Archives: Expert Predictions

Company of the Month

Just think what the world will be like once any programmer in the world can write a globally distributed application and make it available on the net without any concern for grungy system calls and incompatible standards. We’ll have all kinds of interesting games, communications schemes, bulletin boards, databases, and whatever else happens to be widely enough adopted to reach a critical mass of users … The problem with this brave new world is that the new ease of writing global applications will be available both to the people I like and the people I don’t like. So we can have both global democracy and global surveillance, global community and global hierarchy, global interaction and global accounting. Better get going and spread around the kinds of applications you’d want the world to made out of.

Welcome

The civic networking movement the world over is starting to do its networking in earnest now, and that’s terrific. Will it be Home Shopping Channel the whole planet wide? You can make the difference by getting involved right now.

The Net Gives New Life to Journalism

With the amazing proliferation of materials available to us all on-line, we can become more active watchdogs of the government *and* the press, and the chances will increase for us to participate in areas where we once felt powerless. Look out for e-mail interviewing, more journalism Listservs and bulletin boards, more on-line papers and magazines, more opportunities to e-mail to the press, and more information to keep up with. It’s all happening on the Net.

The Net Gives New Life to Journalism

Old-time reporters still smell the ink and listen for the clank of linotype and typewriters. Modern journalists are accustomed to the quiet of computers, the changed workrooms, the blending of graphics and print. It behooves the older generation to add computer skills to their wealth of experience, in order to be effective mentors to the new generation.

The Net Gives New Life to Journalism

Up until the Net began mushrooming, computer-aided reporting (CAR) involved combining multiple databases to reveal government or business misconduct … Reporters used to pry many databases out of the government. However, more and more are available on-line, and that should increase.

The Net Gives New Life to Journalism

“Print” and “broadcast” used to be the two divisions in journalism schools. Soon the NII, or Infobahn, will allow video clips to be part of the story, and all journalists will need to be conversant with good writing and good broadcasting. Multimedia delivery is here. The division of the future will be between advertising and public relations on one hand, and news reporting using multimedia on the other.

The wireless consumers’ movement

Maybe your car should have a running meter on it, like an odometer only measured in money instead of miles, telling you how much you’ve spent driving it lately … The same idea could be applied to thermostats and electrical devices … Approximate prevailing gasoline prices could be broadcast as well. Insurance companies or home bookkeeping systems could tell your computer how much you’ve paid in premiums. Maintenance costs could be approximated as well. And so forth. All of this information would reside in various databases – some private, some public, some that are free, some that you have to subscribe to. The result, perhaps, could be substantial decreases in all of the ills associated with driving: highway deaths, pollution, wasted time, emotional stress, and so forth.

The wireless consumers’ movement

Let’s found the wireless consumers’ movement. We’ll need a bar-code scanner and cheap wireless packet communications that we can plug into the PDA. Then when we’re shopping, we need only point the scanner at the UPC bar-code on a given product to retrieve the information about it from Consumer Reports, the Wine Spectator, the New York Review of Books, or whatever. Reviews of the products would pop up on your screen, hypercard-style, with buttons you can press with your pen to get further details, comparisons with other products, and so forth. You’d subscribe to these various services, paying per month or per screenful. This idea can be extended considerably. Merchants can choose to make their prices and other information available on servers for these products, so that when you scan a certain bottle of wine at one shop, another shop can automatically tell you that they have it for a few dollars less.

Orwellian privacy

As computer and network technology changes, lots of words and concepts will change their meanings. This is both inevitable and reasonable. But it also means that we will have conflicts about what words ought to mean. “Privacy” is one of those words, and we should be vigilant in defining and defending an expansive understanding of it.

Orwellian privacy

Computer communications can be sorted through, and you can keep what you want and kill what you don’t. Increasingly, as your communication is channeled through computers, you will increase your control over it. It’s the dumb terminal, the phone, which is the model of the violation. It violates your time and attention because it’s dumb. If you have a really smart terminal that can sort through the communications and identify them, you can reject anything you don’t want.

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