Building the Information Marketplace

NII users would fill out different E-forms to, say, order goods, settle transactions, or find people and services. Over time, these E-forms would grow in kind and number and would constitute the common currency, or language, of computer communication via the NII. In time, the typed text on the NII’s [National Information Infrastructure’s] early E-forms might be replaced with speech. To buy a jacket, you might answer voice prompts asking what color, size and material you want.

Building the Information Marketplace

The infrastructure should be flexible in the way it transports these ones and zeroes: Besides routing them to their destinations, it should be able to carry them with varying degrees of speed, accuracy, and security to match different computer capabilities and needs… We … need to endow the NII with a set of widely understood common communication conventions … The information infrastructure, then, is characterized by three key ingredients: flexible transport capabilities, common communication conventions and common servers.

Greetings from the Twilight Zone

It’s possible that [the Internet] will influence the whole structure and nature of knowledge as much as the printing press did.

The Internet as Mass Medium

A new communication technology such as the Internet allows scholars to rethink, rather than abandon definitions and categories. When the Internet is conceptualized as a mass medium, what becomes clear is that neither mass nor medium can be precisely defined for all situations, but instead must be continually rearticulated depending on the situation.

We Are the Wired: Some Views On the Fiberoptic Ties That Bind

[The Internet is] like a television station without programmers or a newspaper without editors – or rather, with millions of programmers and editors, a lot more opinionated than polished. Like it or not, in a time seemingly dominated by giant communications empires, the amateurs may hold the key after all.

We Are the Wired: Some Views On the Fiberoptic Ties That Bind

A highway makes sure you can’t even stop at a restaurant that might serve something local. So with the communications superhighway, I think. Five hundred channels sounds wonderful – but the 500 channels, and the electronic bulletin board, and the CD ROM Louvre, will still be showing the same narrow band of human experience, the only parts that can come across a screen. Vast amounts of information – the kind one gets from contact with other human beings or with the natural world or with live performance or with one’s own navel – remains beyond even the fiber-optified magicians.