The Internet, and online interactivity in general, is going to have a profound impact on the music business … If we don’t adjust and adapt, we might get steamrolled. I’d like to see the industry start to attack the opportunity in an aggressive, coordinated fashion, so we have standards we can all live with.
All life, at its core, is a process of digital-information transfer … The rise of cheap processors and parallel architectures creates the ideal digital ecosystems to spawn software rather than build it. Nature – not rational cognitive planning – becomes the guiding force for the next generation of software solutions.
When you buy a can of Coke, you are paying a few cents for the drink and the can, and nanodollars for television advertising. No doubt, the means of financing the bits will look strange to our great-great grandchildren. But for today, it’s what makes television work. Eventually, we’ll find new economic models, probably based on advertising and transactions. Television will become more and more digital, no matter what. These are givens. So it makes no sense to think of the TV and the PC as anything but one and the same. It’s time TV manufacturers invested in the future, not the past – by making PCs, not TVs.
PCs … will inevitably become more bedworthy. And television sets will grow to resemble keyboardless computers, installed more like Sheetrock than furniture … the TV and the PC are bit processors, accumulating bits as they come, or reaching for them from afar. Sometimes, you’ll want to pull on bits; other times, you’ll want them pushed at you – whether you’re in the bedroom or the living room, sitting or lying, with someone or alone.
The dream is to use the existing cable network to bring high-speed Net connectivity to the home. While in theory the cable network can handle transmission speeds that leave phone lines in the dust, in reality much of the network will need to be refurbished to support such data transmission. Nonetheless, the specter of cable modems should help to spur on ISDN deployment.
Who wants to participate in the kind of sterile, cartoony world that companies like CompuServe and Prodigy are doomed to create? Perhaps a few … but the rest will want to move into grittier, less-planned online worlds. This new digital landscape will not offer architects or urban planners the jobs they’re really angling for.
Kids seem more willing to “out” themselves to the Net than to their parents.
A universal language is needed that can describe any document to every computer. Right now, the leading candidate for such a beast is SGML … [which] faces growing competition from newer, privately backed solutions like Adobe’s Acrobat … SGML and its competitors embody fundamentally opposed philosophies. Which system wins in the marketplace will profoundly affect the shape and usefulness of future digital libraries … If we follow the lesson of HTML, tempering HyTime’s scientific idealism with a sense of market realism, we should end up with a universal language for multimedia documents, available to both graphic designers and librarians. The result will be the richly woven, accessible digital libraries that Negroponte envisions.
I bet you $1,000 that in the year 2020, we’re not even close to the kind of disaster you describe – a convergence of three disasters: global currency collapse, significant warfare between rich and poor, and environmental disasters of some significant size. We won’t even be close. I’ll bet on my optimism.
As we import biological principles into technology, we are generating technology that’s decentralized, that plays on differences, that’s irregular on demand, that’s nonlinear, and that’s very interactive. If we were stuck with having to make technology that was centralized and stupid and brute, we would be looking forward to a dismal future. But we don’t have to make technology that way … In the end, people will choose technology and civilization. The Luddites will be left behind.