Internet Evolution or Revolution?
By 1997, most people will still think that the Internet and the World Wide Web are synonymous.
Subtopic: General
Scholars Try to Measure the Impact
Today, many people when they commute to work encounter people they wouldn’t otherwise, and so become aware that there is a homeless problem, a crime problem, a whole set of social ills. But if you work out of your home, shop out of your home, learn more out of your home – you might forget they exist. And who’s going to care for the disadvantaged when those who are online forget they exist?
Home Entertainment: New Off-Ramps On Info Highway For Couch Potatoes
In our time, under the prod of the new technology, entertainment and information services will ultimately follow the same historic pattern. Profound changes are seldom abrupt, and the broadcasting industry will probably do everything in its considerable power to delay or derail any shift to other delivery methods.
Home Entertainment: New Off-Ramps On Info Highway For Couch Potatoes
With so many channels available on the information highway, the producing companies will not be able to maintain any form of monopolistic control. When the pipe is wide enough to carry everything, they won’t be able to restrict their product to a few preferred outlets. The technology will force the market open.
Network Economics
Our primary difficulty in comprehending the global mind of a network culture will be that it does not have a central “I” to appeal to. No headquarters; no head. That will be most exasperating and discouraging. In the past, adventurous men have sought the holy grail, or the source of the Nile, or Prester John, or the secrets of the pyramids. In the future, the quest will be to find the “I am” of the global mind, the source of its coherence. Many souls will lose all they have searching for it – and many will be the theories of where the global mind’s “I am” hides. But it will be a never-ending quest like the others before it.
Network Economics
The particular thoughts of the global mind – and its subsequent actions – will be out of our control and beyond our understanding. Thus network economics will breed a new spiritualism.
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As very large webs penetrate the made world, we see the first glimpses of what emerges from that Net – machines that become alive, smart, and evolve – a neo-biological civilization. There is a sense in which a global mind also emerges in a network culture. The global mind is the union of computer and nature – of telephones and human brains and more.
Java Day: You Are There
The Internet can be seen as an emergent organism. It wasn’t engineered; it has grown … Communication is taking place outside of the human mind. There is positive feedback from within the network. The technology starts to change as a result of its own processes. Communication takes place between computers that is meaningful to them. Just think, you’ll be able to say to your grandchildren, “I was there when all computers couldn’t talk to each other.” But what is more likely: you’ll be explaining your time to an applet that your grandchildren created to deal with their grandparents.
Chapter 16: Cracking the Ice
Warfare in Cyberia is conducted on an entirely new battleground; it is a struggle not over territory or boundaries but over the very definitions of these terms. It’s like a conflict between cartographers, who understand the ocean as a grid of longitude and latitude lines, and surfers, who understand it as a dance of chaotic waves. The resistance to renaissance comes out of the refusal to cope with or even believe in the possibility of a world free of precyberian materialism and its systems of logic, linearity, and duality.
Lessons From The Luddites
Resistance to the industrial system, based on some grasp of moral principles and rooted in some sense of moral revulsion, is not only possible but necessary … Is this invention nothing but, as Thoreau put it, an improved means to an unimproved end?