Elon University

Archives: Expert Predictions

Persistence of Locality

Every family will have its own mailing list carrying contributions from its members. At that point – actually long before it – we will have to triage our mail still further. While I have had to do very little of this so far, I sense that the rules will be something like this: friends over strangers; family over friends; and within those categories, the geographically or chronologically close over the distant. Those most likely to survive the second cut are longtime friends who live nearby.

Persistence of Locality

The Net … will further erode the relevance of geography in human relations. Everybody in cyberspace is a few keystrokes from everyone else; the canonical six degrees of separation seem more like two … At present, only a tiny fraction of my physical friends and relations are on the Net, but in the near future most of them will be here, together with mailing lists running out of all the neighborhood associations to which I belong: reading groups, discussion groups, vocational and political societies, alumni organizations, church groups.

The Creators: Twenty-five Years Ago, They Brought the Internet to Life

I have been thinking about new architectural features for the Internet that allow a kind of semipermeable membrane that lets the company put some of its assets in a private setting, so that they’re only accessible to other parts of the company or some discretionarily selected group. We still have to find ways of distinguishing between access points.

Just Say No – To Cybercrats and Digital Control Freaks

Never before has a group of citizens with such global awareness, depth of experience, media sophistication, and healthy skepticism been handed such a massive opportunity. Without any official proclamations, we’re already in the information age. We’re no longer at war, and we live in a networked economy. The left-wing is dead. The right-wing is dead. Ideology is dead. In place of the stale, 19th-century pre-cyber age ideologies that still provide coinage for “the system” (how could anyone still be proud to be identified as a socialist or a Jeffersonian or a libertarian?), proto-movements are beginning to form to tackle the far more radical politics of cyberspace.

Just Say No – To Cybercrats and Digital Control Freaks

This administration plans to take over the network that our lives depend on. They say, “Sure, we’ll let private enterprise build it. But in exchange for our generously granting construction permits, we want to control it.” It’s called Industrial Policy, and it doesn’t work. This policy is going to be shoved down our throats – unless we stop it. That’s right, we’re the ones who have to stop it.

Rockin’ With Mr. Bill: He’s the Richest Guy in America. He’s Got Opinions. Here Are Some of Them.

There are basically two domains where you can look to get a clue about the future. One is what I call low-bandwidth interactive: online services and the Internet. The second is high-bandwidth, the sort of bandwidth you get with CD-ROM, which is much faster than anything you get from online services. Too many people are having this big debate about whether the future in home devices is going to be more like the PC or the TV. The answer is you’re going to have both; people will have networks in their home, and the TV and PC will be some of the many peripherals on that network.