The next generation of CD-ROMs will include a link back to an Internet community that will provide the latest up-to-date information, and this combination will allow online publishers to deliver video to users as part of their overall content experience.
The Internet is growing so quickly that the latest, least-expensive technology is being incorporated into it as rapidly as possible … In short, the Internet is the only public network of which the economics reflect the latest advances in communications technology and the full benefits of competition.
The reason the Internet will be as important as the IBM PC is because there are literally thousands of companies – Microsoft and others – that are focusing on the Net as their primary strategy across their entire product lines.
Even in its early stages, the transition to inexpensive communications represented by the Internet is leading people to question old assumptions – sometimes without even realizing it … Only some of the companies laying bets on the Internet will be winners. But companies that bet against the Internet will be losers.
The Internet is a tidal wave. It will wash over the computer industry and many others, drowning those who don’t learn to swim in its waves.
It is unlikely that Michael Heim, David Bennahum, Don Langham or any member of the first generation of cybernauts will be able to accurately describe or assess the realm of the new technology; as Marshall McLuhan has pointed out, we are blinded by our own cultural upbringing, and the realm of cyberspace is certainly one that cannot be inhabited for at least another full generation.
Networking technology and reduced computer costs will bring to minorities, poor people, and rural America information and opportunities that have previously been reserved for the elite, urban upper class.
The Internet has vast potential to expand the audience for works of the literary imagination; and not only to expand access but also opportunities for interactivity, and for building communities of creative minds that could not exist otherwise. It’s a lovely picture, one I’d like to believe in. But I know it is more likely that the Internet will become a vast cyberspace mall, every bit as commercialized as any other mass medium in a free-market society … It is … important that we do not surrender cyberspace and the new media to the purely market-driven forces of late-20th-century multinational capitalism. There are other values – values which cannot be measured in monetary units – that will survive only if we vigilantly carve out a space for them to breathe.
Cyberspace will provide a three-dimensional field of action and interaction: with recorded and live data, with machines, sensors, and with other people. Beyond consequences in cyberspace, these interactions will also have consequences that reach directly back into the physical world, from the efficient running of corporations, governments, and small businesses, to the enrichment of our individual lives with entertainment and communicationÉin short, to our real health, wealth, and happiness.
Neither an advanced degree in math nor extraordinary powers of visualization ought to be necessary for a reasonably well-educated person to spend time productively in cyberspace.