Chapter 7: Electronic Bulletin Board Systems
The future looks bright for electronic bulletin board systems.
The future looks bright for electronic bulletin board systems.
Ideally, everyone who is a consumer online should have the potential to also be a provider on the network. Anyone should be able to run a Web site from their home or company. I’m pretty certain that’s not going to be an issue. Someone will try to put in the fix. But they’ll lose again. If so, this is the BBS of the future.
Everyone’s wondering what will be the ultimate format for the World Wide Web in the future. Today it’s HTML and Hot Java. But will another format come along faster than your heart beats after five cups of coffee? No one knows for certain. Whatever the new language is, Sileo predicts that everyone from mom-and-pop shops to big technology firms will need to hire a consultant to help them translate this tongue.
In the future, few cash-strapped companies will be able to pay for their execs to cavort around Resorts ‘R’ Us for the latest conference. That’s why Sileo envisions a bright future for videoconferencing organizers. As the arranger, you’d set up the equipment, coordinate the times and dates of virtual meetings, and send out minutes to attendees when it’s over.
We might say that many people believe that the information highway will be used not just for passive entertainment, but for knowledge networking. Knowledge networking is the ability to find information, when information is needed. It is the ability to send a question to thousands of people around the world who share an interest in a topic. It is the ability to send electronic mail messages to friends and business associates around the globe.
Companies will be even more confused by all the choices, including interactive TV, computers in TVs, TVs in computers, and more. And big firms – which sell through magazines, direct mail, and catalogs – will seek advice from online consultants on how to best present content for their products or services using these various mediums.
There will be a different kind of literacy based on a melange of digital information – the entire stream of all the things that flows into our mind from our computers.
Perhaps, some like to venture, the new technologies will give rise to a new kind of literacy in which a literate person will be expected to be at least as familiar with great issues, melodies and rhythms as with great words … Some experts believe the next stage of the information revolution will be so cataclysmic that new forms of literacy will emerge.
The telecomputer could revitalize public education by bringing the best teachers in the country to classrooms everywhere. More important, the telecomputer could encourage competition because it could make home schooling both feasible and attractive. To learn social skills, neighborhood children could gather in micro-schools run by parents, churches or other local institutions. The competition of home schooling would either destroy the public school system or force it to become competitive with rival systems.
NREN’s plan, with local schools not even mentioned, could perpetuate educational elitism, where the already-prosperous research universities get additional taxpayer-paid subsidized service and the already-poor local schools get short shrift.