“New forms of getting in touch with ourselves and sharing information will emerge.” PCs will enable video-phoning to replace telephoning and give us unprecedented access to all forms of information through powerful networks. The bottom line: “We’ll have more flexibility and power” to simply enjoy life.
Physically, you are very much here today and gone tomorrow, while cyberspace has become the anchor of your career and the linchpin of your reality. In 15 years, that will be a very common sentiment, so common that it will no longer seem odd or even remarkable.
Financial transactions will probably remain a relatively small portion of Internet traffic for a few years because of concerns about security. Potential commercial service use includes databases, electronic shopping malls, and on-demand entertainment.
Fully-interactive, on-demand multimedia applications will be available through the Internet. In addition to widespread shopping and banking services, the Internet is the medium of choice for business video conferences, medical applications, and remote operation of household devices.
Convergence is what I’m hearing from the information industries, but I’m a networking plumber, and when I look at the new technologies that will be employed in the future information infrastructure, I see divergence. As has happened in transportation over the centuries, there will be a proliferation of modes of information networking, and this is cool.
Users in homes and offices could get broadband digital access via smart hubs in the neighborhood connected to existing wires from the local cable television company. Or they could tap into digital infrastructure via an area radio transmitter.
The NII will provide all Americans with the information they need, when they need it and where they need it, at an affordable cost.
[The information infrastructure will be made up of] hundreds of different networks, run by different companies and using different technologies, all connected together in a giant “network of networks,” providing telephone and interactive digital video to almost every American.
If the edifice of industrial civilization does not eventually crumble as a result of a determined resistance within its very walls, it seems certain to crumble of its own accumulated excesses and instabilities within not more than a few decades, perhaps sooner, after which there may be space for alternative societies to arise.
Less and less is human life connected to other species, to natural systems, to seasonal and regional patterns; more and more to the Technospere, to artificial and engineered constructs, to industrial patterns and procedures, even to man-made hormones, genes, cells, and life-forms.