Information Infrastructure technologies will play a critical role in the Federal government’s own plans to re-engineer its work processes … Vice President [Al] Gore has drawn an analogy between the NII and the first use of telegraphy in a limited government-sponsored demonstration, subsequently followed by widespread private-sector deployment on a national scale.
National Challenges will help to extend the benefits of HPCC technology to applications with broad impact on American society.
Contrary to Gingrich and Gore, the Internet is not the promised land. Sure, our economic and social well-being would improve if some of our worst workers had better skills; but the skills they need most are basic literacy and good work habits. With those, computer competence will come if needed. The infatuation with computers as a cause or cure of social distress is misplaced. Mostly, computers mirror who we are: a people of vast vitality, great ingenuity and manifest imperfections.
Perhaps within a decade most Americans will have an e-mail address just as most now have phone numbers. The computer will become (as it is already becoming) a democratic appliance that will increasingly resemble the kitchen stove. Almost everyone has a stove. But some of us make hamburgers, and others make fettucini. Computers are the same; they reveal differences more than they create them.
Today’s new communications technologies gush uncertainty. Cable and phone companies are forming alliances to compete with each other. Everyone aims to steal everyone else’s business. And strive to rewrite communications laws to their advantage. No one really knows what customers want. Some new technologies will predictably have unpredictable uses. We won’t know what they are until the systems are built; but the systems may not get built until we have a better idea of their uses. We are on the threshold of something; we just don’t know what or when.
Pundits, executives, special interest groups, corporations and politicians will talk about the information highway in terms that will make it appear that it will magically cure all of Canada’s economic ills. Yet, few of these people will have learned how to leverage the global knowledge found within the Internet. Few of them will understand what the highway is or can be, while purporting to represent us in its development.
In every age there are millions of people like me – who are vying to be last to have whatever is new and allegedly better. Who has time for all the multimedia, interactive mumbo-jumbo? We will join the wave of the future only after it laps gently onto shore. Let others enjoy the pleasures of digging their Model T out of the mud.
Folks, I’m not holding my breath. The information superhighway may or may not become a truly transforming technology – the likes of the railroad, car or phone. But if it does, the event is many years, and perhaps decades, away.
As the Internet begins to attract more interest, more commercial participation, and more users, its culture will undoubtedly begin to change. The Internet tomorrow will probably be different from the Internet of today. To some, this is a good thing, and to others, this is a very negative evolution. Regardless of what the change means, the Internet will begin to change.
World Wide Web is another example of how Internet resources and the Internet itself will continue to evolve, making it easier for participants to locate information scattered throughout the world.