This is what will happen: Multiple overlapping of remotely located personalities … Pretty soon, we’ll have dozens of alters wandering the electronic hallways, meeting other alters, while we wait … The alters ultimately will report back to us about the things they’ve seen, other alters they’ve spoken to, the fun they’ve had. Later, maybe they won’t report back to us anymore.
A lot of smug businesses, organizations, and implementations built around technology are going to be bypassed in the next few years – so fast it won’t even be funny. I’ll bet the Internet as we know it will be passe in five years – just as the largest number of people are waking up to it and making investment decisions about it. They will soon look foolish.
Medieval Christians thought of themselves as connected to a greater consciousness, a community of souls, which was as real and powerful to them as cyberspace is to its denizens today … The vast numbers of the illiterate had to learn their information, if at all, from painted or stained-glass pictures in churches, without access to the textual basis of the images. Today we call this television, tomorrow virtual reality. The sense of community and common goals among the “wired” was defined in opposition to a Great Unwired. The power of information technology is obvious; let us see that it does not, by excluding some from its communion, invent serfdom anew.
Say you go to a small village. People are hungry. Is the priority an electronic mailbox … or 100 kilograms of corn? What we’ve learned, over the past 20 years, is that the mailbox may well be the priority.
Africa doesn’t have to go from drums to telegraph to telex. We can go straight to satellites, electronic media, and a computerized newsroom.
The future of the computer and communications industries will be driven by applications, not by scientific breakthroughs like the transistor, microprocessor, or optical fiber. The problems now stem not from basic material sciences but from basic human needs. To focus on the future of the “bit” industry, there is no better place to set one’s tripod than on the entrepreneurial, business, and regulatory landscape of the United States, with one leg each in the New York, American, and NASDAQ exchanges.
Like the printing press, the new computer media will bring forth its own very special ways to think about complexities we have not been able to deal with up to now … Much care has to be taken with design and education in order for the change to be positive. We don’t have natural defenses against fat, sugar, salt, alcohol, alkaloids – or media.
Logic suggests that if the marketers are at the helm, [interactive television] is bound to end up looking more like QVC than the Internet. Fundamentally, interactive television will serve whoever controls the switches. Today, via the ratings system, advertisers do. The history of broadcast has its own inexorable logic, a logic based on selling an audience about which progressively more can be known. The $64,000 Question is whether interactive television will reinforce that logic, taking it to the extreme of one-consumer/one-commercial, or shatter it, creating a decentralized network of citizen-broadcasters, each with his own vision of the future. The answer is television history in the making.
The Passive People Meter is straight out of a Big Brother nightmare … [it is also] a powerful computer which links the phone line, the cable line, and the TV with a broadcaster. The current, toggle-switched People Meter … can be reprogrammed at a distance by Nielsen. A more powerful model could conceivably target individual television sets for custom-tailored commercials. This is broadcast’s version of the direct-mail approach … Any vision of interactive television that preserves the ratings economy – would also preserve the current couch-potato paradigm of television watching. A video-mail system, then, is a profoundly dark take on interactive’s bright future, a betrayal of all that the technovisionaries hold dear.
As a device shrinking to pocket size, the telephone is subsuming the rest of our technological baggage – the fax machine, the pager, the clock, the compass, the stock ticker, and the television. A sign of the telephone’s power: It is pressing the computer into service as its accessory, not the other way round … The telephone is not just a device. It is a network … As the network spreads, it is fostering both the universality and the individuality of human discourse. The Net itself, the world’s fastest-spreading communications medium, is the telephone network in its most liberating, unruly, and fertile new guise. Thus Bell’s child is freeing our understanding of the possibilities that lie in ancient words: neighborhood and meeting and information and news.