The future belongs to those who have ready access to huge amounts of accurate information … In the United States there is only a vague consensus that this high-bandwidth network is vital. In place of the unity of purpose evident in Japan, there is internecine squabbling over who has the right to do what/to where/to whom.
These networks form the key infrastructure of the 21st century, as critical to business success and national economic development as the railroads were in [Samuel] Morse’s era.
A quiet but crucial debate now under way in Congress, in major corporate boardrooms, and in universities, has the potential to shape America in the 21st century and beyond … Vast data highways, capable of sending entire libraries coast-to-coast in a few seconds or sending crucial CAT scans from a remote village to urban specialists, could be linked in a vast network of “highways of the mind.”
I don’t believe “Beavis and Butt-head” on demand is going to drive (sales on) the information highway. Every child I know already has an Encyclopaedia Brittanica within reach as they watch MTV. So why is wiring them up to the Library of Congress going to change things?
The real value of an information network will not be in a 500-channel cable TV and other entertainment media for home users but will be driven by business. The network will help large work groups automate their organizations and use fiberoptics and other technologies to transmit video, audio and data.
The more concretely new information services can be designed, and the more they can be linked to tangible and familiar activities, the easier it will be for consumers to comprehend their value. Positioning attempts have already entered the vernacular, such as “electronic mail,” “electronic banking” and “telecommuting.” Of course, real benefits must ensue from such services for them to make the great leap into the mainstream.
A 500-channel cable system will surely deliver unfathomable and boundless mediocrity. And with more channels, production values will further decline, since there will be less money spent per program.
I don’t believe that phone books, newspapers, magazines or corner video stores will disappear as computer networks spread. Nor do I think that my telephone will merge with my computer, to become some sort of information appliance.
I see a wide gulf between the real networks that I use daily and the promised land of the information infrastructure … Few aspects of daily life require computers, digital networks, or massive connectivity. They’re irrelevant to cooking, driving, visiting, negotiating, eating, hiking, dancing and gossiping. You don’t need a keyboard to bake bread, play touch football, piece a quilt, build a stone wall, recite a poem or say a prayer … I’m saddened that so many accept the false promises of a hyper-hyped idea. Overpromoted, the small, intimate benefits of the Internet are being destroyed by their own success.
It is perhaps not by coincidence that the approach of the third millennium should be heralded by a new form of human behavior. This new form of human behavior is a technological John-the-Baptist … Significance in history is not the product of isolated events but the result of convergence among a multiplicity of forces. It is the thesis of this work that two isolated events – the end and beginning of a millennium, and the rise of mass participation in uncensored bi-directional mass communication – the Internet, will conjugate in such a way to give birth to a new form of human behavior and with novel behavior, a new form of human consciousness – the uncensored self.