In the best case, says Mitch Kapor, we could collectively invent a new entertainment medium, one that taps the creative energies of a nation of midnight scribblers and camcorder video artists. “In the worst case we could wind up with networks that have the principal effect of fostering addiction to a new generation of electronic narcotics.”
Over the next decade, the telecommunications systems of the world will be rebuilt from the ground up as copper wires are ripped up and replaced by hair-thin fiber-optic strands.
Yes, networks can help people strengthen neighborhoods and communities. But they also encourage people to find ways out. Unhappy with your schools? Join the parents who have turned to home schooling … Any future information network will help unhappy people secede, at least mentally, from institutions they do not like, much as the interstate highway system allowed the affluent to flee the cities for the suburbs and exurbs. Prescribing mobility, whether automotive or electronic, as an antidote to society’s fragmentation is like recommending champagne as a hangover remedy.
The Internet will not work as a mass medium in the future. There is no revenue stream … and it requires too much time and expertise to learn and use. The future will not look like America Online, Minitel, or Internet. If the information superhighway is to be for all, then it cannot (and should not) be limited by price, technological crudity, or scientific configuration. The new infohighway ought to be as advanced as possible and available to all who might like to use it.
Many of the futurists who see a new day dawning are going to be disappointed by what they find at dawn’s early light. The notion that people who spend dozens of hours watching sitcoms every week and never read a newspaper will somehow be transformed into Renaissance men and women by the availability of new information services in the home seems overly hopeful, to say the least.
The Internet will be to women in the ’90s what the vibrator was to women in the ’70s. It’s going to have that power.
[The Internet is] “colliding with America – it’s ignoring an enormous legal, cultural, and political culture.” Working with that culture, he suggested, “will be a lot harder than anything they’ve done before.”
Anyone who thinks Net culture will survive the influx of billions of dollars doesn’t know that millions of those billions will be spent on lawyers.
The Internet will evolve the way we make it evolve. It’s the first time the use of technology depends on how we want it. In this age, we’re dissatisfied with large institutional efforts, so this means bringing it closer to people, making it more responsive to individual citizens.
By 2000 there will be 300 million users online.