Records of the Future: At Your Fingertips
Some experts predict that within five years the online delivery of a full CD will be an affordable possibility.
Some experts predict that within five years the online delivery of a full CD will be an affordable possibility.
The Internet can be seen as an emergent organism. It wasn’t engineered; it has grown … Communication is taking place outside of the human mind. There is positive feedback from within the network. The technology starts to change as a result of its own processes. Communication takes place between computers that is meaningful to them. Just think, you’ll be able to say to your grandchildren, “I was there when all computers couldn’t talk to each other.” But what is more likely: you’ll be explaining your time to an applet that your grandchildren created to deal with their grandparents.
A new kind of computerized communications will … eclipse the telephone. It will tie our computers at home and work to the outside world, enabling us to plunder the world’s entertainment and information resources at the push of a button.
Your library. It will no longer be an alien place, a place frequented by the educated elites whom they believe are their oppressors, but a known and friendly place.
All the participating libraries in the world will become, in effect, parts of one vast library. If you work for, let us say, the Savannah Public Library, you will be able to think of the Library of Congress as a branch of yours.
Entire ecosystems of Net-spawned information-seeking robots will be circulating through the Net … How you protect the community from dangers of attack without destroying the openness that makes the community valuable is a social problem, as is the problem of who should pay for access to this increasingly powerful pool of knowledge tools.
[People may pay more to join “private rooms” with authors or like-minded authorities to extend topics raised by paper-based Wired articles. Advertisers presumably will pay to reach those select markets] … I undoubtedly am naive about all this and will get crushed like a bug. But there is a place in the world for getting good, honest information about things for sale.
A revolution in communications – the ability to find people with common interests, and share common tools and common interfaces … will drive PC usage to a new level, particularly in the home.
The next generation of CD-ROMs will include a link back to an Internet community that will provide the latest up-to-date information, and this combination will allow online publishers to deliver video to users as part of their overall content experience.
News assistants [customized search agents] would do an excellent job of creating an information source that is relevant to a particular individual, but by their specialized nature they would also neglect a person’s desire to browse through information relevant to a community. Gathering information as part of a community is an activity performed by different methods and in the service of different goals than when we seek purely personal information. I don’t always want to know about the restaurant that would best suit my tastes – sometimes I want to see everything that’s available in town … Collection of community information is a service newspapers have always performed, and if they can translate that beneficial function to their online counterparts those new information sources will have a better chance of being successful.