Pioneering the Electronic Frontier: For Many People, the Information Revolution is Already Here
We need mom-and-pop digital delis on the information superhighway. A new technology’s entrepreneurs never come out of the previous generation.
Archives: Expert Predictions
Pioneering the Electronic Frontier: For Many People, the Information Revolution is Already Here
Electronic networks enable scholarly publishing to imitate the intellectual process more closely … “The unit of transaction will become the idea, not a collection of articles.”
Pioneering the Electronic Frontier: For Many People, the Information Revolution is Already Here
This vast potential to gather further information on one’s own will change the nature of education itself. “Teachers will go from ‘the sage on the stage’ to ‘the guide at your side.'”
Transcendence at the Interface: The Architecture of the Cyborg Utopia – or – Cyberspace Utopoids as Postmodern Cargo Cult
If cyberspace is utopian it is because it opens the possibility of using the deterministic platform for unpredictable ends … We might even grow a system large and complex and unstable enough to leap across that last possible bifurcation – autopoetically – into that strangest of all possible attractors, the godmind.
Gaia, Freedom, and Human Nature Ð Some Ironies on the Way to Creating the Network of the Future
In the end, the Sane Network is not going to emerge from some committee, but from all of us, by tossing up idea after idea and recognizing that 99 percent of them will be garbage, like so many youÕve heard this afternoon.
Gaia, Freedom, and Human Nature Ð Some Ironies on the Way to Creating the Network of the Future
One principal element must be openness … In the Net of tomorrow, the light of criticism must shine everywhere, or secrets which lay hidden will fester into new crises, new weapons, new errors. In an information society, secrecy is the equivalent of cancer.
Free As Air, Free As Water, Free As Knowledge
Too much access. By all means letÕs not provide our electronic networks with too much access. That might get dangerous. The networks might rot peopleÕs minds and corrupt their family values … ItÕs cultural struggle, political struggle, legal struggle. Extending the public right-to-know into cyberspace will be a mighty battle. ItÕs an old war, a war librarians are used to, and I honor you for the free-expression battles you have won in the past. But the terrain of cyberspace is new terrain. I think that ground will have to be won all over again, megabyte by megabyte.
Pigs in Cyberspace
Machines have gone farther and seen more … As they become smarter over the coming decades, space will be theirs. Organizations of robots of ever-increasing intelligence and sensory and motor ability will expand and transform what they occupy.
Potholes in the ‘Virtual’ Highway
Everybody talks about an information highway, but nobody has the faintest idea what’s going to be on it. It has to get easier to make the content, or it won’t get done.
Chapter 6: Bit Biz
Infobahn-oriented strategies are emerging [for dealing with the business of bits and assurance of payment]. For example, providers of news archives and other large, frequently updated databases may charge users not for the information that they download but for the time spent logged in … Invention of mechanisms like these is one part of the answer to the problem of constructing a workable framework for cyberspace business – one that adequately protects the originators and distributors of bits, while avoiding unnecessary impediments to the free flow of information. Another part is the development of intellectual property law to cover the new situations that arise in cyberspace. Yet another – perhaps most important of all – is the emergence of a broadly shared sense of morality in these matters.