Sure, we all knew that the Net was going to become more commercial, but it still is somehow unsettling to see your formerly pastoral town filled with new high-rises, billboards, and gawking tourists. What’s strange is the mass media’s portrayal of net.pioneers as a bunch of rabid anti-business hippies – as if most people are delighted with TV commercials and junk mail. Advertising may be inevitable, but it’s still worth bitching about.
The idea of an intelligent agent that can whisk away our tedious work is incredibly seductive. But it is also a dangerous idea to promote. In the 1980s, many database companies discovered that promoting a “natural-language interface” is the kiss of death because customers then expect too much. To connect your product with “intelligent agents” risks far greater customer disappointment.
Experts point to anti-pollution laws and two-career families as the driving forces behind telecommuting’s resurgence. While the Clean Air Act may cause a small increase in telecommuting, most employees still believe that physical visibility is necessary for promotions, and this will keep telecommuting from catching on.
Both those who believe patents are crucial to the industry and those who believe patents will cause irreparable harm [are] claiming that the unique nature of software requires sweeping changes in U.S. intellectual property laws … The problem isn’t the much-maligned patent office, it’s people’s egos.
With set-top boxes, we will be pressured to replace at least part of our TVs annually in order to get features we don’t really need.
In the constant search for a killer app that will bring the Net to the masses, Mosaic is the current pick. It allows for navigation throughout the Internet with a consistent and attractive hypermedia interface. The bad sign is that only the Net intelligentsia are excited about Mosaic – the typical PC user isn’t clamoring for the program.
Content is the key to national security and national competitiveness … We must make available to each citizen the richest possible information commons. National intelligence is the empowerment of the individual citizen … In the Information Age, national intelligence will either be put in the service of the citizen and in the context of private-sector information capabilities that are unclassified, or it will be slowly and painfully eliminated from the budget of the nation.
A “Decentral” Intelligence Agency … provides a way to master the flood of multimedia, multilingual, multichannel information collected, analyzed, and disseminated by millions of autonomous sources each day … the federal government must empower all of its people to gain access to the kind of distributed intelligence that is impossible to create within a single “Central” Intelligence Agency. The supporting elements of this new vision include connectivity, content, and coordination, among others. Connectivity is well along, because it is a tangible “thing” that most bureaucrats and private-sector profiteers can understand … We citizens must instruct our government in the basic truths of the Age of Information.
Researchers and customers, companies and citizens, will coproduce technologies … Personal computers and computer-mediated communication offer ways for people to think about ideas and procedures … The innovations that emerge from that computer-aided thinking are more valuable to organizations than the hardware that helped individuals come up with them. The relationships between people in organizations are more important than the hardware and software that makes it easier for them to communicate. Using computer-based tools in an atmosphere that fosters storytelling, improvisation, and informal communication is a way of harnessing silicon to amplify the powers of minds and working communities.
What else is a MOO good for, besides playing games? What are the nonrecreational uses? Could a virtual office be a useful tool for effective telecommuting?