All publications will eventually go fully electronic … and newspapers will be the last. Paper is flexible, flat, reflective, and cheap. Computer displays as good as paper will be a long time coming – flexible is especially hard. There is some work on making erasable electronically writable paper, but don’t hold your breath. It is likely that newspapers will become electronic only as interactivity (personalization) can be introduced.
It’s going to reach the same amount of people that the current mass media reach. But it has totally different properties than any of the previous mass media. The big impact that the Net’s going to have on culture in general is that it will allow it to become a lot more fragmented … I think that’s positive. It increases choice and diversity. It means that you can go find the stuff that you really think is interesting as opposed to the stuff that you’re forced to be spoon-fed because there’s nothing else out there.
It’s going to have a dilutive effect on traditional media. I think a lot of new brands and content are going to be created on the Net and not in traditional media. I go to CNN.com every day, and I read everything that was on CNN. I get to look at all the images, listen to all the interviews. There’s no longer any reason to watch CNN. I don’t know if CNN’s going to be real happy to hear that.
[By the end of 1995] dynamic content starts to appear. E-mail and discussion groups become more tightly integrated with the Web … It’s a lot easier for people to create and publish content with graphical tools. And … it’s going to get a lot easier for people to charge for information or to charge for buying and selling things.
The big shift that the Internet effects is [that] it allows niches or communities of interest around specific topics to be able to really thrive, down to a huge degree of specialization that hasn’t been possible before.
[The utopian vision of a nation where everyone has a home page, and we’re all going to be producers as well as consumers of information is] dead on. This is the perfect medium for it. [With] every previous mass medium, whether it’s TV or radio or publishing, there were always these huge distribution bottlenecks. That’s all changing. Instead there’s an unlimited number of publishers or bookshelves or places to go look at or whatever, and there’s no limit on it.
It will be five to 10 years before most calls are combining voice and data. If you are using a browser, there ought to be a talk-to-me button. You should be instantly in contact with an attendant who’s looking at the same screen you are. The access services we’re providing will become front ends to traditional telephony services, so computers may be used to do call set-up for a voice conference, followed by a voice call.
The percentage of users who need secure private communications will be a relatively small part of a huge volume of traffic. We’ll see enormous growth in unmanaged services. For example, consider a Web server as a catalog: There’s no need for security except when the customer is buying. You can’t steal what’s being given away, and most of the information in the world is like that. For most services, you won’t need a private network to guarantee quality.
We need an electronic equivalent of the police force – the traffic cops of the information superhighway.
Pornography is a big enough issue. Someday, somewhere, as election time approaches, someone is going to say, “This is an issue that will get votes,” and go after it.