While the President of the United States talks about creating high-tech “information superhighways” that will revolutionize America, [Mark] Hannah has a more pragmatic idea of how those superhighways will be used by most Americans – at least in the short run. Hannah ticks off his fingers as he sits on a couch in his office in Building 2 on the SGI campus, counting: “Interactive home shopping, video on demand, and games.”
The fact that these people are kidding themselves into thinking they know how to do this is terrifying to me. It’s not like you’re walking into a proven market, where you know there are 50 million people who are just waking up every morning saying, “I’ve got to have interactive TV today.” They don’t know what it is. They don’t know to want it.
If users have more control over the uses of the networks, these new opportunities are more likely to get the early nurturance they need to turn into big, recognizable business opportunities. To accomplish this, we should consider a process for setting aside experimental frequencies on broadband networks for developing significant new uses.
They have treated information the way John D. Rockefeller treated oil – as a commodity, in which the distribution network, rather than product quality, is of primary importance. But once people can get the raw data themselves, that monopoly ends. And that means big changes, soon … I will have artificial intelligence agents roaming the databases, downloading stuff I am interested in, and assembling for me a front page, or a nightly news show, that addresses my interests. I’ll have the 12 top stories that I want, I’ll have short summaries available, and I’ll be able to double-click for more detail. How will Peter Jennings or MacNeil-Lehrer or a newspaper compete with that?
The Internet will be to women in the ’90s what the vibrator was to women in the ’70s. It’s going to have that kind of power.
Guaranteeing equal opportunity of access to the technology and software, and equal opportunity to add to and comment on the information in the network, should be items Number One and Two in the Virtual University Bill of Rights, I believe.
The transforming power of the Internet, and all of its possible successor netwoven communication technologies, are in the process of completely destroying all of the institutions, behaviors, and values which arose around the industrial technologies of the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries – economic, military, political, cultural – just as industrial technologies destroyed – or at least marginalized and substantially changed – the institutions, behaviors, and values of pre-industrial, agricultural societies.
Marshall McLuhan’s famous statement – “We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us” – is … true for the future … The most potent technology transforming the present … is the vast array of electronic communications technologies which are now being widely touted as composing the Information Superhighway … Many once-separate and expensive technologies are being woven together into a gigantic, global, and comparatively inexpensive information network which, among other things, is destroying the necessity of traveling to a single centralized location to work, or to trade, or be entertained, or even to govern. It is now increasingly possible, and preferable, to telework, to telemarket, to teleview, and to telegovern. It thus is no longer necessary, nor desirable, anywhere in the world to continue to create huge urban centers … It can all come to you.
The technologies of the present and immediate future – I’m thinking here of electronic information and telecommunication technologies – have already marginalized and bypassed, if not utterly destroyed, all major institutions of the present – including many of the reasons cities – and megacities – came into existence to begin with. But when I look at what the completing of the human genome project, and all the other aspects of the biological and nanotechnological revolution are about to do to our ideas about and fund of “information,” “intelligence,” and even “life,” then I realize that the impact of electronic technologies on our old institutions and beliefs is nothing compared to what these new technologies are about to bring.
People will buy the Internet if they know what they are buying and whom to buy from. Understanding how to position the Internet service industry is perhaps one of the greatest challenges the field of technology venture marketing has ever faced … The commercial Internet has developed so rapidly over the past several years that no strong “industry model” has had a chance to assert itself.