Elon University

Subtopic: General

Traveling the slow Lane on the Info Highway

We are becoming a world in which technology of every kind is cheerfuly granted sovereignty over social institutions and natural life, and becomes self-justifying, self-perpetuating and omnipresent.

The Internet – Where’s It All Going?

We’re trying internally to cut down on the amount of paper that we use … With the hypertext kind of paradigm that you see on the Web, you can imagine putting all of your corporate documentation on there – even things like design files for machines.

The Internet – Where’s It All Going?

Dial-up access and dedicated service to our customers are all part of the plan, including access via other switching systems such as ISDN, hyperstream frame relay, SMDS (switched multimegabit data service) and ATM (asynchronous transfer mode).

The Internet – Where’s It All Going?

Corporations join W3C because they need that space to be stable and want to have a say in the way it evolves. They realize that the Web – as a highway and marketplace – has to be there as a precursor to all the fancy ways in which their products will be able to compete.

The Economy of Ideas

We’re going to have to look at information as though we’d never seen the stuff before … The economy of the future will be based on relationship rather than possession. It will be continuous rather than sequential. And finally, in the years to come, most human exchange will be virtual rather than physical, consisting not of stuff but the stuff of which dreams are made. Our future business will be conducted in a world made more of verbs than nouns.

Informing Ourselves to Death

Anyone who has studied the history of technology knows that technological change is always a Faustian bargain: Technology giveth and technology taketh away, and not always in equal measure. A new technology sometimes creates more than it destroys. Sometimes it destroys more than it creates. But it is never one-sided.

Highways of the Mind or Toll Roads Between Information Castles?

A workable national network might include the following features: Built and managed by private enterprise. Federal start-up subsidies for colleges, universities, libraries and schools. First Amendment free-speech guarantees. Guaranteed interconnection to other data services offered by telephone companies and other locally regulated businesses. Guaranteed universal digital access for everyone who wants to connect. Fair rates and policies subject to regulatory review.

Highways of the Mind or Toll Roads Between Information Castles?

So far, two models or metaphors – “highways” and “railroads” have been proposed to frame the debate. Both borrow from transportation examples in U.S. history. Both, I believe, fall short of the mark. And we suggest that a little tweaking of the two, the best solution for the U.S. might be found in a kind of synthesis of these different visions.