Thousands of informed and uninformed people are now speculating publicly about the information highway. The amount of misunderstanding about the technology and its possible pitfalls surprises me. Some people think the highway – also called network – is simply today’s Internet or the delivery of 500 simultaneous channels of television. Others hope or fear it will create computers as smart as human beings. Those developments will come, but they are not the highway.
An imbalance in technologies tends to provoke a corresponding refocusing on ethnic values … I think we should negotiate a contract for mediodiversity in a mediosphere that is continually threatened with increasing uniformity of content because of the spread of global networks … By transforming three-quarters of the world into a cultural proletariat, you will make people of this class into more determined rebels in the 21st century. Far more determined, in fact, than the economic proletariat has been in the 20th century.
Futurologists such as Alvin Toffler tend to overemphasize the thread of technological determinism in history and then project it into the future. The technologies of transmission – writing systems, printing presses, and computers – do not necessarily drive change in a predictably specific direction … Each technical step forward means a compensating step backward in our mind-set … By transforming three-quarters of the world into a cultural proletariat, you will make people of this class into more determined rebels in the 21st century. Far more determined, in fact, than the economic proletariat has been in the 20th century … machines will never be able to give the thinking process a model of thought itself, since machines are not mortal. What gives humans access to the symbolic domain of value and meaning is the fact that we die.
I’m a future hacker; I’m trying to get root access to the future. I want to raid its system of thought. Grrr. Machines disappoint me. I just can’t love any of these wares, hard or soft. I’m nostalgic for the future. We need ultrahigh res! Give us bandwidth or kill us! Let’s see the ultraviolet polka-dot flowers that hummingbirds see, and smell ’em like the bees do. And crank up the sensorium all across the board.
I think tech will solve all our problems, personal and scientific. Girls need modems.
Today and for the next 20 years, those who are awake, and able and willing, will be playing that same defining role in what is surely going to be a radical transformation of all we hear, see, and know. And what a piece of great, good luck it will be to have been present at the creation.
Successful convergence means having the willingness to subordinate your media expertise instead of imposing it. It means treating a new medium on its terms – not yours. It means having the patience to relax and follow your curiosity instead of hyperventilating and chasing the crowd. We need to be convergence contrarians – willing to challenge conventional wisdom, yet able to explore other possibilities. Now I don’t care what software, hardware, firmware, floppyware, infoware, or underware that technology convergence creates for our creative communities. I just care that real editorship is involved in the process, contrarian and contentious all the way, because I trust absolutely that interesting things will follow.
Movies survived television, and radio is hardly extinct. To worry about displacement is futile, and to base plans on it is wasteful. Of course, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t explore new technologies … We will fall short if we impose our own familiar business models on the coming convergence. Telephones were not just telegraphs with voice. Computers weren’t just calculators with keyboards. And in the future, no one will call your product “magazines with sound and moving pictures.” We have to resist media imperialism – the tendency to colonize, to define new technologies in terms of the old … Redefine, don’t repackage.
We are on the brink of a great convergence – where the computer, the television, and the telephone will meet to create truly new communications products. Who knows how they’ll get along? Who knows what the result will be? What we do know is that the time for hype has passed. And the time has arrived for us to do the tough conceptual work of coming up with a new discipline, a new vocabulary, a new paradigm for what is emerging.
The digital haves and have-nots will be less concerned with race or wealth and more concerned (if anything) with age. Developing nations will leapfrog the telecommunications infrastructures of the First World and become more wired (and wireless). We once moaned about the demographics of the world. But all of a sudden we must ask ourselves: Considering two countries with roughly the same population, Germany and Mexico, is it really so good that less than half of all Germans are under 40 and so bad that more than half of all Mexicans are under 20? Which of those nations will benefit first from “being digital”?