Elon University

The Way We Make Wealth

Electronic pathways form the essential infrastructure of the Third Wave economy … taken together … [the] features of the Third Wave economy … add up to a monumental change in how wealth is created.

Internet Evolution or Revolution?

The future growth of the Internet will not be determined solely on the basis of technical excellence … The network’s growth is too rapid to plan its path; the new breed of Internet entrepreneurs will undoubtedly effect many changes not anticipated by computer scientists and engineers … Within only two years the network will start to work subtle but significant changes in our cultural fabric.

The College Classroom of the Year 2010

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.

Coming Ready or Not: The World We Are Leaving Future Generations, and Our Responsibility Toward Them

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.

Coming Ready or Not: The World We Are Leaving Future Generations, and Our Responsibility Toward Them

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.

Coming Ready or Not: The World We Are Leaving Future Generations, and Our Responsibility Toward Them

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.

The Emerging Internet Market

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.