio- and videophone calls, teleconferences, tele-debates, tele-discussions, tele-forums, and electronic town meetings. They will, of course, continue to have the capability to phone radio and television talk shows from cars, homes, and workplaces, and talk to vast audiences simultaneously. Most citizens will gain access to a good deal of information and data in many different formats,The material … may have been tailormade specifically for their age group, sex, race, style of living, educational level, taste, and individual interests. Some of it the users will pay for. Some will be provided free because it is promotional or public-service in nature or because it grinds the ax of a particular interest group.