Elon University

Subtopic: General

Mind Games with William Gibson

We are being shoved up against futurity with such violence that science fiction may become a historical term … The Internet may be important because we are seeing something akin to what we did when we invented cities.

The Information Superhighway as the Yellow Brick Road

Critical theorists concerned with issues of class and power see the Information Age as merely an extension of capitalist influence beyond its traditional industrial base … My own work, which shares this critical view, describes the process as a kind of panoptic sort, an all-seeing discriminatory technology that uses information about individuals gathered from numerous sources and transformed into strategic intelligence by means of sophisticated statistical models. This intelligence is then used to determine the quality of options and experiences we face in our roles as citizens, employees, and consumers.

The Information Superhighway as the Yellow Brick Road

Like the Oz stories, the tales of the Information Age are fanciful … Much of the futurists’ promise is humbug, a deceitful fiction, an instrumental contrivance developed with the assistance of creative people in marking and public relations departments. It is true that the future is unknown, but the evidence available to us in the present makes it clear that the promises of the Information Age are at the very least substantially overdrawn, if not outright fabrications.

Serious Money Heading to Internet Companies

The big winners today are software start-ups that are working to make the still-nerdy Net and particularly the World Wide Web more hospitable to consumers and businesses … If the trend continues, financing for this full year might well surpass $200 million. That would be about five times as much as the $42 million that went into Internet companies all last year.

Netscape’s Rise is Getting Scary: It Shows No Sign of Slowing as Stock Soars 21 1/2 Yesterday

There has been talk of Netscape becoming the next Microsoft, but the comparison is not apt. Microsoft dominates the personal computer industry in a way that no company, even Netscape, could do to the virtually untameable Internet. It’s more likely that investors believe the myriad alliances Netscape has struck with other technology companies will enable it to set the tone for developing business, banking and entertainment on the World Wide Web. The bottom line is that it doesn’t matter that Netscape is still a puny company on paper. The future is what counts, and optimism over the future has juiced the stocks of most Internet-related companies, not just Netscape.

International Implications for Global Democratization

Information revolution technologies enable citizens of prospective democracies to learn more about how other societies operate. If they discover that others living elsewhere live better thanks to democratic governance, they are likely to seek democratization. At the same time, information revolution technologies empower citizens anywhere to broadcast charges that their own governments have violated inalienable human rights. Thus, world pressure can be brought to bear against repressive regimes unable to hide their misdeeds as successfully as before.