In 50 years when you look back and when it’s pretty well understood what this “Net” thing is, it may be called something different by then. People will say the idea that it is a collective consciousness was maybe a good way to start thinking about it but it was kind of a rudimentary, naive way. It’s really a lot more than that. It’s a lot more than a collective consciousness, and I don’t even know that it’s a collective consciousness, really.
We need to think as teams here, across boundaries of academic discipline, industrial affiliation, nation, to understand, and thus perhaps regain control of, the way human communities are being transformed by communication technologies.
The playing field in the global telecommunications industry will never be level, but the degree of individual freedom available through telecommunication technologies in the future may depend upon whether the market for goods and services in cyberspace remains open for new companies to create new uses for CMC.
In cyberspace we lose weight immediately; but there is a gravity of choice that is not yet fully understood. Certainly there will be a shifting from the sense of territory, of being an inhabitant of an earthly system of values that includes roots, walls, and possessions, toward a radical adventure that blasts it all.
The plan, according to a consensus of experts … is that every home will eventually be wired and … this access will make our lives fuller, richer, easier, more wonderful somehow. Will it? Probably not … We are talking about a machine here; a pretty interesting one, but basically a big machine that spits data across long distances … Ultimately we just connected to one another, and that doesn’t make us any different; it just means we are more in touch.
Are we headed toward a world filled with anemic drones, laboring away at sterile keyboards, never taking a moment to sniff the ragweed, never twisting an ankle while tossing a Frisbee to their flea-ridden dogs? Well, we might be. America, at least, has been headed there for some time, roughly since the invention of the fluorescent tube. The Internet, though, is just a symptom of our technological cocoonery, not the root cause.
[We look forward to] integration with concurrent editors and other real-time features such as teleconferencing and virtual reality.
In late 1997, electronic confrontations between religious conservatives and libertarians will erupt into physical conflict.
There will be a major consolidation of Internet providers by 1997. Small providers will be acquired by larger ones or simply forced out of business. Those remaining providers will have blacklists of offensive subscribers and will have strong “content quality” rules, although they will never use the word “censorship.”
By 1997, e-mail will still not allow the transparent interchange of arbitrary types of nontext files. However, a large underground community and creative businesses will be taking advantage of the Internet as a vehicle for multicast multimedia.