The Internet, Your Company and You

The smell of money has finally awakened the telcos to the Internet as a marketable “product.” In September, MCI suddenly showed TCP/IP and Internet services; AT&T ads pump the word ‘Internet’ at the top; CompuServe rolled out TCP/IP network services alongside its account-oriented offerings. One report placed Sprint up into No. 2 position in Internet connectivity providers, displacing Usenet. The ICXs are in position to aggressively price Internet connectivity. How well they can deliver remains to be seen. Still needed are national/international dial-up access networks for travelers and for users in remote areas without IAP/IPPs in local-calling reach. Also needed are by-the-hour ”net terminals” in airports, hotels, libraries and convention centers. The number and range of free and pay-for-access information, resources and services available via the Internet will literally explode.

Two Wired Guys; Lifelong Passion Keeps His Mind Young

The thing is, it grew from the bottom up. It began with the people, with two people reaching out to touch each other. The humanness of it is very compelling to me. It is not about technology, or bits and bauds and bytes; it is about people and communicating with one another … The Internet is the means of communicating in the future. You wouldn’t think about living today without a telephone. This is an extension of the telephone and the television. They are all coming together – media convergence. You can either get with the program or get left behind. I get more information into my mind in a six-hour session on the Internet than I do from all the books I read in a week. Most of the books, newspapers and periodicals I read are way behind the curve of information anyway. The Internet makes them largely irrelevant.

Two Wired Guys; Lifelong Passion Keeps His Mind Young

Where others saw a gimmicky device, I saw the promise, I guess – the promise of communicating with the world. This led to my later involvement in bulletin boards, distant delivery of education and the Internet. And the cyberspace as we know it today in the form of the Internet will be unrecognizable when compared to the future convergence of telephone, cable, computer and broadcast industries. And it’s happening as we speak!

Paved With Fool’s Gold?

What kind of future is America going to have based on the promotion of illusion rather than the search for truth? WeÕve substituted image for substance, illusion for truth and then we wonder why our children are having difficulty finding their way in life. What this focuses for us is that technology is a means to an end, not an end in itself … Man does not live by data alone. We live in two worlds – the world of data as well as the world of meaning. The more information we amass, the more power our computers gain, the more essential meaning becomes. Finally we must express in fresh terms the enduring meaning of the American Experiment with liberty and responsibility. This is not the responsibility of someone else. ItÕs the task of anyone who believes that America has something great and unique to contribute to the future of the human endeavor.

Paved With Fool’s Gold?

If you look at the future of religion, clearly within the American context of traditional denominations are moving toward secularization … And you see this in surveys, which show a longtime decline in core Christian beliefs. But we’ve already begun to see the effect of the combination of technology and religion in the proliferation of televangelists. With organized religion on the Internet, I think that weÕll see a lot more discussion, but also a narrowing of interest. I think that youÕll see people reveal very personal sides of their beliefs.